Boomerangs and Bombs: The Zagreb School of Animation and Yugoslavia's Third Way Experiment

Abstract

The Zagreb School of Animation, one of the great achievements of Yugoslav culture, produced hundreds of films from the 1950s to the early 1990s. This paper studies the early development of the Zagreb School and the films that satirized the universal concerns of the post-World War II landscape: industrialization, militarism, environmentalism, nuclear annihilation, and urban alienation, as well as the conforming pressures of commercialization and mass culture. This paper argues that the Zagreb School, which was made up neither of dissidents nor propagandists, breaks many of the stereotypes about artists in the dictatorial states of central and eastern Europe. Its approach to the animation medium is adjacent to the two most important features of Yugoslavia's Third Way experiment: the development of workers’ self-management and a commitment to internationalism. The paper places the Zagreb School in this historical context with a formalist analysis of Boris Kolar's Bumerang (Boomerang, 1962).