Discovering György Kovásznai‘s animation is like tapping into an alternate dimension of art. The Hungarian painter, writer, journalist, and animator mostly directed short films during his nearly 20-year moviemaking career, projects heavily steeped in Hungary’s neo-avant-garde movement of the ’60s. (Avant-garde pioneer Dezső Korniss was one of his mentors.) That movement comes to the surface in his work through bold, weird, experimental animation techniques, and even more experimental storytelling. The single feature film he completed before his 1983 death, the deliriously bizarre 1980 movie Bubble Bath, could be called a musical, a love story, a comic farce, or a domestic drama. But none of those descriptions scratch the surface of what you’re in for when you watch it.
The 80-minute movie barely has enough plot to make up a short story. Prospective bridegroom Zsolt Mohai gets cold feet on the day of his marriage, and runs to hide in the apartment where Annika Parádi, a nurse studying to enter medical school, is looking after an elderly widow. Zsolt has never met Anni, but knows she’s a good friend of his fiancée, socialite Klárika Horváth, and hopes she’ll intervene for him with Klári, breaking the news that he isn’t going to show up for the wedding. That process is complicated both by Anni’s attraction to Zsolt, and by Klári obliviously arriving at the apartment to pick Anni up for the ceremony, with a belligerent prize-fighter in tow.
For American animation fans, the closest touchstones to what Kovásznai is doing in this movie might be early Ralph Bakshi movies like Heavy Traffic and Street Fight. The looseness of the narrative and the animation feels like a meeting point between the “underground comix” scene of the ’60s and ’70s and the constant dreamy shape-shifting of Max Fleischer's early work. Fans of Central European animation from this era will have a bit more…