"Passing Days": a man sits in his home. A door opens, police officers randomly enter, beat him up and leave. His chair becomes water, so he stands up. A king rides him like a horse, a painter sells him worthless painting and takes his money. His wife cheats on him with other men. He observes war through the window. A woman gives him an apple, he bites it, but his teeth fall out. He opens the door, and only a graveyard awaits him... "Tup-Tup": a man wants to read newspapers in his bed, but is annoyed by loud thumping noises from the apartment above him. His clock explodes and he finds himself out in the field, in his pajamas. He wants to rob a sleeping man with a gun, but the latter's giant hands chase him and flick him away. He keeps running, still hearing the noise, until he sets the whole city on fire. There is finally peace and quiet, but then the noise returns. He digs his own grave, wants to shoot himself, but a giant frog emerges from the gun. After kissing it, the frog turns into a woman.
In a local 2 0 2 0 poll by Croatian film critics determining best movies of Croatian cinema, two of Nedjeljko Dragic's short animated films were picked as among the ten best films in the category of animated films: "Passing Days" and "Tup-Tup". Both are experimental films with a running time of 10 minutes each, have no dialogue, and both share the same topic: ordinary man lost in the madness of modern society. Both are good, if the viewers can enjoy surreal, abstract films without a story, built only on absurd symbolism, yet none really managed to stimulate on a higher level. Experimental films often age the worst, and these two films confirm it. "Passing Days" is the better version of this theme, showing a caricature-drawn man in a white background, experiencing life through his home. Weird, bizarre episodes show up, and they often seem just like underdeveloped ideas or attempts at obfuscation of the dirrector, without a more clear grip at how to articulate all this. Two great jokes: the protagonist opens the door and sees two men carrying a horse by his two legs on the front and back, while the horse also carries a man riding him. Another one is the brilliant satirical image of the man being pulled between two groups, one purple the other green, while his body is evenly split between these two colors, symbolically showing how two ideologies are fighting over trying to recruit everyone among their ranks, even people who do not want to be aligned. The ending with the graveyard being seen from the door implies a harsh truth: life is a mess, chaos and full of unwanted choices, and then it's all over.
"Tup-Tup" takes the often trope of a person who cannot sleep during the night because of someone constantly making noise, but seems to lose its focus and drown in the sea of abstractionism. It traverses to a wide range of often incomprehensible episodes in the open, without much sense to find the right balance between satire and allegory. There are some amusing moments (a wind blows the windows away from the residential building, leaving it just a blank rectangle; the protagonist berating a protestor holding a sign so aggressively that even the face on said sign runs away from it) and some fan service (a woman whose large breasts punch the protagonist like in a boxing match; the protagonist dreaming he is inside the sea of large breasts), and the same motive of a grave at the end, signalling how people are simply exhausted by modern times and pointless existence, yet they cannot quite compensate for a lack of ability to better articulate all this, to be more understandable to the audience. The fact that "Tup-Tup" was nominated for an Oscar for best short animated film demonstrates again that sometimes award ceremonies are too lazy to simply find better movies: Croatia has better cartoons.
Grade:++
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