Croatia's (then Yugoslavia) city of Zagreb was the center of the animation industry that Eastern Europe would became famous for. The Zagreb school of Dusan Vukotic (1927-1988) ,Vatroslav Mimica (b,1923) and Nikola Kostelac (1920-1999) belong essentially to the 1950s and 1960s, however the groundwork for their careers started in the 1940s. The Zagreb artists collective pursued the linear, schematic stylization - mastered by wartime artist Anthony Gross the decade prior and developed by UPA in the Forties.- to its logical conclusion. It would usher in a whole new approach to the medium for never had so few lines been needed to achieve such richness in both character and action.
And Zagreb wasn't the only game in town - Prague had their own certain contingent, boasting the greatest of all talents of international animation in Jiri Trnka (1912-1969), Trnka, a pre-war puppeteer would begin working on films after the war. One of Trnka's earliest films was done in harsh black-and-white line drawings ; Perak the Spring Man of Prague (1946), concerning a chimney-sweep with a docile demeanor who turns progressively violent in his resistance to the Nazis. Trnka went on to make films with puppets utilizing the stop-frame principle that was employed by all animated films to effect movement in his puppet characters. His talent for endowing his vast range of puppet characters with uncannily realistic life began in the Forties with films such as the satirical The Song of the Prairie (1949), a parody of John Ford's 1939 western Stagecoach and his traditional Czech subject, 1947's The Czech Year, his first feature length effort, an anthology showcasing a sextet of Slavic fairy-tales. Other notable graphic animators whose careers began around the same time as Trnka's were Zdenek Miler (1921-2011), Karel Zeman (1910-1989) and Jiri Brdecka (1917-1982) an eminent artist, director and intellectual. At the end of the Forties, Zeman introduced a new brand of puppetry using animated figures composed of glass in films like 1949's ten-minute short Inspirace (Inspiration).
During the 1940s the most advanced forms of design moved in the direction of a simplicity of line that recalled the early experiments of acclaimed French animator Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay, re-establishing the essentials of the medium. The finest animators of the Forties believed firmly that animation must remain a highly stylized graphic form that took delight in its own wit of subject and artifice of line. They were also concerned to reduce the complexity of the image so that the labor costs; costs which once proved Disney's overheads astronomical - could be substantially reduced. Indeed it was a new era for animation. By the Fifties, it had become an internationally established part of creative cinema, matching every mood from comic caricature to political satire, from folklore to serious drama and from fantasy to the outer limits of mobile abstract art. In the decades that followed although yet to garner the respect commanded - animation has continued to be bar none, the most technologically advanced form of film-making as we know it.