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PRODUCTION Hungary

Hungarian animated cinema is on a roll

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Having attracted attention as a genre in 2005 with the release of Áron Gauder’s The District - which achieved domestic box-office success and received multiple awards internationally – Hungarian animated films will be out in force with a spate of releases set for the end of 2007 – start of 2008, with three features taking pride of place.

The wave of releases began last Thursday when Egon & Dönci hit screens and the trend will continue with the release of Cat City 2 on December 20 and A Fox’s Tale in February 2008.

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Debut feature by director Ádám Magyar, Egon & Dönci is being released (as of November 29) by HungariCom on 33 screens. Produced by Taxfree Film with a budget of €460,000, this 3D film follows the adventures of two characters who inhabit a faraway planet and receive a message from some human beings.

Eager to discover planet Earth, the two companions, who only communicate via gestures and facial expressions, start to build a spaceship and then set off on an exploratory journey of the solar system, making lots of new discoveries along the way.

Following its predecessor, which enjoyed enormous box-office success in Hungary in 1986, Béla Ternovszky’s Cat City 2 will be launched on domestic screens by Budapest Film in time for the New Year celebrations. Produced by Eszter Salamon and Szilárd Varga for Szerep Productions, this 2D film benefited from a budget of €2.4m.

In the first film, the dog robot Cat Catcher pacified relations between cats and mice, but a tribe of rebel cats from the African jungle now want to restore a more natural and conflictual relationship.

Set for theatrical release by Budapest Film in February 2008, A Fox’s Tale by György Gát and János Uzsák is also a follow-up to another successful Hungarian animated film, Vuk: Le petit renard (“Vuk: The Little Fox”) by renowned director Attila Dargay, a film that dates back to 1981 and clocks in as the second highest grossing Hungarian film at the French box-office for the period 1993-2005.

Produced in 3D by DYN Entertainment and FFH Budapest with a budget of €4.5m, the feature is being sold internationally by Tritonfilm.

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(Translated from French)

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