Serbian Director Says Spirit of Animation Reflects The Images of Human Thought
Zecevic thinks that time is the theory of animation.
Animation is an original and romantic way to realize human being’s dreams. Yet in recent years as the film market has changed, commercial films have become more dominant. Have we already lost our innocence or dreams? Bozidar Zecevic, the famous Serbian animation director and independent filmmaker who has explored the motivations for human thinking, provides a perfect answer: animation is human thinking, so think!
Daily News: Aa famous animation director, what criteria, in your opinion, should constitute a professional cartoon story?
Zecevic: Animation is very similar to the process of human thinking. So if you understand the process of human thinking, then you’ll see there is an animation cinema going on in our heads.
Why animated? Because those pictures are from life. They resemble life. But they’re not the life, they’re something else. They’re kind of imagination. So when we see the film on screen, we see how we think. It represents a gathering of our experience. What we should see on the screen, and what is the best we could see on the screen, depends on our capability to understand and comprehend the imagery we are seeing.
On the screen what matters is editing and composing of those pictures. The most important thing I expect in animation cinema is the character of motion. Number 2 is also the timing of that motion. In fact, not the timing of the picture but the timing between two pictures.
But what is more important is inter-timing, the way you are composing your pictures. When you put them together, you are getting what we call the animated film. That animated films also depends on the time and space when it is produced and where it is created. You have to think about your viewer, your spectator, and the quality of what\'s communicated to the spectator.Is that enough?
Daily News: Definitely. That is quite a thought-provoking theory which I had never heard.
Zecevic: The fact is time is also a teacher of history and the theory of animation. But what I like best is the pre-history of animation. The pre-history of animation is the pre-history of the human mind. You can find animation in the Neolithic caves, the Egyptian pyramids and the Greek temples.Everything that is important in animation happened long before animation was invented. Film animation was invented in the 19th century, but the principle of animation existed from very ancient times, from the time of pre-history. It\'s a little bit complicated, eh?
Daily News: Yes, a little bit. Because as Chinese teenagers, we all think the cartoon story is something very simple.
Zecevic: No, no, no, it’s not. It looks simple, but it is not simple at all. It’s very complicated. You have to understand the spirit of animation existed in man long ago. We believe film was invented only 200 years ago. That’s not true. Film was invented when we started thinking.
Daily News: OK, these are wonderful theories. Let’s go to the second question. What do you think about our Chinese directors in the animation industry.
Zecevic: I don’t know very much about the Chinese, only what I see. I was coming to China for our meetings and I noticed animation is very much developed in China. It has become an important part of film life in China, as it is in Japan, in South Korea. What I see is a development of technology and creative forces in China.This visit is an opportunity to be better informed and to know more about China and Chinese animation than I do. In this program, we have some very good Chinese animation, very representative, and I am impressed by that.
Daily News: Speaking of the development of technology, we all know that 3D technology has dominated the entire animation industry market. Do you have some predictions about future developmen that will become a trend?
Zecevic: 3D animation, or digital animation, has become prominent in our living environment. We see it everywhere around us, not only on cinema screens or television screens, but also in railway stations and airports, in the aircraft. Everything is moving pictures, especially at night, when all those lights, like in central Shanghai, start to move. That’s nothing but animation and it makes us more sensitive to all kinds of animation than we were before. It is not only concentrated on the screen but it is dispersed everywhere around us. The future of animation is the future of this world which will become a big animation in itself.
Daily News: We would like to know about the strength of animation development in your country, Serbia.
Zecevic: Serbia is a small country. And we are very far from the facilities you have in China. We are using mainly Chinese and Far East digital technology. But we have very experienced creators, 50 to 100, who operate to international standards. We have won many international prizes in the Serbia animation organization which operates like ASIFA, the International Animated Film Society. It\'s very old, about 100 years. We have many opportunities to show our films, not only in Serbia but also in international festivals, and have won many prizes, so I am quite satisfied with the standard. We are small and poor, but we are not poor in a creative sense. We don’t have much money, so we try to work in other ways. We are capable of producing animation films, I have done a couple, and there is always change, always something new happening, such as understanding the world of digital knowledge and combining it with imagination.
Daily News: Can I say that, despite the development of technology, the most important thing about animation is to make the character more vivid, or more alive. That’s the spirit of animation?
Zecevic: Yes, that\'s the spirit of animation. Life itself is an animation subject. Although animation is not life itself, it looks very much like life, but it is not. And animation is not film. I think animation is an art in itself. It has much to do with the moving picture, but it is not photographic. Film is still based on photography and, in the digital world, film is based on photography that is digital. Animation has nothing to do with photography. It has something to do with the imageries of the human mind, so it\'s very close to painting, to a picture. In fact, artificially, animation is a part of art itself.
Daily News: Is this your first visit Shanghai.
Zecevic: Yes, but I once went to Beijing and I visited a university in Changchun (Jilin Province). The juniors who made animation there really impressed me. So I know something about China, but this is my first time in Shanghai. I have walked around the city, visited a temple, had a tea ceremony, and seen your gardens.
Daily News: Are there any Chinese animations that really impress you?
Zecevic: I cannot name you a few, because my knowledge of Chinese animation is very limited. I know some but I don’t want to mention them because I’m sure there are others better and more interesting than I have seen. China has a very long history of animation. When I speak of Chinese films, not only the contemporary ones, but the older ones, I see that Chinese people think in very peculiar pictures. Chinese pictures are very specific, so Chinese man is visualized in the world in his way and that’s very interesting and always new. At the Chinese university I mentioned, there were 1,100 students or more making animations. Changchun is a small city of two million people and I talked at the ASIFA conference. I was really impressed by the animation related to China. You must be aware that in China you have more opportunities than anywhere else in the world.