“Who is the fly? Who is the one chasing it?” Such anxious – and, to the decision-makers of cultural policy, provocative – questions were raised on several occasions by members of the Artistic Council of Pannónia Film Studio [Hungary’s leading animation studio during the socialist era]. They probed the supposed or real political message of one of Ferenc Rófusz’s earliest original short-film projects, at that time still bearing the working title A bogár (lit. The Bug). The film, eventually completed in 1980 in Budapest’s Pannónia IV unit – a workshop also known as the Fiatalok Műterme (lit. Young People’s Studio), led by Miklós Salusinszky – was released under the title A légy (The Fly). It became the first Hungarian film to receive an Academy Award (Oscar) and, in its visual language, departed radically from the studio’s earlier short-film productions. This formal inventiveness, moreover, would come to define Ferenc Rófusz’s entire career – free of territorial or generic constraints.
Form and content
With his first film, A kő (The Stone, 1973), born from an idea by József Nepp [animator and scriptwriter, a central figure at Pannónia], and with one of the final episodes of the Gusztáv-series – Gusztáv olvasna (Gustavus Would Like to Read / Gustav Wants to Read, 1976), co-directed with Marcell Jankovics [animator, director and cultural historian] and also the young director’s first internationally awarded work – Ferenc Rófusz was still working within the genre that had dominated the 1960s and 1970s: the intellectual caricature film. The Fly, although it retains the earlier films’ punchline-based dramaturgical logic, in formal terms already departs from the well-trodden path of its predecessors. In the spirit of postmodern rupture with tradition, both in its visual and sonic construction, there appears the “naturalistic” mode of representation that would also come to define Rófusz’s later films.
Solutions evoking the eavesdropped imagery of live-action cinema are also characteristic of other contemporary films from the studio: István Orosz [graphic artist, animator and filmmaker]: A sótartó felé (Towards the Salt Cellar, 1978); Győző Somogyi: Gőzhajóval Pest-Budára (lit. By Steamboat to Pest-Buda, 1979); István Orosz: Álomfejtő (Private Nightmare, 1980). Yet whereas these works were created more in the spirit of a kind of surreal pseudo-documentary, The Fly is the film that combines a camera imitating live action with the joke-driven narrative progression of the great predecessors’ comic shorts (including Rófusz’s first two opuses, mentored by Nepp and Jankovics), while at the same time turning these ossified cinematic topoi inside out.
In terms of content, the life of the title character in The Fly, ending in an insect collection, the execution of the condemned man in Holtpont (Dead End / Deadlock, 1982), or, in Gravitáció (Gravity, 1984), the fatal free fall of the agile apple longing to escape from among the shrivelled ones, all reflect the grotesque, morbid worldview of the great era of Hungarian and East-Central European animation in the 1960s and 1970s. They are related to those animated films which, stripping human existential questions to their bare essentials, condense them into a few minutes.
Indeed, not only the authorial short films, but already the Gusztáv episode co-directed by Rófusz – Gustavus Would Like to Read, created from a script by Marcell Jankovics – is also built on a dramaturgy similar to that of The Fly. It tells of the flight of the title character, the emblematic anti-hero of Hungarian animation, and ends with his presumed death. Gustav, who in this episode appears as a working family man, returns home after work wishing to read the newspaper in his armchair. Yet, in order to find some peace and quiet, he is forced to flee from his panel-block flat all the way to a deserted island, which then turns out to be a military training ground, where a hydrogen bomb is being tested.
However, while among the short films made in the decade before The Fly – such as Hídavatás (Inauguration, Marcell Jankovics, 1967/1969), Koncertisszimó (lit. Concertissimo, József Gémes, 1968), Rondino (Csaba Szórády, 1977) or Hamm (lit. Gobble-Gobble, István Bányai [Hungarian-American graphic designer and illustrator, 1977]) – the punchline-based “joke” is not necessarily taken personally by the viewer, and while the dense parables of Sisyphus, Küzdők (The Struggle) or Ad astra unfold in the unreachable distance of abstract space, when watching Rófusz’s films we cannot remain voyeurs at a respectful distance – it is impossible to evade the fate imposed upon the protagonist. As a result of the camera’s identification with the protagonist’s point of view, the spectator enters into a tacit community of fate with the individual standing no chance against the faceless pursuer (The Fly) or the firing squad (Dead End). This is precisely why, in the politically extremely unstable period of the Eastern Bloc, it mattered greatly to the luminaries of cultural governance with whom the esteemed public was, in fact, expressing solidarity – who was the fly, and who was the one chasing it. The film’s indirect political reading would have become even more topical, given that it was released in the year the Polish Solidarność movement [independent trade union and opposition movement founded in 1980] was born and then awarded an Oscar, had the film been completed – as suggested during the long production process by studio colleague István Majoros – with an alternative ending in which the title character emerges victorious from the struggle, having struck down its pursuer. Perhaps it was precisely for this reason that the film did not receive approval for release with this “revolutionary” ending.
In the formal, visual solution of representing the chase, the three-minute subjective camera sequence in The Fly plays a particularly decisive role. This is clearly suggested by the fact that in the early 1980s, in the full-length Toldi adaptation produced in Studio I of Pannónia Film Studio, Daliás idők (Heroic Times, dir. József Gémes), the memorable, emotionally unsettling chase scene appears to have been inspired almost directly by the pursuit of the fly. When confronted with the expressively rendered images that convey the agitated state of mind of Miklós Toldi [the main character: a legendary Hungarian folk hero from the 14th century] as he hides in the reeds, the viewer feels as if we are throwing ourselves into the dark forest together with the protagonist, fleeing from his pursuers in the dead of night.
The Fly, and then Rófusz’s next film, Dead End (1982), also brought technical novelties to the production of independent animated films. The practice of animation that does not function as serial production, but instead regards the short form as an autonomous work of fine art, emerged in the 1950s. Behind the limited style that modernised Disney-style hyperrealism and industrial-scale cartoon production lay the intention that, in contrast to the assembly-line methods of earlier decades, the most appropriate form must always be found individually for each content. This New Wave-style approach – reducing the number of in-between drawings in radical opposition to the Disney formula of “24 drawings per second”, and employing minimalist backgrounds – reached Hungarian animation in the 1960s, the very period when Rófusz was beginning his career. The innovation is linked to the studio founded by animators who left the Disney Studio after the major 1941 strike, under the name United Productions of America (UPA). At first it was applied in commissioned films, then became internationally recognised through independent shorts that were repeatedly nominated for Academy Awards alongside the works of the major Hollywood studios. Exactly thirty years before the Oscar awarded to The Fly, UPA’s emblematic Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950) received the statuette in the animated short category – a film in which the elegantly stylised moving figures and the static backgrounds, reduced to a few patches of colour and sketch-like drawings – the two key elements of animation production – function as fully equal protagonists.
Three decades later, within the most radical collective of Pannónia, the Young Artists’ Workshop, whose capacities were pushed to the limit as a film factory, the pendulum in Rófusz’s drawing team swung in precisely the opposite direction. In their search for a unique form, they seemed to defy the “less is more” principle established by American short-film animation opuses. Although the creators of The Fly also “limited” themselves, this reduction concerned only the absence of characters. Out of the characterless yet highly detailed, photorealistic background drawings, they still had to “produce” as many as usual: 12 drawings per second, that is, approximately 2,500 drawings in total, if they wanted the movement to appear continuous to the human eye. The Fly does not radically depart from the traditionally time- and cost-effective methods of animation production because its creator was unaware of the classical animation technique – used in filmmaking for almost seventy years by that time – of drawing moving and static elements on separate layers in order to avoid having to redraw the backgrounds for every single phase of movement. Nor does Rófusz’s unusually labour-intensive technique raise a banner for Stakhanovism [Soviet-era ideology glorifying extreme labour productivity], since, due to the Sisyphean workload, the team was unable to complete the fully animated crayon film by the originally planned deadline, and thus even lost the modest bonus paid for independent short films. In the case of The Fly, the situation is simpler (and characteristic of masterpieces): the content dictates the form. Although we never actually see the protagonists of the story, the drawn “camera eye” sees everything, and among the objects that enter its field of vision it neither selects nor prioritises.
If The Fly is about over-drawing, then in Dead End, as a kind of ironic counter-gesture, precisely the opposite occurs. The director reduces visual content to a minimum: our “eyes” are covered before the execution, and for most of the running time we see nothing at all, together with the protagonist. What is more, the roles are turned upside down: the human becomes the victim, while the fly resting on the shoe of the condemned man flies away gaily.
Advertising films and art
Like the young apple in Gravity (1984), yearning to break away from the tree branch, Rófusz left Hungary in 1984 and took up work in West Germany [Cold War–era counterpart of the Federal Republic of Germany]. However, the projects there either failed to materialise, or the television productions already in progress offered him little in the way of professional challenge. He therefore accepted the invitation of Toronto-based Nelvana Studio – a Canadian animation studio specialising primarily in children’s content and commercial productions at the time – and signed on as a creator of animated commercials; in 1988 he settled in Canada.
As a commissioned artist, he returned to his original “trade”, employing in the advertising industry the techniques he had refined in short films – above all, the stylistically formative visual language that had by then become his personal hallmark: the artistically elevated technique of background animation. With one essential difference: in contrast to his short films, which presented dramatic situations in monochrome tones, these thirty-second works revel in a profusion of colour. By this point, he had already been undertaking advertising commissions on a regular basis for more than a decade, and he won an award with the very first of these – an animated commercial made in 1977, while still employed at Pannónia Film Studio, for the Budapest International Dog Show.
How important applied art was to him professionally is further indicated by the fact that in 1979, in the Budapest animation studio’s internal professional bulletin, Közhírré tétetik (lit. Hereby Announced), he published a scathingly toned opinion piece entitled Egy reklámfilmes közérzete (lit. The State of Mind of a Maker of Advertising Films) [1], in which he wrote about the discrepancy endangering professional standards between the creator’s artistic intentions and the often constraining demands of the client. From 1991 onwards, he entered the arena of agency-mediated commissions under the aegis of his private studio, a one-man enterprise named Super Fly Film – after the insect that had by then become a Rófusz emblem.
Both client and creator benefited from the resulting advertising films, since those commissioned works proved most successful in professional competitions in which the fine-lined graphic style of his 1980s short films, the dynamically roaming camerawork of his Canadian predecessor and role model Frédéric Back [French-Canadian animator, director, conservationist and two-time Oscar winner] [2], and above all the background-animation technique drawn on a single image layer, which had become his distinctive creative signature, together provided the visual surplus that makes his animated advertisements instantly recognisable (Road Warriors, 1992; Animated News, 1998; Solutions, 1999). [3]
The sacred and the everyday
In the early 2000s, Rófusz returned to the making of independent short films. Compared to the extremely concentrated mode of expression of the three-minute trilogy formed by The Fly, Dead End and Gravity, and to the strict temporal constraints of advertising, his new individual works proved to be markedly more “expansive” in their articulation. After the centrally supported state film production of the pre–regime-change period [the socialist, state-controlled system in Hungary before 1989/90] and having been hardened in Western, capitalist film-financing structures, he now assembled the production budgets of his films from multiple sources, largely from private sponsorship [4]. The first of these works was the war-themed Tüzet szüntess! (Ceasefire!, 2002). The eight-minute Canadian–Hungarian animated film, created from a text by a Canadian author, was inspired by the trauma of the protracted Yugoslav Wars [series of conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s]. Retaining the photorealistic visual world of his earlier independent animations and enriching it with 3D effects, the film’s most arresting scene once again lies in the use of the subjective camera: through the eyes of a little boy who has survived the abduction of his mother by soldiers and is fleeing through the ruins of a bombed-out town, we scan the devastated residential buildings and the church.
In his previous films, it is the perspective of those in liminal situations that takes precedence – the pursued fly, the man awaiting execution, the child living in a war zone. In contrast, in his next film, Ticket (2011) – produced once again entirely in Hungary and employing the background-animation technique over a ten-minute duration – we are presented with the “subjectivity” of the average person, before whose eyes, at the moment of death, the film of his life reels past. In Ticket, the two sides of Rófusz’s creative portfolio seem to merge. The life of a human being, from birth to death, unfolds in a colour-saturated world, condensed with the routine precision of an advertising filmmaker. Yet whereas in commercials he compresses space so that, within the tightly limited half-minute of advertising time, we hurtle around the world in the “company” of the product to be sold, in Ticket he guides us through the stations of an entirely ordinary man’s life – and the “product”, devoid of any underlying commercial intent, is the thought-provoking film itself.
The narrative of Ticket, hovering between everyday and exceptional moments, is raised to a more exalted level by Az utolsó vacsora (The Last Supper). In this film, which presents the intersection of the sacred and the profane, the eternal and the transient, Leonardo’s iconic mural in Milan comes to life. The ordinariness of a festive meal merges with the liturgical pathos of the Eucharist, a juxtaposition further sharpened by a subtle irony directed at the duality of contemporary (mass) culture: in the aura of a work regarded as “a symbolic bearer of European culture” [5], an overbearing night watchman tramples coarsely, while, together with him, a football match broadcast – which likewise belongs to a certain category of “sacred” in the modern imagination – seeps into the ecclesiastical space. Two opposing “religions”, the sacred and the vulgar, are thus set against one another.
The first concept of this ten-minute short film, co-created by Rófusz with the animation director Sándor Békési, his former colleague, was devised as early as 1978; at the time, however, the panel of the Artistic Council of Pannónia Film Studio did not consider it worthy of realisation. [6] Forty years later, much had changed: the political environment, the technological possibilities, and the creators themselves. Sándor Békési, instead of pursuing a career in animation, had committed himself to a theological vocation, while Ferenc Rófusz, now an Oscar winner with a series of successful short films and many years of experience in applied filmmaking behind him, returned to the decades-old film plan. In the convergence of theological authenticity and virtuoso technique – that is, in the alignment of content and form (once again, after The Fly) – the project could finally be realised at the highest possible level.
[1] Ferenc Rofusz: Egy reklámfilmes közérzete (lit. The State of Mind of a Maker of Advertising Films). Közhírré tétetik, 27/20, April 1979, p. 20.
[2] Ferenc Rófusz. In: József Fülöp, Tamás Kollarik (eds.): Magyar animációs alkotók I. (lit. Hungarian Animation Creators I). Budapest: MMA MMKI (Hungarian Academy of Arts, Research Institute of Art Theory and Methodology), 2019, p. 2013.
[3] Several of the director’s drawn advertising films can be seen in the television portrait film Rofusz portfolio (Éva M. Tóth: Tálentum – Rofusz portfolio, 2002).
[4] See Erika Ozsda: Tüzet szüntess! (Ceasefire!). Filmkultúra Online, 2002.
https://www.filmkultura.hu/regi/2003/articles/profiles/rofuszf.hu.html (last accessed: 30 November 2025).
[5] Sándor Békési: Vallomás Az utolsó vacsora műhelyéből (lit. Confession from the Workshop of The Last Supper). Confessio, 2019/1.
https://confessio.reformatus.hu/v/vallomas-az-utolso-vacsora-muhelyebol (last accessed: 30 November 2025).
[6] Sándor Békési provides a detailed account of this in the above-cited essay.
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