At Annecy in 2007 there were five Hungarian animated films on show, with Tibor Bánóczky's Milk Teeth (which was treated as a UK entrant) receiving the Jury's special award in the Graduation Film category. Is this a prize for Hungarian Animation?

Géza M. Tóth: Tibor finished at the Moholy- Nagy University of Art in Budapest three years ago, and his very first effort, In the Dead Channel, already got him noticed. He went on to complete the National Film and Television School in London, one of the best training grounds for animators anywhere, and Milk Teeth was his graduation piece there. It's a "three-hander" about a night passed by a brother and sister. She sneaks off to a cornfield to meet her boyfriend; her younger brother goes after her, and that leads to all manner of complications.

György Szemadám: The film has an uncommonly strong screenplay. Bánóczky himself wrote it, very finely gauged to the visuals, and the cutting underlines what the script is saying.

What are you three working on at the moment?

Áron Gauder: I'm working on a Viking story. I've been interested in the Viking world since I was a boy-it may have started when my grandmother read to me from The Song of the Nibelungs. Old Norse sagas fascinated me, just the very idea of those people, the ancestors of the Vikings, fleeing from the kings and taking over Iceland. A new translation of some of the sagas appeared a few years ago and that prompted me to trek all over Iceland. At that time I was churning out a huge amount of advertising stuff, working round the clock. On top of a glacier it came to me I had to change my life. So the trip was a lucky turning point for me. It finally pushed me into getting out of advertising. Since then, a screenplay has been written for a film that will be called Egill, and the storyboard is ready. It is going to be about a man who grows up in a society of free peasants and can't fit into the feudal world, because he can't accept the thought that any person should be placed under or over another. What I want to show is what the Vikings did when they weren't raping and looting.

Géza M. Tóth: At the end of July we finished work on a short which will be just over eight minutes long. It's been done with 3-D animation and it's muted, visually and in its sound. We're trying to say something about why we feel a need to leave our mark on the world, and how we manage to leave that mark. The storyline isn't important, it will be a mosaic built up of tiny details, which will knit together into a coherent whole. The aim will be for the air to stand still as it is being projected.

Your Maestro won awards and was nominated for an Oscar, the most successful Hungarian animated film since Ferenc Rófusz wonan Oscar for The Fly back in 1981.

That film shows the last minutes in the life of a fly that has strayed into a room and seems to know exactly how to keep the viewer in suspense.

Géza M. Tóth: I studied psychology, really getting immersed in cognitive psychology. But I don't start from what I know, I start from what people who see the film are likely to know. When I present an image and place it alongside certain sounds, am I sure what impact that image and sound will have on an individual or a mass public? Animation offers the opportunity to wink at audiences who are interested in animation, who are familiar with its idiom and logic, and who can make links with films they have seen previously.

György Szemadám: In point of fact, it was Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse who won the Second World War. Cartoons had a huge impact not just on the Allied soldiers but on the public, who saw a reflection of themselves in Mickey. Mickey always picked himself up and dusted himself down. He was the embodiment of the resourceful, indomitable little man. More and more feature-length animated films are being made now, and it's getting hard to tell where the acting stops and the animation starts in something like Lord of the Rings.

Géza M. Tóth: They're not two different genres; putting them in separate boxes is oversimplification. Some people would argue that feature films are one large category in which animated films are just one subcategory, but that's not right either. It is owing to an illusion of movement, after all, that we can speak of motion pictures anyway. Films with actors, as a rule, present the everyday world more faithfully that animations do, but the approach of the director is essentially the same. The makers of the great slapstick films in the silent years were keenly aware of how cartoons and feature films with live actors could live side by side; Chaplin, for instance, was quite ready to use stop-action when appropriate. How much animation is there in Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter films is a meaningless question for me.

Since the days of Georges Mélies, the storyline has shaped films.

Géza M. Tóth: For Béla Balázs cartoons were "absolute" film. In the Felix the Cat shorts, every time Felix hits a problem, his tail curls into a question mark, which he uses as a hook. Now, that's something that no other art or any device used by another art could have done. Animated pictures still preserve a bit of the magic that film had back at the very beginning.

Áron Gauder: György Pálfi's Taxidermia has a bizarre visual world and a stream of ideas to show the workaday lives of three generations of Hungarians, and I was involved in that. Although it has not been nominated for an Oscar yet, it stands a decent chance. It offers the viewer 69 varieties of tricks-all with the aim of lulling viewers into not noticing that any tricks at all are being played.