13/12/2024 - The Croatian animator talks fast cars, cramped spaces and cinematic revenge during Ljubljana's 21st Animateka International Animated Film Festival

The first seeds of No Room were planted with the illustrations that animator Jelena Oroz made for the Croatian Cultural Centre: cars with expressive eyes and human legs. This key visual wouldn’t leave her mind, and she found herself inspired to incorporate it into an essayistic short film. Caricaturing herself as a PaRappa the Rapper-esque human with floppy ears, Oroz narrates her struggle to live indoors or manoeuvre outside towards the noise and mass of cars beyond her home. Her car conundrum conjures up examples in an eye-popping array of animation styles, perspectives and forms.

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Cineuropa sat down with her at the 21st Animateka International Animated Film Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where her short film No Room played in the Official Competition section. Here we discuss motion, freedom and our symbiosis with vehicles.

Cineuropa: What sparked the development of this film?
Jelena Oroz: I wanted to make an animated documentary, interviewing people from my neighbourhood and their children. But it wasn't very successful, because kids – everything is fine with them. They don't see this as a problem. They're not afraid of cars or anything. So I had a problem with the structure. My producer suggested that I contact a scriptwriter, Jasna Jasna Žmak, sending her a text with my thoughts, my frustrations, everything I was feeling regarding the topic. Jasna sent it back as a monologue, which helped me with the structure. Now I could play with the animation with the monologue serving as guidance.

Animation is uninhibited by the restrictions and rules of real-world physics. No Room explores feeling hemmed in and trapped with limited movement whilst uninhibited movement happens outside. So the film has an interesting relationship with its medium.
I teach traditional animation at the Academy of Fine Arts [Zagreb]. I'm always trying to send this message to my students, that you need to use animation as a medium. Because, otherwise, you can just make a live-action movie. Use this possibility to turn anything into anything, to use transformation, to use illogical stuff, illogical movement. I really appreciate animation as a medium. I found myself bored by still images. They became more interesting when they moved. The golden age of Cartoon Network had a big influence on me.

How long was production on No Room?
Ten months. Once you have everything structured, you just work and that's it. A few months ago, I was at a festival in my hometown, Osijek, where my film was screening. The film before mine was a very long, slow experimental film. When I saw my film after that, I felt: oh my God, this is really fast. I think it's a thing with animators and directors, because we know the images in our head. We sometimes think that everything is going too slow. That's why it's good to have an editor.

Why give the cars human legs?
I wasn't really thinking about it initially. It was just fun to animate cars with legs. You can give them individual character. You can give them really big legs or really thin legs, they can move really fast or really slow. Later, I was thinking of them as some sort of Transformers. When people enter their cars, you can't really see them anymore because of the tint of the car window, but you know that the person is inside. Then it has become like a half-human, half-machine.

What materials and forms of animation have you used here? There's an interesting mix.
I wanted to step outside of 2D digital animation – it’s my safe place, and I wanted to try something different. I used toy cars and Lego blocks for the stop-motion moments, which was fun. I also inserted traditionally drawn cars. But, otherwise, it's 2D digital, frame by frame.

Your style is distinctive, with strong colour-blocking and defined lines. Where did that evolve from?
I just like colours. I don't like to think about the colour palette as something that should be clearly defined. I prefer the mess, with my intuition guiding me. I draw humans a lot, but not real humans – silly characters. I love this kind of character design. I'm always trying to connect those characters with my own personal stories or thoughts.

What artists influence your approach?
Now more than ever, there are so many interesting artists. We can open Instagram and see that people are crazy in the most beautiful ways. But live-action directors like David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Ulrich Seidel — I love stories where the characters are not good or bad, just different. It's always some emotion that you're not sure of: is this a bad emotion or a good emotion? I like those styles.

You speak in the film of having made this film as your ‘revenge’. Do you feel that making the film has been ample revenge?
When I watch it now, I think I was too soft. Of course, I don't think that cars are bad. I wanted to show that we're all part of this. At the end of the film, the character trying to get to the other side of the street gets in her car, and she acts the same [as the other drivers]. We're all the same, basically. It's just different perspectives.

Did you storyboard this film?
I added some transformations during the process. There are some elements that you can’t predict when storyboarding. I feel I need to go further in being guided by my intuition. I have experience working on animated films, and I know the process. Now I want to do something to surprise myself, to really enjoy the process and be surprised by the results.