"Surogat": a man arrives at a beach, takes small triangle patches and inflates them into objects, such as a tent, a barbecue grill and a volley ball.
He also inflates a woman from them, but she falls for another, muscular man. When the first man unplugs the plug, the woman deflates, and the muscular man deflates himself. The man inflates his own road to drive back home, but then the car steps on a nail, and the man falls and deflates himself. / "The Play": A boy and a girl draw on papers in a room, and their drawings come to life. The boy starts teasing the girl by creating more and more disrupting drawings, including of a tank and a rocket, until the kids end up fighting for real, and start to cry.
In a local 2 0 2 0 poll by Croatian film critics determining best movies of Croatian cinema, Dusan Vukotic's short animated experimental film "Surogat" (also translated as "The Substitute") was ranked as number 1 in the animation category, probably due to the fame that it won an Oscar for best animated short film. While such a reputation is overhyped (Blazekovic's "The Elm-Chanted Forest" is easily superior), "Surogat" is an interesting and creative little film: 26 years before "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and its concept of the Holodeck and 39 years before "The Sims", Vukotic was able to dwell on the issue of artificial reality and man surrounding himself with fake environment as a compensation for real life. The abstract and vague, but still sufficiently articulated storyline without dialogue of a man who inflates triangle patches on his summer vacation to create himself a simulated environment, even going so far to inflate his own woman, and even to "pump up" her breasts a little bit more, is both grim in its contemplation of self-sufficient isolation as well as full of wacky jokes (the man doesn't have any place to hide on the beach in the open, so he simply digs up a hole in the ground, hides his head in it, and then exchanges his ordinary underwear for a speedo; as he packs, he even deflates the entire sea, picks it up and puts it with the luggage in his car, and then inflates a whole road for himself). The Picasso-style animation is annoying, and the movie clearly needed more humor, but it still has enough sharpness and wit to surprise the viewers, even contemplating if the anthroposphere could one day even outnumber the biosphere.
"The Play" is also very creative. It consists of a live-action segment of a boy and a girl drawing in a room, and their drawings coming to life. For instance, the girl draws a little girl on her paper, but the boy mischievously draws a mouse which walks from his paper to the girl's paper, scaring her. What starts out as a tease out of boredom, quickly develops into a competition, a tit-for-tat, until it practically develops into a real animated "war of drawings": the boy draws a lion to attack the drawing of a little girl, but the girl draws a house for the little girl to hide from the lion; the girl then even draws a gun, which allows the drawn little girl to shoot at the drawn lion, etc. In the end, even tanks and rockets are drawn, indicating the dangers of aggressive human behavior going out of hand, and conflicts becoming violent beyond any measure. Due to such a pacifist tone, the movie was also hailed, and manages to assemble just enough playfulness and ingenuity to keep the viewers' attention during its running time of 10 minutes.
Grade:+++
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