During its golden years of the 1970s and ‘80s, Hungary’s Pannónia Film Studios ranked alongside Walt Disney as one of the world’s greatest animation studios. Pannónia’s varying styles were plentiful: ranging from hand-drawn feasts and futurist neon collages, to ingenious stop-motion extravaganzas.

In this series, the fantastic abundance of visions are united in their spirit of artistic resistance. Through animation, many artists working in communist-era Hungary found a way to circumvent oppressive state controls. Poetic and metaphorical in nature, animation afforded the ambiguity needed to express forbidden, uncomfortable truths. An invaluable contribution to Hungarian film history, the prismatic animations created at Pannónia Film Studios are as visually enthralling as they are rich in subtext and covert political significance.

Farnaz Hashemnia

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