Garaža Kamba

After major festival successes, Sunčana Brkulj has decided to present the movie Butterfly at the Kamba gallery as well, using this experiment to offer an answer to the question of how to exhibit animation in such a space at all. The author also approached the work as an experiment from a directorial perspective, giving viewers the opportunity to choose for themselves how they will watch the film – whether they will keep their gaze fixed on one spot or follow the movement of the characters who drive the action.

Sunčana Brkulj places a community of tiny creatures in a harmonious garden of pastel fields, visually separated by the arms of a stream flowing from a shared water source. These creatures continuously cross the pre-defined boundaries. Through a clearly structured division of labor and joint effort, they achieve prosperity and a harmonious life. The key to their success lies in respecting the element that unites them – the fountain that supplies them with water and simultaneously symbolizes the source of life. By arriving and unintentionally blocking the source, a butterfly briefly disrupts the established natural balance, and the landscape itself begins to change rapidly. After an initial alarm and panic, the community soon finds a solution to the new situation and discovers a new raw material suitable for sustaining life.

Drawing inspiration from the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500), the author aims to bring a painted canvas to life. Here, Bosch represents a reference to visual chaos, which she, in the film, seeks to systematize, generally calm, and reduce the number of characters. In this work, Brkulj also builds upon Boris Labbé’s film La Chute (2018), as well as the tradition of the Zagreb School of Animated Film, and particularly Zlatko Grgić’s series Professor Balthazar (1967–1978). The influence of kawaii (jap. ‘cute’) aesthetics is visible in the character design, while their reduction to basic features stems from the eternal inspiration drawn from the art of ancient civilizations, characterized by the simplification of distinguishing features and the stylization of figures without emphasizing portrait characteristics. In this vein, her characters achieve high expressiveness with minimal design. The inspiration from ancient civilizations is also noticeable in the decentralization of the subject, meaning her tendency to place the entire ecosystem as the central “character” instead of an individualized protagonist. In Butterfly, as in other animated films bearing her signature, she seeks to connect two media she frequently explores in her artistic work – animation and experimental collage. In this way – nearly two-dimensional characters, made of plasticine and animated using stop-motion with the help of an improvised green screen – are placed onto a collaged background. The soundscape by Danish musician Sophie Birch also contributes to bringing the image to life, further energizing the entire composition.

The author addresses the ever-relevant theme of community cooperation in a crisis within an idealized small garden where every creature has its own special role. Thus, she also approaches current events from an optimistic perspective, emphasizing togetherness as the only possible approach to solving problems. Ultimately, her butterfly is freed, the fountain is functional again, and the tiny creatures gain another potential source of life alongside the old system.