 by MAX SPARBER
 These are dire times for any sort of animation that doesn’t involve computers. Such old-fangled crafts as cel and puppet animation, which require thousands of meticulously detailed drawings or carefully constructed miniature sets and costumes, are expensive, time-consuming propositions. Television and film have started to rely on CGI animation, almost to the exclusion of everything else. CGI gets cheaper and better every year, while cel and puppet animation, which require a large staff of highly trained specialists, just gets more expensive. Even the European studios are suffering. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic-based Kratky Films—the first studio to be privatized—accrued a $13.6 million debt, laid off half its workforce and ceased work in its Jiri Trnka animation studio for two years.
 The
shame of it is that the Jiri Trnka studio, along with the animator who gave
the studio its name, was responsible for one of the most celebrated animated
shorts ever made, called “The Hand.” In 1965, Jiri Trnka set his
considerable technical skills (he had worked as a puppet maker and children’s
book illustrator) to creating a melancholy, meditative allegory about an artist
consigned to prison and eventually driven to death by an oppressive, totalitarian
hand. Trnka’s film proved to be controversial: Although the 17-minute
film won the top prize at the Annecy International Animation Festival, it was
banned by the Czech government in 1969, only four months after Trnka’s
death.
But Trnka remained one of the world’s most beloved animators. Although
he was declared to be “The Walt Disney of the East” by an English
journalist after his feature-length “The Midsummer Night’s Dream”
debuted at Cannes in 1959, Trnka shared little with his American counterpart.
Trnka’s films were usually meant for adult audiences—his shorts
include adaptations of stories by Anton Chekhov and Jaroslav Hasek. Trnka’s
characters were voiceless; he made no efforts to move the mouths of his exquisitely
crafted puppets, which often look like Eastern European folk dolls. Rather than
having his characters lip sync with live actors, Trnka instead favored scenes
acted out to lilting scores, or voice-over narration, such as his adaptation
of Hans Christian  Andersen’s
“The Nightingale,” which was released in the West with narration
provided by Boris Karloff. His films were meditative, generously paced and tended
toward abstraction. One short film, titled Merry Circus, was constructed out
of paper cutouts, and consisted entirely of angular images of circus performers
performing impossible feats: In one image, two seals with impossibly flexible
necks juggle dozens of objects back and forth in fountain-like patterns.
Image Entertainment has compiled six of Trnka’s films, including the feature-length
“The Nightingale,” into a collection they have titled simply “The
Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka.” It’s an odd, fascinating collection:
along with Trnka’s notorious “The Hand” is an informational
video about the dangers of drunk driving (featuring a leather-jacket clad puppet
pressed into drinking at a wedding party) and a marvelous parody of the American
Western titled “Song of the Prairie.” In this film, Trnka has a
singing cowboy ride to the rescue of a wagonload of gold, gunning down banditos
while taking preening poses and skipping along the sides of mountains. There
is a depth to these animated puppets that computer animation can never hope
to duplicate—the banditos, once shot, plummet off their horses and engage
in complex acrobatics before they die, and they are unmistakably real objects
moving through real space. This collection of short films shows a style of animation
that still seems genuinely magical. Trnka gives us a world of living dolls,
and we aren’t likely to see many new films from this world. ||
“The Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka” is available from Image Entertainment.
image-entertainment.com. $29.99.
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