Gloria Victoria uses mixed media techniques to create images that evoke bloody battlefields and the horrors of war, with imagery of combat and massacres from the bombing of Dresden in World War II to Guernica, from the Spanish Civil War to Star Wars, in a style inspired by expressionism, constructivism, cubism as well as surrealism. Ushev has stated that the film is "less geometric" in its animation than his previous works and that he sought to flatten the 3-D effect as the film progressed towards its climax, so as to convey the emotion of a human being at war.[1][3]
The film received the FIPRESCI critics prize at the 2013 Annecy International Animated Film Festival in June 2013. Gloria Victoria was screened as part of the Short Cuts Canada program at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.[4] It was named as Most Well Liked Animated Short of 2013 in a survey of fifteen festival programmers and critics, selected by eleven out of fifteen people surveyed.
