Budapest Classic Film Marathon: Hungarian animated film returns to big screen after 50 years

Hugo the Hippo, a 1975 Hungarian-American co-production animated film, is returning to the big screen on Saturday evening after fifty years, the National Film Institute (NFI) said.

The film by the Pannónia Filmstúdió, co-produced in the US by multiple Emmy award-winner Hungarian-born Róbert Halmi as part of Brut Productions, a division of perfume company Faberge, is an important legacy of Hungarian animation, which is celebrating 110 years in the business this year.

Halmi asked William Feigenbaum, its director, to engage a top animation workshop in Europe, and his first trip led him to Pannónia Filmstúdió, where Graham Percy’s drawings were set in motion by György Gémes, the film’s technical head.

Two years, 150 animators and 150,000 drawings later, a film emerged that was heavily influenced by the visuals of the 1968 Yellow Submarine based on the songs of the Beatles — a surreal, musical animation mixing traditional Disney style and the bizarre paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and African and Asian art.

Photo: Wikipedia/Hugo the Hippo

Hippos must repel sharks massing on Zanzibar harbour; while they succeed, soon they are seen as menaces, and people set their sights on exterminating them. Little hippo Hugo survives and is looked after by local children.

Kati Kovács, Erzsébet Kútvölgy and Péter Máté sing the songs in the Hungarian version of the film, the copy of which held in the collection of the Library of Congress was restored by the Hungarian National Film Institute’s Film Lab, the NFI said in a statement.

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