Fantastic! Hungarian animation film won international award, and qualified for the Oscars!

“Amazing news has arrived: Yesterday, our film won the Award for Best International Short Animation at the Guanajuato International Film Festival in Mexico, which means Shoes and Hooves is officially qualified for the Oscars in 2025”, the official Facebook page of the film wrote.

“I am very grateful to have worked with such an awesome crew! It is not a nomination yet; it is a qualification, which is the first step. The second step is to be shortlisted. Fingers crossed!“, they added.

The animation film is 15 minutes long and is about a centaur girl, Paula, who works as a small-town pedicurist, and her dream is to work on human legs. She falls in love at first sight with a crocodile man, Arnold.

The film’s question is whether the centaur girl can find her way back to her identity or not. The centaur girl suppresses her identity by dreaming about human legs, while the crocodile man does so with the predator living in him.

Photo: FB/Viktória Traub

I was interested in the repression and compliance in the film and the question of whether love or self-acceptance would triumph in a conflict, the director, Viktória Traub, said. The IMDB rating of the film is 7.8/10.

Not the first successful film of the director

The set of the film is an imaginary world populated with hybrid human-animal creatures.

The short movie was made with 2D animation technology. The textures made by digital brushes create a natural, ripe and realistic effect in the viewer, making the surrealistic characters authentic, Dot & Line blog wrote.

Viktória Traub graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest in 2008. Currently, she is a PhD student at the university and works at the Károly Esterházy University in Eger. She has been a freelance designer and animation film director since graduation.

Her films ‘Vastojás’ (Iron Egg) and ‘Sellők és rinocéroszok’ (Mermaids and Rhinos) claimed several awards at international festivals. The Hungarian Association of Film Critics chose the latter as the best animation movie in 2018.

Here is the teaser trailer of her latest one, Shoes and Hooves:

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