Piotr Dumała

Piotr Dumała (born 9 July 1956 in Warsaw) is a Polish film director and animator.

He is noted for his animation technique. While training to be a sculptor, he discovered that scratching images into painted plaster could be a beautiful way to create animations. This is only one technique of a method called destructive animation, where one image is erased (in this case, painted over) and re-drawn to create the next frame in the sequence. William Kentridge is another artist who works in this destructive way. Dumała's main themes, and the way to show them, recall ostensibly the world of writer Franz Kafka. His film Crime and Punishment was included in the Animation Show of Shows. In 1992 his film Franz Kafka won the Grand Prix for best short film at the World Festival of Animated Film - Animafest Zagreb, and his film Hipopotamy received Grand Prize for Independent Short Animation at 2014 Ottawa International Animation Festival.