Opera Cordis (found Dušan Vukotić animated short film; 1968)
The still from animated film
Status: Found
Date found: September 9th, 2023
Found by: Animation on croatian way in association with Alexey Gotovtsev (aka Smeshariki.ru)
Opera Cordis is a 1968 surreal comedy animated short film that was written, directed, designed & animated by Yugoslavian animator Dušan Vukotić and produced by the Zagreb Film Studio.
Plot
A man and a woman were both asleep, and they had different dreams. The man heard the woman laughing, and he decided to find out what was going on. He went to investigate her dream, and he discovered that the laughter was coming from her heart. The man decided to capture the woman's heart, so he started trying to use a net to catch it. But the net was empty, so the man decided to use scissors to cut open the woman's chest and get the heart. When the heart was free, the real struggle began. The heart defeated the man, but then a man with a Hussar mustache appeared from the heart and helped the original man get back into the woman's dream. Then, thanks to the help of a mysterious hero with a mustache, the original man was able to jump into the heart with the woman and continue sleeping.
Release
The animated film was released at the Chicago International Film Festival in October 1969. The animated film was re-released on June 8th, 2016, at Animafest Zagreb.
Availability
After the cartoon was shown in Croatia in 2016, it was never released on video media. Only stills, an advertising flyer, soundtracks, and an fragment from the 10th episode of the documentary series "Zagreb Animation School" (Zagrebačka škola crtanog filma) was available online. On September 9th, 2023, the cartoon was digitized and uploaded to the YouTube channel "Animation on croatian way".