The experience of seeing Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in the cinema so deeply touched a ten-year-old boy in Budapest that he resolved to become an animation artist. Sándor Békési had the opportunity to start realizing that dream when he came to Pannonia Film Studio from the Secondary School of Visual Arts where he studied animation under the mentorship of Marcell Jankovics and became one of the youngest employees of the studio in 1972. He joined Ferenc Rófusz’s team in making Jankovics’s animated feature Johnny Corncob, and later he contributed to the making of television series such as Next, Please! and The Mézga Family on Holiday (he even co-directed certain episodes of the latter). In the early eighties, working with József Gémes, he was involved in one of the most unique works of the studio: Heroic Times, premiered in 1984, was the first painted animated feature created in the world. Meanwhile, he completed the animation programme of the Hungarian University of Art and Design in the class of József Nepp. His graduation piece carries the painting style while recalling the birth of animated film: Lights Before Dawn (1985) presents the story of Émile Reynaud’s short-lived Théâtre Optique condensed as a beautiful yet sad fairy tale-like romance. The second half of the decade is marked by a series directed by him, Tales of the Vases (1986–89), in which Greek mythology comes to life in drawn, painted and cutout images (in the second season, Békési worked as a writer and a visual development artist).
The nineties brought a significant career change. Images were replaced by words, the drawing table changed into a professor’s desk: Sándor Békési first studied theology, and then taught for many years at university as a Reformed theologian. However, theological aesthetics did not keep him away from animation completely and he returned to the field in practice too. In 2018, Sándor Békési and Ferenc Rófusz could finally realize their project that was rejected forty years before that, the film titled The Last Supper. The making of the series Confessions of Hungarian Saints by Kecskemétfilm is currently underway to which Békési contributes as a writer, designer and director. The creator adds his theological knowledge to the episodes in production, to which highlight the human side of the characters—primarily saints from the Árpád dynasty—as their inner struggles reveal the way they deal with tribulations and temptation, setting an example for the viewers today too.
Zoltán Varga
film historian
