‘Fisheye’: the macabre vision of Joško Marušić
Over the years, film has proven to be an incredibly effective medium for conveying the urgency of environmental disasters. While many talented documentarians have risked their lives to capture these hazardous realities, animation isn’t really far behind. The films of revered auteurs like Hayao Miyazaki are regularly cited as some of the greatest films ever made about the subject. Another overlooked but important addition to the discourse is the work of Croatian filmmaker Joško Marušić.
As the entire world experiences the rapidly worsening impact of climate change and other environmental catastrophes, the lenses through which we view reality have also changed. That’s exactly why animated films have been able to capture this indescribable feeling of impending doom, constructing surreal worlds through which we can process our own. Although Miyazaki’s masterpieces – like Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind often reaffirm that the fight isn’t over, many people find it difficult to share that optimism.
Marušić’s 1980 horror film Fisheye isn’t optimistic at all. It’s a relentlessly cruel vision of a violent reversal of the food chain, featuring bizarre fish who decide that it’s time to take revenge. Set in a depressingly bleak fishing village, it documents the genocide that occurs after the fishermen leave for their daily catch. A product of the reputed Zagreb School of Animation, Marušić’s macabre perception of the world is seamlessly translated through animation.
During an interview, Marušić noted (via KinoKultura): “The Zagreb School of Animation had its specific technological and ‘worldview’ coordinates. The technological characteristic of the School was the so-called ‘limited animation,’ which, in digest, means a complete commitment to stylisation. It is customarily contrasted with the Disney-style’ full animation’, where all characters are animated according to the strictly delineated canons of ‘realistic’ animation.”
The filmmaker added: “The School introduced the genre of animated films for adults, films pregnant with cynicism, auto-irony, and the relativisation of divisions between people. In all great conflicts, our sympathy is with the ‘small man’ who is most frequently subject to manipulation. This ‘small person’ exists in all classes and all societies and verily constitutes the most numerous sector of society, but remains powerless because he or she is not ‘networked’.”
In Fisheye, the ‘small man’ isn’t the fishing community who have to rely on the one resource available to them but the fish themselves. With fishing nets, tridents (resembling the forks with which we regularly gulp down their meat), clubs and unquenchable bloodlust, the fish systematically clear each house while rounding up their haul of the day. While the film’s commentary is obviously influenced by the sociopolitical climate within which Marušić was working, Fisheye transcends that historicity. It’s more relevant than ever before, serving as an ominous warning to those who continue ransacking the planet for profit margins.
Watch the film below.
