The first official trailer has just been released for The Crystal Planet, which will hit domestic big screens on 20 August, distributed by Duplicato Media (Blitz Group) and offering a lavish cinema experience that blends powerful emotions, visual spectacle, authorial creative vision and global production.

The children’s feature is directed by Arsen Anton Ostojić, for whom this is the first feature-length animation after a successful career in live-action films, including A Wonderful Night in Split, No One’s Son and Halima's Path, all Croatian Oscar nomination contenders.

The project is based on the original screenplay penned by the legendary filmmaker Dušan Vukotić, the first non-American winner of the Oscar for animation in 1962, with the short Surrogate, and one of the key creators of the Zagreb School of Animation. Ostojić reveals that it was Vukotić who showed him the first drafts of the script back in the mid-1990s, but his untimely death prevented him from filming the project. Now, exactly three decades after he first came across the story, Ostojić has finally managed to bring the project to a close, in collaboration with international partners and a renowned animation studio in Prague.

The cast in the English-language version is headed up by Oscar winners Jeremy Irons and Vanessa Redgrave, as well as the legendary Michael York.

The story centres on 11-year-old Rea who moves with her father to the newly discovered Crystal Planet, where her father gets a job at a robotic animals factory. On the planet’s surface Rea discovers an unusual dinosaur-like cub – Burgy, who comes from the underground, lost and separated from his mother. With the help of her new-found friend Andy, Rea embarks on a moving and visually spectacular adventure to protect Burgy and reunite him with his mother while facing a ruthless factory owner who wants to turn him into a robotic prototype.

That complex antagonist, the factory owner Mordokan, who also happens to be the Governor of the Crystal Planet, is voiced by Jeremy Irons, who highlights that “it was a real pleasure playing the character of Mordokan” and describes him as “a greedy industrialist, but also a caring father whose inner sadness endangers the entire planet and all the beings that live on it”. Redgrave portrays the character called the Matriarch, while York voices the Patriarch of a mysterious animal species that lives in the planet’s underground caves.

In the Croatian version, the characters are voiced by prominent domestic actors led by Goran Navojec and Katja Matković (Paulina P. from The Diary of Paulina P.), along with Judita Franković Brdar, Ivan Glowatzki, Jelena Miholjević, Lela Margitić, Pero Juričić, Marko Spiridonović (known for Extraordinary), Dijana Vidušin, Ronald Žlabura, Tin Rožman and others.

The particularly impressive musical score provides another noteworthy aspect of the film. The famous Diane Warren – the most nominated woman in Oscar history, with 17 nominations and an honorary Oscar under her belt – and rising star Halle Bailey, an American singer-songwriter first known for her role as the little mermaid Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid – have teamed up to write the film’s original song “Somewhere We All Belong”. As director Ostojić points out, Diane Warren’s new song powerfully captures the emotional core of the film, while Halle Bailey’s voice brings a universal, timeless quality that further deepens the story and its message of compassion, coexistence and finding one’s place in the world.

The film is produced by Filmosaurus Rex from Zagreb, BFilm from Bratislava and Alkay Animation Prague, one of the leading animation studios in the Czech Republic which also produced My Sunny Maad, the winner of the Annecy Jury Prize and a Golden Globe nomination. The animation supervisor on the project was Jakub Pistecký, whose impressive oeuvre includes projects such as Rango, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Avengers, further reaffirming the high level of production.

The film has received support from a number of European institutions, including the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, Czech and Slovak Audiovisual Funds, HRT, Czech Television, Creative Europe/MEDIA and Eurimages, and will be available in the original and dubbed versions, making it suitable for the widest family audience.

The International Film Festival for Children and Youth in Zlín is the longest-running festival of its kind in the Czech Republic and the world, and generally one of the most significant among such festivals internationally, and is dedicated to bringing the youngest audience in contact with the most diverse authorial approaches and themes from around the world. The Crystal Planet will screen in the Feature Film Official Competition for children and youth. The festival takes place from 28 May to 5 June. For more details, visit the official festival website.