There isn't much respect for the rule of law in Bulgaria, nothing happens but we always lay the blame at someone else's door, says Nikolay Todorov, a foremost name in Bulgarian animation.

Born in Sofia in 1952, Nikolay Todorov graduated the Sofia secondary school of fine arts and then went on to study Animation at the e All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow with Ivan Ivanov-Vano - the “father” of Soviet animation. He has worked for the Sofia Animation Studio as film director, artist and screenplay writer, as well as for ZDF in Germany and has authored more than 90 cartoon films. His film Megalomania was selected for the Iinternational Film Festival in Cannes. At the International Film Festival in Hiroshima, Japan his Odyssey was selected among the top ten animated films of modern times. During the time of socialism (1981) works of his were bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has been on the juries of the animation film festivals in Annecy, Cannes, Ottawa, Hiroshima, Moscow, Zagreb, Krakow, Berlin.

We talk to Nikolay Todorov about latter-day Bulgaria and about art. Nikolay Todorov says he has been fascinated with animation movies since his childhood: “In those days the great Western animations, like Disney were not readily available. But there were a great many cinemas in Bulgaria - 3-4,000 in number. Whereas now there are no more than 30-40.” We also touch a nerve - the Internet - the worldwide web may be a vast library offering practically everything there is and that is a wonderful thing, but on the other hand:

“These highway robbers have taken over all distribution rights, taking everything we call culture without even asking,” Nikolay Todorov says. “Everything that has ever been created by human hands - by brush, by camera - everything is there to be found online. In Western Europe people may have the good grace not to pilfer absolutely everything but in the former socialist countries thievery is a way of life and everything is put on the market. The times we live in are wonderful for people who want to find things out, but to want to find things out, one must have a certain level of education, one has to have read books. Everyone steals, the bigwigs, they steal too, they steal money they do not know what to do with because they are greedy.”

Being a man of art who has worked in two different epochs - of communism and of democracy, we ask Nikolay Todorov during which of the two an artist feels freer and where the bounds of freedom lie:

“Freedom is a means of existing, of breathing. No one can ever force you to do anything, and I don't mean just art. As to art, it is a well-established truth - art is for people who are very wealthy or for people who are really poor. If you start out doing art thinking you will make a pile of money, you may grow rich but that is not art. Because it is a matter of the spirit, art has different dimensions. If one wants to create something in art, nothing can stop him. In the time of socialism we went out of our way to find some book - there was literature that was forbidden - so we had to find mimeographed copies to read. But we read all those books. Prohibitions are a strange thing, they are for the stupid. Paradoxically, the times when there has been violence are the times when the best art was born.”

For four years Nikolay Todorov has been working on a 70-minute film called Made in Brachycera with screenplay writer Viktor Samuilov. The movie was conceived in the 1980s but was banned.

“Brachycera is a suborder of flies. The film is all about how the force, if it falls into the hands of the illiterate, cannot help them, it can only harm them.”

English version: Milena Daynova