“Marona’s Fantastic Tale:” the very fairy-tale like title along with the fluffy eyes of the puppy on the poster, seem to suggest that Anca Damian’s new animation (2019) is nothing but a cute bedtime story for kids. The keyword here is “seems.” For those who actually go to see it, it is clear right from the first scene that this is going to be a film unlike any other and that “Marona’s Fantastic Tale” might end up being fantastic even for an adult viewer. Indeed, this animation is really original in its form as it mixes  2D, 3D and Cut out animations to tell a simple story with rather complicated visuals. In the end, it is an exhilarating journey which repeatedly surprises the audience by its constant play with imagination until at some point the viewer allows himself to be totally emerged into it and for a short time, feel the childish admiration for it.  Still, there are multiple factors that make the animation a good one. One of them is its ability to tell a rather simple story in a very non-simple way. In the very skeleton of the film is an ordinary plot that tells the story of a puppy from her birth to her death, going through three separate chapters, in each of which the viewer gets acquainted with the new “human” in puppy’s life. But this is only on the surface level. When looked carefully, one can find a lot of sublayers and a lot of implications in it. We could say, that the puppy is used to defamiliarize the ordinary world in the eyes of the viewer, as the entire story is seen from the puppy’s point of view which allows the directors to be creative, and to show the mundane life from diverse angles. And with this tool to color the story, we get deep insights into the fundamental issues and longings of human nature: the ambitions, deeply encrypted loneliness, troubles with relationships and the never ending generational conflicts during the young adulthood. If not the puppy and the truly adventurous animation, this could end up being a very melancholic story indeed, as all the issues discussed are profoundly dark. The animation, however, is anything but dark. The colors play a key role here as the main characters have their dominant colors which perfectly suit their persona and tell the viewer more about them than the words could.Red is for passion, blue is for loneliness, grey for wisdom and age: it seems rather obvious, but when done cleverly it really makes the character stick in viewers’ minds. The animation also uses a lot of exaggeration and enhancement to creatively show some of the concepts of the story. For instance, the “puppy’s human” might be depicted bigger than the other humans, and even bigger than the entire world, but it makes perfect sense, as for the puppy this human is the entire world. The entire animation, in general, is like a roller coaster that takes the audience through different climaxes while at the same time entertaining them and keeping them constantly amazed with its play with lines, shapes and abstractions. But in the end the power of this animation is that it makes the viewer believe in the illusion it creates, makes him roam through different colors experiencing different shades of emotions until finally the world on the screen seems more real than the one outside. And for a short while, the audience feels a part of the story, empathizes the characters and really gets touched from it like a little kid would. And that's the true magic of a good animation. And that’s the “fantasticness” of this tale.