Opera Cordis (found Dušan Vukotić animated short film; 1968)

The still from animated film

Status: Found

Date found: 09 Sep 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 of the woman and continue sleeping.

Production Crew

Writer, Director, Art Direction, Animation: Dušan Vukotić
Sound Engineer: Mladen Prebil
Music Supervision: Tea Brunšmid
Assistant Director: Josip Pilat
Animation: Turido Pauš, Neven Pteričić, Rudolf Mudrovčić, Leo Fabiani
Director of Photography: Oktavijan Miletić, Teofil Bašagić
Backgrounds: Srđan Matić
Music: Tomislav Simović

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 home video. Only stills, an advertising flyer, soundtracks, and a 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."