BIKIĆ STUDIO AND THE FIRST SERBIAN FEATURE ANIMATED FILM
Saturday, 25.10.2025. / Student Cultural Center /
EXHIBITION AND LECTURE
Organizer and lecturer, Milan Marić
animator of Bikić studio
The animated film studio “Bikić” was
founded in November 1989. During the
period when he worked with his artists
under “someone else’s roofs”, Veljko Bikić
managed to rise above the situation and
gather his team under the umbrella of the “Bikić”
studio. After the great success of the animated-feature project “Hatchipuh” (a technique in animated
film that is still not simple even today), which was
made for West Germany during the Cold War, subsequent projects in series began to follow, such as
“Little Flying Bears” for the Canadians, “Tom-Tom
et Nana” and “Anathole” for the French, “Tommy
and Oscar” for the Italians, etc. In the meantime, a
significant number of auteur films and advertising
campaigns were also made. The successes of the
“Bikić” Studio over the years inspired people from
other companies to join it, who had previously been
somewhat skeptical of the same success. During
all this hard work on series, films, and commercials, Veljko’s idea from 1988 to finally make the
first Serbian feature animated film called Captain
John Peoplefox was “lurking” all the time. Major
preparations began, given that the project was
quite ambitious, expensive and very creative. Over
the following years, the complete preparation for the film was completed. The characters were
designed, the songs were finished, the music, etc.
A well-coordinated team with extensive experience
from previous decades finally came together. The
animation was supervised by Veljko Bikić, the main
animators were Risto Topaloski, Miroslav Jelić and
Darko Perović. We also had great external collaborators such as: Nenad Pukmajster - main camera,
Sonja Đorđević - editing, Zoran Simjanović - music,
Ana Sofrenović - vocals, Branislav Brana Jovanović
- lead set designer and modeler. It was an exciting
time for the “Bikić” studio: primarily because of
drawing on pinned paper, perforated film strips,
cameras, watercolors and other techniques for
set designs, pens and rapidographs, transparent
foils on which they copied and colored in various
nuanced technical colors, and of course, computer
capabilities, which is the technique used to make
the teaser for Captain John Piplofox. Unfortunately,
on November 18, 1998, Veljko Bikić passed away
and everything was stopped very soon...
