Boris Kolar

Boris Kolar was born in Zagreb on 14 April 1933. He studied architecture in Zagreb, and before turning to film he worked as an illustrator and caricaturist for newspapers. A lifelong lover of Zagreb, its history and its people, he remained rooted in the city for the whole of his life.

Kolar entered animation in 1952, working at Duga Film and Zora Film. As chief artist he drew Little Red Riding Hood (Crvenkapica, directed by Josip Sudar), the first Croatian animated film in colour, and he worked as artist, animator and designer on Branko Ranitović's Traffic Signs, Street Heroes (1958), which was honoured at Venice. In 1956 he was one of the founders of the animation studio of Zagreb Film.

He was chief artist on many of Dušan Vukotić's films, including The Playful Robot (1956), Abracadabra (1957), The Great Fear (1958), Concert for Machine Gun (1958) and The Avenger (1958), and set designer on Cowboy Jimmy (1957) and Nikola Kostelac's Meeting in a Dream (1957). He co-wrote Vukotić's The Tail Is the Ticket (1959).

From 1960 he directed his own films, beginning with The Boy and the Ball. Boomerang (1962) won first prize at Karlovy Vary and was commended at Annecy, and he received directing awards in Belgrade. In 1964 he made The Monster and You, a UNICEF commission recognised at Edinburgh and Vicenza, and Woof Woof (Vau-vau), which won a prize at Oberhausen. Later films included The Discoverer, Experts (1968, a co-production with the National Film Board of Canada), Dialogue (1968), the minifilm series Adam and Micromania, Freedom Is... and Utopia (1973). He also wrote the scripts for A Dog's Life (1966) and Sisyphus (1967).

With Zlatko Grgić and Ante Zaninović he co-created Professor Balthazar, making all twelve episodes of the first season in 1969 as co-director, writer, artist and animator. He then directed four episodes of the second season in the early 1970s and six in the third season in 1977. In the 1980s he worked on Prince Marko, conceived as the first Croatian feature length animated film, but the project was halted at the storyboard stage. In the 1990s he directed short films including Croatian Resurrection (1992) and Cravat Croatica (1994), about the origin of the necktie, and in later years he contributed to new Balthazar productions such as Augustova treća sreća, Vrline iz dubine and Hektorovo otkriće.

Kolar was a devoted Zagreb man who, in the words of the organisations that announced his death, found the unusual in seemingly ordinary events. He set down his memories of his life, his city and the people who shaped his era in the autobiographical book Sjećanja i razmišljanja jednog Zagrepčanca (Memories and Reflections of a Zagreb Man). Details of his family life have not been widely published.

Boris Kolar died in Zagreb on Wednesday 21 October 2026, at the age of 93. The cause of death was not made public. His death was announced on 22 October in a joint notice from the Professor Balthazar Association, the company Profesor Baltazar d.o.o. and the institution Zagreb Film, which said that Croatian culture had lost an exceptional artist and that the generations who grew up with Professor Balthazar had lost one of the creators of a world of imagination, goodness and human ingenuity. The news was carried by the Croatian news agency HINA, HRT, Večernji list, Index.hr and tportal. Funeral details had not been published at the time of the first reports.

Kolar is remembered as one of the finest draughtsmen of the Zagreb School of Animated Film, the movement that won Croatian animation a place in world cinema, and as an intellectual voice within it who wrote about the role and problems of animated film. Boomerang and Woof Woof are counted among the anthology works of Croatian animation, and Professor Balthazar, which he helped to create and shape, remains one of the most recognisable Croatian cultural creations. In 2024 he received the Golden Octavian for lifetime achievement from the Croatian Society of Film Critics.