Two years ago a brash, witty, low-budget animated feature, replete with rap speech patterns, attained almost instant cult status after its release, selling something over 100,000 tickets at the Hungarian box-office. The District was a debut film for both its codirectors, Áron Gauder and Emil Novák. The whores, cops, petty criminals and Roma who feature in the film are all drawn in twodimensional photorealist-style animation. The leading figures are a group of teenagers (accurately reflecting Budapest's Eighth District's ethnic mix) who use a time machine to travel back into prehistory and gun down whole herds of mammoths, because their giant corpses, in the distant future, will turn into oil, and the oil into lots of money, which, with Osama bin Laden himself being holed up in the district, will give the "Eightfers" some say in how the world goes on. The main character, a Roma Romeo by the name of Ritchie Lakatos, his pockets lined with dosh, is now at last in a position-against his father's total opposition-to pursue his Julia, who comes from a family who are their deadly rivals. Needless to say, the gushing new oil wells in the Eighth District set off a string of international repercussions. The film was successful not just at the box office but on the festival circuit as well, carrying off the top award for the best feature film at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, which is the Cannes of animation.
The District made quite a splash in the animation world at home, with its subject matter, technical tricks and ambition all breaking new ground. Gauder and Novák's film simply tore up the rulebook: fizzing with humour, it touches on red-hot issues such as terrorism, Roma affairs, all sorts of aspects of minority rights and inferiority complexes-topics that are normally only encountered in Hungarian animation, when at all, coded within a fairy tale or in a sophisticated context. It is also of note that the two young directors sought their audiences in mainstream cinemas

rather than allowing the film to be treated as a product of a second-rate genre. That may well have been the most surprising aspect of all for the Hungarian film industry, given the rather patronising way it has looked on its animators, even the most successful, as engaging in "kid's stuff". That status was frankly acknowledged in a short, Cartoon (2005), released the same year as The District. It has a commissionless animator doodling on his drawing board, purely for his own amusement. Some of the images show flickers of life, with a bird or two taking wing and a few interesting figures breaking into a run, but there is no development, no climax-nothing emerges in the end. Although Pál Tóth, a lone pioneer of computer animation in Hungary, probably intended this elegiac piece as a portrait of his own predicament, I would not be at all surprised if it struck a familiar chord with many of his colleagues, given the current dearth of financial backing for animation projects that they all have to contend with.
For the bald fact is that animation has been in a parlous state for the last fifteen years or more. True, there has been no lack of accomplishments or prizes. Only five short years ago, Zsófi Péterffy took a Silver Lion for the Best European Short at the Venice Film Festival for her expressive Lover of Pirates, while Géza M. Tóth's Maestro, a virtuoso comic tale about the mysteries of a cuckoo clock, received an Oscar nomination. This year, Tibor Bánóczky, still a student, received a special mention at Annecy for his short In the Dead Channel, which has an exceptionally strong script. A round of the festival circuit is also expected for what was possibly the most articulate and elegant of this year's crop of animated shorts, Life Line, from the newly graduated Tomek Ducki- and this is before saying anything about the middle generation, among whom the likes of Zoltán Szilágyi Varga and Ferenc Cakó have gained considerable recognition abroad.

To understand why, it is necessary to go back to that year of change, 1989. The transition from a socialist to a free-market economy brought a drastic reduction in state support and cinema, like the arts in general, was badly affected. The stateowned studios went to the wall; audiences were drawn away by a seemingly endless stream of foreign (mainly American) films that now had unfettered access to the country; consequently, a new domestic production set-up has been able to emerge only very slowly. The public service broadcaster, Magyar Televízió, is chronically on the verge of bankruptcy and has been subject to an ever-changing management who seem to have no clear idea about what a public broadcasting service's role could be in a commodified cultural market where the commercial channels are cheap to run- since they are able to fill their schedules cheaply with imported packages of films and soaps. The seven lean years, which in practice have lasted for seventeen, were somewhat mitigated by the Film Act of 2004, but it is the animation sector which has been hit most heavily of all, with an allocation of a bare €1.0-1.2 million out of the Ministry of Culture's annual budget. And that amount has, in fact, been further reduced in the current year, so that it is now at best one fifth of the support that was set aside before 1989 (as a rough guide, one minute of animation costs approximately €4,000). Adding to the problems is the fact that the few grants available are not co-ordinated. At a recent conference, Marcell Jankovics, the doyen of Hungarian animators, commented that Hungarian animation these days did not compete on equal terms with its foreign counterparts in either the advertising market or on piecework rates. (Due to the desperately slow trickle of financing, Jankovics has as yet been unable to complete his major project: a feature-length adaptation of Imre Madách's classic verse play, The Tragedy of Man.)

Animation is being kept alive largely by the television companies, but whereas in most of Europe the television companies are long-standing customers for computer animation, Hungary's public service channel shows no interest at all in this branch. From the Sixties to the Eighties something like four dozen animated series, several hundred episodes altogether, were produced for MTV; since 1989 not a single series has been commissioned for television. Not long ago, Duna Televízió cancelled an amusing and charming series by Kati Macskássy called Peasant Decameron after only the third episode. By comparison, the now classic series of shorts that Marcell Jankovics directed under the umbrella title of Hungarian Folk Tales, which several generations of Hungarian children grew up on and which ran to nearly 100 episodes, has now long lost any trace of a TV company logo. Admittedly, József Nepp, who created The Mézga Family (1968) and Béla Ternovszky, who created Cat City (1986), have recently managed to obtain contracts for follow-ups.

One is all too well aware, however, that not all soups taste as good when reheated, and the most recently completed episodes are indeed far from convincing. It is also symptomatic that the Pannónia Film Studio, the distinguished linchpin of Hungarian animation over the forty years of socialism, has finally given up the ghost after a drawn-out death agony. For the time being there is no knowing what will happen to its archives, its materials and films. Many animation directors, including Kati Macskássy, the daughter of Gyula Macskássy, a founding father of the genre, are seriously worried about what is going to happen to this incomparable legacy. In its prime, around the late Fifties, Pannónia was one of the best-known animation production companies in the world, ranking alongside the likes of Hanna- Barbera, Disney, Soyuzmultfilm in the Soviet Union or Toei Animation of Japan. During those postwar decades "Hungarian animation was one of the ambassadors for Hungarian culture in the wider world," as the recently deceased Sándor Reisenbüchler, one of the studio's leading lights, put it. What is now clear is that there were just too many fortunate factors which coincided to make that a golden age for animation in Hungary. Among these factors were the advent of television, the primacy the public broadcasting service principle had in the dictatorships of the Soviet bloc, the lavishness of state patronage (all the more generous because animation was not regarded as a political threat) and even the non-market-driven and more entertainment- centred culture of advertising.
The opportunities inherent in what was a fortunate conjunction of circumstances, were exploited to the utmost by a singularly gifted generation of artists. Gyula Macskássy and fellow directors or their pupils kept Hungary at the forefront of animation internationally decade after decade. Among them were Jankovics with his adaptation of Sándor Petôfi's classic folk epic John the Valiant (1973), which was the first feature-length Hungarian animation film; Reisenbüchler with his extraordinary collage technique; József Nepp who created Gustavus, the socialist little man, with the series subsequently extended by Attila Dargay and Jankovics to a further 68 episodes in 1964, then by another 52 episodes in the 1970s; Dargay himself, who pioneered the Disney approach in Hungary; Ferenc Cakó, the master of sand animation; and Líviusz Gyulai, a virtuoso of line. It was, after all, an animated film, Ferenc Rofusz's 1981 short, The Fly, that was the first Hungarian film of any type to win an Oscar.
A string of feature-length animated films racked up box office sales of over one million each, eloquent testimony to the skill of their creators in finding an idiom that spoke to their audiences. Among these were Vuk by Dargay (1981); Water Spider- Wonder Spider by József Haui, Szabolcs Szabó & Csaba Szombati Szabó (1982); and Saffi by Dargay (1984).