Interviews with two representatives each of ten areas of applied and desing art on their own careers and the current state of profession | The artists talked to Hedvig Dvorszky and László Attila Márton

- How did you find your way to the area in which you became a well-known and recognised artist?
- In which of your works do you think you succeeded in realising the objectives you had set?
- What is the current situation and the future of your profession like? What are its opportunities?

I was the scriptwriter, designer, director and animator for several hundred films, of which I directed 280 myself. I made four feature length films (John the Valiant, The Son of the White horse, Song of the Miraculous Deer, The Tragedy of Man), as well as numerous short films. My other projects include participating in my friends’ and colleagues’ films, designing posters and emblems, illustrating my own books and those by others, directing theatre performances, and writing and directing puppet plays.

Of my feature length films, the greatest popularity was enjoyed by John the Valiant (1973), which was the first animated ‘feature film’ in Hungary maybe because this film already had a mature animation picture method: it was built on the unfolding of metaphors, colour dramaturgy and a clear visual idiom, and everything revolved around fighting, fighting successfully, instead of around a hopeless struggle. I was guided by the ideals of folk tales in this film and in all the others I made later.

I strove to pass on my experience in my educational activity too: I taught animation for more than two decades. I represented Hungarian films, mostly with success, in the juries of numerous international animation competitions. I began to make my educational programmes for the Hungarian Television from the end of the 1980s (1988–1998), which mainly focused on themes like mythological and ethnographic traditions, Christian symbolism, legends and history. When my opportunities to make animation films became more and more restricted, I threw myself into writing popular science books, adopting not the perspective of a scholar but rather that of an artist, trying to make the associations presented in these works more exciting using analogies placed in historical context.

Now I regard my activity as a kind of mission, as I am increasingly pessimistic about the future. The state of affairs today shows some of the loss that the rejection of tradition will eventually lead to. Modern man is materialistic, lives for the moment, takes no interest in the past, and has no consideration for the future, yet wants to expand his dimension. Modern man is uncultured and unmoved by intellectual joy, which is the result of the misguided concepts in how children are raised and educated today. This is an alien world for me. I, like Atlas, am carrying the past on my shoulders, and, thankfully, my efforts are not entirely futile, at least from what I can tell based on some of the feedback I am getting.

Interview conducted by Hedvig Dvorszky

It came as a total surprise that my Symphony no. 42 was selected for the short films competition at the Berlinale in 2014. This nomination kicked off a wave of festival participations: the film was invited to over one hundred festivals, and it received more than fifty international awards. Then, at the end of 2014, it made it to the Oscar shortlist. It came out of the blue; I did not expect that at all since it was more like an experimental film, while the Oscar more typically recognises films with more classical narratives addressing larger audiences. It was extremely happy about the shortlisting.

Actually, the whole project was a playful process. I formed a coherent picture from many short writings, and I tried to build on the power of association in the film. I tried to attach more roles to sound in the film, because I find it exciting how sound and image can be aligned, or how sound and scenes can be combined in a way that the viewers do not feel they are browsing through a picture book. I wanted to have a cohesive force, some kind of stability. Another work of mine, Love, was screened at the Berlinale in 2016. It is a Hungarian-French coproduction, and it was my first film after graduation.

As I see it, animation is flourishing in Hungary these days. For some years now it has been recognised at international venues, including A-list festivals. These films are mainly degree projects, but Kecskemet Animation Film Studio participated in the drawing of The Red Turtle for example, a feature film nominated for the Oscar.

Animation has many branches and techniques; this genre is a virtually inexhaustible treasury. The role of virtual reality is expanding a lot. People are beginning to discover the many opportunities inherent in VR, how much can be done with it, how it works, what rules it is governed by. Up to now filmmakers have only been experimenting with all of this.

Interview conducted by László Attila Márton