FEATURE AND ANIMATED FILMS
Zlatko Bourek started working in animation in 1956. Together with the Vukotić-Kostelac group, he founded Zagreb Film’s Animation Studio. The Zagreb School of Animated Films is an aesthetic term that encompasses a series of authors who introduced avant-garde tendencies to the new generation of fans of the moving drawing. Driven by a shared passion, seventeen authors created their respective animated works, and soon a new concept of the animated film had emerged. In Z is for Zagreb, the only integral book about the Zagreb School, film critic Ronald Holloway calls the period from 1957 to 1962 the golden age of the Zagreb School of Animated Films. Zlatko Bourek is the author of the scenography for the newly founded studio’s first film, Dušan Vukotić’s The Playful Robot (1956). After that, he realized scenographies for a number of films, and in 1961 he also started working as a screenwriter, designer and director. He gained worldwide fame for his films The Blacksmith’s Apprentice, Far Away, I Saw Mist and Mud, Dancing Songs, Captain Arbanas Marko”, “The Path Towards the Neighbors”, “The Cat”, etc. He is also the author of the distinctive scenography for the Professor Balthazar series. In 2014, in collaboration with his colleague Pavao Štalter and under the auspices of Zagreb Film, he completed his final film, “Wiener Blut”, using traditional cel animation.