Show #31: Borivoj Dovnikovic
Borivoj Dovnikovic (interviewed June 2006) or “Bordo” as he’s more popularly known, was one of the first members of the extraordinary Zagreb Films creative machine. Bordo began as a print cartoonist, and his first animation work was at Rainbow Films, which then morphed, sorta, into Zagreb Films. This interview was recorded in the lobby of the Zagreb International Animation Film Festival, in 2006. It is another of the interviews taken from of our UPA documentary interview library, which we are dipping into, for those interviews that have a general audience interest. The UPA interviews tend to average around an hour, and the host is frequently off-mic, so we cut out most of the UPA references and off-mic questions. Sometimes we even replace the hard-to-hear questions with newly recorded ones, but in this interview you’ll hear the questions in the background, slightly above the din of the crowd. Oh, yes, this interview has a little more background noise than most of our interviews, as a crowd began to grow, assembling for an upcoming film program in Theatre #1, off the lobby, where we were quietly chatting.
Fortunately, as you will hear, Bordo is quite enthusiastic about the cartoon and animation world, and the history he was a part of. His voice is passionate, and animated, albeit his accent is strong at times, but the overall adventure comes through loud and clear, about a group of young artists working in the near-void of their young country of Yugoslavia, stretching down along the Adriatic coast. Just a few years earlier, after World War II, it had been hobbled together from a variety of different cultures, back in the days when Marshall Tito had them sitting precariously between the politics of the United States and the Soviet Union, not totally Communist or Democractic. It’s hard to image how these artist manage to create such ground breaking films, because, as Bordo relates, they had very little exposure to other animation around the world … some books, articles, a few films, but not many, outside Disney from the west, and children’s films from Moscow. And yet, one of their very first short films, “The Big Meeting”, in 1951, won a number of international awards, and immediately put them of the fast track to fame, if not fortune. His own personal film, “Curiosity” was included in a program of the 84 best animated short films in history, entitled “Jewels of a Century,” and shown at Annecy 2000. He’s now become an elder statesman, so to speak, of the international independent animated shorts world, and travels to animation festivals around the world. We were lucky to connect with him at the Zagreb festival, of which he was one of the original organizers in the early 1970s … and, he’s still a totally delightful ball of fire.
This episode sponsored by The UPA Project