One of films’ authors, Zvonko Čoh, had worked on several animated shorts. His creative partner, Milan Erič, was an accomplished artist who had worked with Čoh on an animated short in the early 1980s. At the end of the decade, the duo decided to tackle a more ambitious project: Slovenia’s first feature-length animated film. In the end, The Socialization of a Bull? took more than a decade to complete.

During the production process, Čoh and Erič were joined by Ivo Štandeker, a war correspondent and a comic strip enthusiast. His unique brand of humor added spice to as story set in a universe far, far away, where a medical accident causes a member of the royal family to undergo reverse evolution, turning him into a bull, who is then sent to Earth.

The production of the film was beset by trouble. The process itself was painstaking: some 20,000 images had to be drawn by hand, and the team had few assistants. Štandeker, who had helped with both the writing and the animation was killed in 1992 while covering the war in Bosnia. Financial difficulties even led the creators to add a question mark to the film’s working title – a bit of punctuation that was kept when the cartoon premiered.

The bizarre, utterly inventive film premiered in 1998. It wasn’t a major box-office success, but it was recognized by the critics, winning a prestigious Prešeren Fund Award and was recognized with a prize at the Leipzig Film Festival. Perhaps most significantly, The Socialization of a Bull? finally put Slovenia on the world map of animation.