UPDATE (3 November 2023): See the comments section for some additional memories and insights from cameraman Ivan Vít, who worked as a technical assistant on most of the films discussed in this article (and on the second Bears series and The Appletree Maiden, for that matter).
Today, 7 October 2023, marks exactly 100 years since Czech animation legend Břetislav Pojar was born. Such a momentous occasion deserves to be commemorated in the grandest way possible: what better way, therefore, than to present a translated career-spanning interview with the man himself, and to offer several more observations and production details on some of his most beloved films?
Actually, before we move on, I must make a formal announcement: henceforth, On the Ones is truly no more, and I have decided that this will be the last article I write on animation history. In truth, keeping the blog semi-active has always felt more like an obligation than a real passion project; this sense of duty could be kept burning for as long as I still had the passion to keep watching, researching, and writing about international animation. Over the past year or so, however, my interests have shifted dramatically, and I feel that I’d much prefer to focus my time and effort on other hobbies and duties I’ve mostly neglected, especially now that I find them much more pleasant and nourishing. I have even wondered in the past several months if so much of the misery that dominated the past several years of my life was a direct result of trying to enter the animation blogging sphere, and if it really was all just a giant waste of time and energy and emotion that should have been expended on far more nourishing aims.
There is a certain poignancy in how, just as my two articles on Pojar in late 2016 and early 2017 were how this blog got going as mostly a solo-project, so too will these last few mega-articles on Pojar ultimately be how it ends. In a way, though, my devotion to Pojar and his films is arguably the ultimate reason why this blog is coming to an end. When I learned in early 2020 that transcripts for his two most beloved series, the Bears and The Garden, were bizarrely hidden inside the HTML code of Czech Television’s pages for Mistři českého animovaného filmu and the Bears series’ reruns (unfortunately, the website has since undergone a revamp, and all those subtitles are no longer there), I knew that I had to not only translate these films, but also discuss them in more detail than I had in those old write-ups. The latter desire was only reinforced by how, towards the end of March, I made the acquaintance of Marin Pažanin of Ajetology; through the e-mail interviews he began conducting with animator Jan Klos and others, the two of us learned far more about the history and making of all these classics of Czech animation than either of us ever would have dreamed.
The actual experience of translating these series and creating subtitles for them very meticulously—a process that, by its very nature, made me watch the films over and over again and even study them frame-by-frame—did two things to me. The first thing was that it awakened a new desire to focus more on translating obscure works instead of just trying to write about them, and this is one particular new interest of mine that I hope to keep going for at least a little bit longer. The second, and more consequential, was that it made me really see just how intricately crafted and meticulously animated these films were; combined with the influence of Marin’s own keen eye as far as spotting interesting details and production mistakes, I decided to try making my new articles on the Bears the definitive write-ups on the series, analyzing every bit of character acting and various other elements and unnoticed details as much as I possibly could.
In writing these articles, I would always literally re-enact what the Bears did (at least, to the best of my non-transformative abilities) in front of my computer, to get a sense of what they were thinking and conveying with even their slightest gestures. It really is a testament to Pojar’s acting ability—and to his animators’ own talents—that they really tried to get this kind of character acting across, with many very specific movements and timings that I certainly wouldn’t think of trying to animate on my own if I were an animator in their conditions. The downside of trying to figure every single little detail of their acting out, though, and for that matter observing every single little error or whatnot that I could find, was that the articles kept ballooning more and more to increasingly unsustainable levels, with seemingly every further article outdoing the last in terms of length and content. Their influence would wind up spilling over into my New Moomin article earlier this year: I had specifically intended it to be a series of much shorter write-ups when I began writing it last November, but it soon became obvious that my overanalyzing habits had become second-nature, and it very quickly evolved into a practical encyclopedia of lengthy episode analyses in themselves.
All the while, my active interest in animation began to subside, and it was hard to really work up the motivation to start writing again after my New Moomin article. When I finally sat down to begin writing about The Animal Lover sometime in July, I only wrote about the first four or so minutes of the film before I realized—I had already written tons of paragraphs attempting to detail and decipher even the most minor gestures of the old gentleman and the fish and the gnome without really getting anywhere, and on top of that, I no longer had any real sense of fulfillment from writing, let alone any motivation beyond Pojar’s centennial. So it was that, after consulting with friends, I decided to scale things back significantly: my final article would be a two-parter, the first being an entire translated interview with Pojar and the second being a series of mostly shorter write-ups on The Garden, Dášeňka, and Nightangel, bridged by the overall history of Pojar and his studio Čiklovka. The write-ups on The Animal Lover, Of That Great Fog, and Nightangel, in particular, are essentially revised versions of my previous write-ups from February 2017. (The first two are also significantly reorganized and expanded with more details—unfortunately, I couldn’t really do the same for my Nightangel review due to time constraints, it really was only last night that I finally got to that section of the article…)
Once again, very special thanks must go to Marin Pažanin and the folks at Animation Obsessive, who in a real sense deserve to be considered the co-authors of this article. Aside from Marin’s valuable interviews and AniObsessive’s valuable resources (they provided, among other things, the interview with Pojar translated below, which I had already quoted in my previous article on the second Bears series), many of the observations in the write-ups below were taken from very insightful conversations I’ve had with them over the years.
With Head In the Clouds and Feet on the Ground
Taken from the Czech National Film Archive’s anthology “Animace a doba” (Animation and Time), which was published in 2001.
Stanislav Ulver: Can you describe the genesis of the creation of your first two films, shot in the early fifties, which differ quite substantially from each other, and not only because the first of them is a classic fairy tale and the second (about a motorcyclist who doesn’t resist the invitation of the wedding guests and then cannot drive while drunk) a story from the “hot present-day”?
Břetislav Pojar: In the case of The Gingerbread Cottage (Perníková chaloupka), I was entering Trnka’s own field, which was to a certain degree conditioned by the fact that I was starting out and had to take the theme that they offered me. It was an older script, it had already been lying in the studio for some time, and I could only rework it thoroughly. It was just at the time when they definitively rejected Trnka’s film about Matěj Kopecký and suggested that he make Old Czech Legends. The studio was idle in this interim and it was necessary to fill the break with something—and so I got an offer to do just that. Maybe also because I always ran away from the studio—to a live-action film, to a documentary, anywhere. I simply already wanted to direct back then. But since it was a fairy-tale story which was Trnka’s own, and the puppets which he created for The Gingerbread Cottage were also quite similar to his illustrations from children’s books, it began to be said that it was a Trnka-esque, imitative film, and that naturally ate at me. In fact, there is already a whole series of elements on display here which I used later, for instance even in the Bears.
That’s why when I started preparing my second film, A Drop Too Much, I was quite careful that a similar Trnka imprint did not turn up in it. I started looking for inspiration elsewhere, for instance in Kamil Lhoták and artists who came from the so-called civilizational circle. Another source of inspiration for me was the Italian neorealist wave. So the second film was created in a substantially different way from The Gingerbread Cottage, and even my own experience left its mark on how it came across as believable—the fact that I also had a motorcycle and rode it a lot.
Ulver: It was probably one of the first films ever where a puppet scene gained such great dynamics.
Pojar: Yes, it was. The theme itself demanded it and it was difficult to figure out how to do it, because building a long enough scene, down which a motorcyclist would speed, was not possible in the studio. In order to be able to express the needed movement at all, I had to use a slightly different, typically animated solution—moving the background, and not the puppets. Unlike Trnka, who was an illustrator and scenographer—and although he had a command of film language, he liked to proceed from static, artistically-conceived images, which he could sometimes use very effectively even without movement—I was fascinated mainly by film possibilities and movement.
Ulver: If we were to follow some kind of main developmental line in your work, would The Little Umbrella come next?
Pojar: As far as animated film is concerned, well, yes. But in the meantime, I filmed another live-action story for children, The Adventure in the Golden Bay. At that time I even thought about staying with live-action film, but back then, the conditions for approving scripts there were so binding that I preferred the freer animation.
Ulver: Was the script of The Little Umbrella your own?
Pojar: The Little Umbrella was actually created, after all, like most of my first animated films, for a commission. Vratislav Blažek came up with the script, a kind of puppet show. But he was a theatre author, who worked with words. And in the studio, we agreed at the time that shooting something similar with puppets made no sense. So I threw it away and wrote a new script myself. I based it on real, even if sometimes a little exotic, children’s toys, there even appear Chinese dragons or maybe a bubble boy. The basic figure is Andersen’s sleep-luller Ole Lukøje from Jiří Trnka’s workshop, other figures and decorations were made by Zdenek Seydl, except for the cube wall, which was designed by František Braun.
Ulver: Then you collaborated with Seydl many more times?
Pojar: Yes, he was an artist who was completely different from Trnka—and I chose him quite deliberately. And right after The Little Umbrella, I did The Lion and the Song with him.
Ulver: Was that the most famous film of this creative period of yours?
Pojar: Perhaps surprisingly, A Drop Too Much was even more famous, even though it was about an anti-alcohol theme. This film went around maybe the whole world, besides the main award in Cannes, it received many others and was instrumental in my international reputation!
But to return to The Lion and the Song. As designer I chose Zdenek Seydl, because he had great experience from the National Theatre, for which he successfully designed ballet sets with gorgeous costumes. A single hitch happened then: Seydl originally wanted to use painted decorations on glass, perhaps according to Trnka’s model, but he thereby made it so ornamental in his way that the figures were not visible against it. In the end, we agreed on a plastic three-dimensional set. It had a more beautiful finale when the oasis was built, everything lit up and ready for filming, I called him to come take a look. He was silent for a while, and then he said: “That’s some stupid 19th-century romanticism.” And all I heard after that was the slamming of the door. Then when he saw the finished film, he apologized to me and retracted everything.
Ulver: The film had great success in 1960 in Annecy, where I think the first year of the future most famous international animated film festival took place.
Pojar: It won the first Grand Prix there…
Ulver: Were you particularly interested in the poetic position?
Pojar: In this case, yes. Finally, the inspiration here was Henri Rousseau’s painting The Sleeping Gypsy, and also a bit of Chaplin. Then I was lured by quite different themes…
Puppet films were actually just starting at that time. They did not have such a long tradition behind them as cartoon films did. Before the war, only a few of them were created, and after that they were made only for a short time here. Each of the creators of that time, Ms. Týrlová, Zeman, and Trnka, were back then still always discovering the possibilities of this genre in their own ways and figuring out what could be done with those dummies. Even I, when I was starting out in the fifties, strove to bring something new with every film.
So A Drop Too Much differs quite significantly from The Little Umbrella, which we talked about a moment ago, and of course also from The Lion and the Song and the other films which followed – How to Furnish An Apartment? (Jak zaříditi byt?) with a popular scientific theme, The Midnight Story (Půlnoční příhoda), which was a modern Christmas fairy tale, and Bombomania, a cartoon satire on atomic armaments which was to commence a series of satirical puppet films.
Each of them was a step into unknown territory—unknown thematically and technically—because even the puppet technology was constantly changing. It worked back then. They could be varied and they didn’t have to be for children, because they were shown as a sort of “appetizer”, as Mr. [Jan] Werich said, before the main film in cinemas. It’s a shame that this option no longer exists today. Authors can present their works at most at festivals or in film clubs, and unfortunately there aren’t enough shows like those here.
Ulver: Did you have any problems with the line that you call satirical?
Pojar: Very soon they forbade it, as far back as in the bud. It was exactly Bombomania, which I made at the studio Bratři v triku at the same time as The Lion and the Song, which got me in trouble. Both of those films suddenly aroused great displeasure, so they devoted an entire half-page to me in Rudé právo [the official Czechoslovak Communist newspaper] called “A Pitfall in Czech Animated Film”—and the “pitfall” was me. As a result, even [Jiří] Brdečka had problems with his film Attention (Pozor). From that time on, I had to submit all the scripts to the central directorate and every project of mine was censored. It took quite a while. But the worst thing was that I had prepared a whole series of scripts of a similar type, and I had to throw them all away and make films for children.
Ulver: Is this the indirect start of your very successful poetic line for children and adults?
Pojar: You probably mean the Painting for Cats (Malování pro kočku) series…But in the end, I was able to carry out the planned satires after all, even if Billiards, A Few Words of Introduction, Romance, and Ideal no longer had any great political subtext, at least in my opinion.
Ulver: But the audience probably found it there…
Pojar: It depends a lot on what kind of situation the film will then come into. Bombomania was shown in Tours at a time when France was testing its first atomic bomb, and after all the commanding general was a tall, asthenic type like De Gaulle, so the French were rolling with laughter, although of course it wasn’t intended to be that way. For that matter, Trnka’s The Hand also deals more with the creator’s private problems, rather than society-wide burning themes. And in the case of A Few Words of Introduction, even I myself had doubts about whether it would be too boring a film, when I had already put in so much work and it had cost so much energy. But coincidentally (of course, on purpose) they played it before the opening speeches of ministry officials at many festivals, and it was always a catastrophe for them. The only one who more-or-less slipped out of it was the culture minister in Ottawa, who declared: “I had a very nice speech prepared, but after this film I’ll leave it for next time.”
Ulver: When we return to Painting for Cats and other films of this type, Rudolf Deyl is already appearing here as a commentator…
Pojar: Yes, here is actually where the foundations of the team with which I later made the Bears emerged. The author of the stories was Ivan Urban, the designer was Miroslav Štěpánek, the music was composed by Wiliam Bukový, and the real discovery was Rudolf Deyl, who read the narration. On the outside, he came across as a very “serious” actor, but here his “comedian” talents became fully evident.
Ulver: The Bears, or They Met Near Kolín if we proceed from the title of the first episode of this series, and The Garden, probably your best-known and most popular spoken films at home, probably clarify your rather skeptical remarks on the subject of the use of narration and dialogue in animated film only with difficulty.
Pojar: The spoken word, of course, enables you in animation to express what you couldn’t with a mute pantomime. Narration makes it easier to describe complicated situations and a puppet’s voice enlivens, it gives them credibility and helps express their character. In addition, working with language is beautiful and entertaining. Trnka, granted, never wanted his puppets to speak, but he simply had to cross that threshold.
But for Czech animation, as I later found out in the case of the Bears, and then in particular The Garden, this is not the way to go. At home, you put a lot of work into the narration or dialogues. You choose the perfect speaker, you see to it that the text is humorous and optimally written. But when someone dubs a film in foreign countries, they usually only choose a cheap actor of the fifth category, God only knows how they translate the dialogues, if the translator understands them at all in the case of such a special language as the Bears speak to each other, and in the end they will still adjust it all “artistically” if need be…
Ulver: In what sense?
Pojar: I saw a version of the Bears in Berlin, where the dubbing director had the little one speak in an even more squeaky voice than what Deyl had, and the big one with a baritone like I have. Then it looked like when a bad uncle tortures a poor little boy—and everything was screwed up.
In Mamaia, granted, one episode of the Bears won the Grand Prize and people liked it terribly [Pojar is referring to how Princesses Are Not To Be Sniffed At won the Golden Pelican at Mamaia’s first International Animation Festival in 1966], but such a film is unusable for foreign television, for instance. It’s impossible to subtitle, it would lose half of its charm, and I don’t believe that anyone would dub it well. It costs a lot of money and the distributor decides to do this at most for a feature project or a large series.
Ulver: The semi-relief puppet was used very prominently in the Bears…
Pojar: I had already started with it much earlier, in Billiards and A Few Words of Introduction, a different type of relief puppet was used in the case of Romance, and a completely different one in Ideal, so that I had quite a good deal of experience with absolutely different types of puppets. And since in the Bears it was about metamorphoses, the semi-plastic form appeared to be just the most advantageous.
Ulver: In what do the main differences lie?
Pojar: A classical puppet is like an actor who can play anything when it has the firm boards of the stage under its feet. But if it has to break away from them and jump gracefully, troubles will arrive.
Ulver: In your interview from 1957, you speak among other things about the need to fly with classical puppets, and then you made it happen.
Pojar: Yes, already in The Little Umbrella. When the script requires flying, you have to force that heavy and unpliable mass to do so. But it is always difficult. If you don’t need movement into the space, it is animated with a vertical camera on glass. For spatial movement, it hangs on nylons at three points, Archimedes already discovered that, but to make a fluid movement in this way is really an art. You can also use special effects, but even that is very complicated, especially if you do it directly on film. The easiest thing to do today is to use a computer.
Ulver: In the case of The Garden, which is probably the closest to the Bears in its poetics, you alternated diverse techniques several times. Why?
Pojar: Because I discovered the advantages of combining them. Just as with flying, it is difficult to animate four-legged and multi-legged animals in classical puppets. The metal skeleton works quite well when there are only two legs, but with a horse, for example, it is already a four-legged problem. I know what I’m talking about, horses were my frequent destiny in Trnka’s films. It can be managed in the end, but you have to invent various gadgets, auxiliary machines and so on, and that’s why in The Garden, where there were elephants, a tomcat, and a whale, it seemed much more advantageous to me to join classical technology with relief. But the use of semi-plastic puppets has one catch. The animator actually assembles them on glass from the individual parts, and he must be very good, to always maintain the artistic character of the figure in every gesture. I was very lucky. My main animator, Boris Masník, could do it perfectly, and the way he animated the Bears or the lads and the animals in The Garden was a genius animator’s performance in all respects.
Ulver: How do you give the puppets expression at the same time? Let’s take, say, the Tomcat from The Garden as an example.
Pojar: There was no problem with the Tomcat, I had already tested it there from the Bears. In The Garden, it was more about fairly realistically and classically conceived lads who not only looked a certain way, but also spoke, even in sync, because when it’s a dialogue of four figures, it cannot be otherwise. It has to be seen, which of them is speaking. It was quite a pain to figure out, but that’s already how it goes with puppets. Bringing matter to life is much more difficult than drawing on paper, you always have to solve new problems. But in a way, it makes the work varied, and ultimately even fun.
Ulver: What led you to return again to classical puppets in The Appletree Maiden?
Pojar: It wasn’t so completely classical. It was again, in a way, a commission on the theme of a Czech fairy tale. One of them, Smolíček, was done by Jiří Brdečka, another by Božena Možíšová. In my case it meant returning to puppets anchored on ground, but I must add that I actually already missed it a little, especially after working with space and greater use of lights and special effects, which is quite limited in relief film. In The Appletree Maiden, it was a lot about creating an atmosphere of mystery and enchantment. And another thing, which attracted me, was to do a tree giving birth to an enchanted maiden. It was, granted, an entrance into Trnka’s territory again, but I was no longer afraid of it.
Ulver: Towards the end of the 1970s, a socio-critical tendency again appears in your films like The Big If or Booom…
Pojar: These were themes commissioned by the United Nations, for which I made the films. But my return to social satire already took place before that. Just when the Prague Spring ended, I finished the film What the Earthworm Didn’t Suspect (Darwin Antidarwin aneb Co žížala netušila). That was the first thing I had to show the new management.
Ulver: Unfortunately, I haven’t seen this film. What bothered [Krátký Film’s new head Kamil] Pixa the most about it?
Pojar: It was again a certain political subtext. The earthworm dreams about a Darwinian evolution into an ever more perfect creature, but when it finally becomes a human and has the impression that it’s reached the height of freedom and liberty, it experiences such a paraphrase of a shortened history of Europe that it prefers to crawl back underground. Back then, I had several similar stories, for example E, which was later shot in Canada, which did not stand a chance here at the time. I returned to the Bears again.
Ulver: When did you first actually depart to Canada?
Pojar: In 1967. They let me go at the time for three months at most, so the first film I made in Montreal involved several such visits. At the time of that relative freedom, I also shot Balablok in Canada, which again had political consequences for them—the English rejected the story, as it could offend the French, but they took it immediately. You simply bump into something everywhere. But in the normalization period, there naturally came problems with traveling…
Ulver: When you shot Nightangel here in 1986, did you collaborate with Jacques Drouin from the beginning?
Pojar: The conditions had already loosened up and and I got out through the UN, for which I had made some films. As for Drouin, the Canadians themselves came up with a proposal to collaborate with one of their younger directors. I decided upon Drouin, who at the time had as his second film Mindscape, realized on pinscreen, but first I had to come up with a theme where both techniques would be joined together. In the end, we agreed together on exactly Nightangel. I originally thought that the puppets would be colored and the blindness, done on pinscreen, in black-and-white. But Drouin worked terribly slowly and his “part” was relatively long, so I suggested that the pins had to be colored, which managed to be figured out. I realized the extensive black-and-white part of the film with puppets in Prague. Drouin then did the colored dreams—there were far fewer of them, but they were important and turned out very beautifully. Even the combined scenes were successful.
Ulver: Did you also try working on that screen yourself?
Pojar: When [Alexandre] Alexeieff, who invented this technique, brought it into the [National Film Board of Canada], I tried it, but I lasted two days at most. Of course, I was not alone. Norman McLaren also experimented with it, but even he lacked patience. [On that note, here‘s a documentary that McLaren filmed in 1973, in which Alexeieff and his wife Claire Parker give a demonstration of their pinscreen to various NFBC animators and allow them to try it out. Among the artists featured are Ryan Larkin and Caroline Leaf.]
Ulver: I think there were more of those pinscreens…
Pojar: This was his original screen, around A2 format. Then he got a bigger one, and since he gained asylum in Canada during the war, like that he donated the smaller one to them with great splendor. Incidentally, two people had to work on that big screen at the same time. Alexeieff was assisted by Claire Parker, who returned pins to him from behind.
Ulver: Can we stop at your combined feature film Butterfly Time [known in English as The Flying Sneaker], completed in 1990?
Pojar: I’d already been thinking of a live-action film combined with animation for a long time. It was a bit of bad luck that this project started to arise right in 1968. Everything was already prepared and approved, even the script, but the troops of the Warsaw Pact interfered in it… Moreover, it was in the group at Procházka, where they were quickly, hastily finishing other films. [I am not too certain what Pojar is referring to here; if I had to guess, he seems to be saying that the film had been assigned to the husband-and-wife team of Pavel Procházka and Stanislava Procházková, who were Čiklovka’s two other animators besides Boris Masník in the 1960s. As mentioned previously, both would emigrate soon after normalization began, which would probably account for their haste at the time.] It was therefore realized as late as some twenty years later, and even if in its time such a combination was quite original, it naturally no longer is today…
And one more thing damaged this film. Originally, it was supposed to be costumed, with reality shifted thirty to fifty years into the past, but there was no money for such a grand intention. Maybe in a few years it won’t occur to anyone anymore. In France, Butterfly Time won many awards, including the audience prize, in England it again had good reviews, in China it was very successful, and in Germany it is distributed to this day, only here is it like it wouldn’t be…
No one ever knows how a film will work with the audience, if it “hits” its time exactly, if it comes too late, or too early. It’s a risk, especially when you’re trying something new. You simply have to be lucky. On the other hand, I think that testing was probably essential in my times. It helped create a foundation on which one can build, to balance the handicap of puppets compared to cartoon films, and to develop this field not only here, but also in the world. Even if today, in the age of digital technology, much of what my generation contended with is slowly becoming a mere history of the Stone Age of puppet film.
As usual, watch The Garden and Dášeňka on YouTube with English subtitles here!
Or, download copies for personal viewing with English soft-subtitles here!
When we left off, Čiklovka had just officially become a branch of the Jiří Trnka Studio, after a few years of administrative limbo. It was a move that made sense in terms of production efficiency. Čiklovka could no longer be devoted exclusively to films by Břetislav Pojar, Josef Kluge, or their close associates: henceforth, outside directors and staffers (predominantly from Konvikt, the actual Trnka studio on Bartolomějská Street) would occasionally be assigned to the studio to work on their own films, or even help out with the main staff’s films, as the need arose. Or, as animator Jan Klos rather cynically put it,
Krátký Film Prague often “exploited” the free capacity of Čiklovka by delegating various directors and their projects (I worked there for 9 and a half years mostly on Pojar’s projects, but I could also work with Václav Bedřich or J. Barta, for example…).
The first visitors from Konvikt arrived almost as soon as Čiklovka became part of the Trnka Studio. The second of Josef Kluge and František Skála’s hunting cartoons, Prach a broky, was animated by none other than the great Trnka veteran Stanislav Látal with soon-to-be-animator Zdeněk Vinš credited as one of the assistants (Břetislav Dvořák, otherwise Kluge’s main animator at the time, also served as an assistant here), and Látal’s energetic animation is largely responsible for why this entry is much more watchable than the first effort Parohy, its fast pace and intricate movement and acting (just look, for instance, at the whole sequence of the dog getting tired!) ensuring that the otherwise-routine gags involving a battle with a crafty hare are actually funny. Unfortunately, it does suffer from its overlong, underwhelming final gag of the hare sounding its horn in triumph; still, at just over 5 minutes, one cannot complain too much. (I would personally say it is the third-best in this series of Kluge-Skála hunting cartoons. As for my curt thoughts on Parohy, since I hadn’t actually seen it yet when I wrote my previous Pojar/Čiklovka article: some nice bits of design and animation, but I thought the gags with the cow and the two deer were just stupid, there are some sequences where the animation is noticeably lackluster and not nearly as fluid and fast-paced as it should be (hardly a surprise with B. Dvořák animating here alongside Boris Masník), and the attempted racy ending punchline was so insulting that I felt a bit of an urge to throw my laptop out the window, aha…)
Aside from the more frequent presence of outside filmmakers, however, Čiklovka largely retained its previous organization centered around Pojar and Kluge, and life at the studio remained as fairly isolated and provincial, if not familial, as ever. Given that the actual production work—whether it was crafting mechanical skeletons for the puppets to ensure their flexibility, building the sets, preparing and decorating the actual puppets, or animating them—was slow and quiet, the occasional breaks helped to foster a sense of community at the former sculpture studio located at Čiklova 1706/13a. These included joint lunches, sitting around in the garden, assorted addresses to the staff, and joint screenings of filmed material.
Břetislav Pojar and Miroslav Štěpánek, photographed by Ivan Vít in the garden of Čiklovka in 1974.
The joint screenings, in particular, arose from how the filmed footage had to be sent to the laboratories at Barrandov to be developed. Much trepidation and excitement surrounded these screenings, not least because there was no way for the animators and other staffers to preview how their work would turn out while it was being filmed, and it was here that certain shortcomings or mistakes in the course of filming came to light. As Jiří Barta, who directed his first films towards the end of the decade at Čiklovka, recalled,
The material was always taken out once in a while, it was, I don’t know, three or four days. And it was sent to the labs. Well, and after three days the call came…It was a suspenseful moment, because for one thing it might not have worked out as animation and for another it might not have worked out with the camera, well, and then there could be completely technical mistakes that we did not anticipate. The whole batch had to be reshot. Today you can see them immediately. […] Back then it was more of a surprise and everyone was nervous. When we were sitting, the call always resounded in the corridor and everyone gathered into the screening, because they wanted to see it. Not only those who worked directly on it, but also the people from the workshops, everyone, even the cleaner…That’s how the film was created.
And so we come to Břetislav Pojar’s next series, The Garden (Zahrada). In many ways, it could be considered Čiklovka’s flagship series. Befitting the studio’s new status, and no doubt in tribute to Pojar’s recently-deceased mentor and friend, it was based on a 1962 picture book by Jiří Trnka, who had a prolific side career as an illustrator. Just as Pojar developed his own distinctive vision as a filmmaker at Čiklovka, however, so too did the series go in a decidedly different direction from how Trnka might have adapted his book, with more of an emphasis on Pojar’s trademark humor than on Trnka’s lyricism. In a 2007 interview with Agáta Pilátová, Pojar explained why he chose to adapt The Garden in particular, and how he expanded upon the original (using the series’ first entry The Animal Lover as an example):
I first heard it read on the radio, I think by Karel Höger, and it interested me greatly. Then the book just came into my hands. But my film goes quite beyond Trnka, it couldn’t be any other way. There are many motifs in the text that I had to develop and solve in my own way. In literature you do it quite simply, the author writes: “The old man died and the garden became overgrown.” And that’s it. But I needed something to be left behind by the old man, especially the animals. This is also why this film is perhaps more visually complicated than some others.
Trnka drew inspiration for the book from the beautiful garden in the villa of Turbová, where he and his family lived from 1939 to 1958; perhaps the series in turn echoes Čiklovka’s own romantic garden, with its extensive sculptural ruins amidst the decorative greenery. Its eclectic, oddball cast of characters, meanwhile, was a perfect opportunity to create and mix different kinds of puppets, in keeping with the experimentation with different materials that had taken place in Čiklovka’s 1960s films. Most notably, however, the series was an impeccable combination of the three forms of stop-motion animation that Pojar had excelled in: classical puppets inhabiting a three-dimensional space, semi-relief puppets on a flat plane, and cutouts. Each film regularly alternated between the former two depending on the needs of a given shot, while cutouts would be used to depict the lads’ bizarre thoughts and fantasies; clearly, as he himself discussed at length in his earlier interview With Head In the Clouds and Feet on the Ground, Pojar had discovered the benefits of combining these different techniques.
What is remarkable in this regard is that, when watching The Garden, one does not really notice that Pojar and his team are essentially switching between two different forms of stop-motion in every other scene or shot. It is a testament to Pojar’s intuition as a filmmaker that the use of either three-dimensional space or a flatter, two-dimensional plane for a given shot is simply what feels right for that particular shot, even in relation to the shots surrounding it, rather than being dictated purely by practical considerations like the presence of animals or above-ground characters. For that matter, designer Miroslav Štěpánek and the set builders at Čiklovka did a perfect job keeping the art direction consistent between the two different kinds of sets, such that the characters always seem to be inhabiting the same setting regardless of the different perspectives; the semi-relief versions of the sets, in particular, always consist of multiple layers of artistry, creating a sense of depth that hides the fact that the characters are being moved against a flat glass surface in these shots.
Of course, Štěpánek’s collaboration was invaluable in ensuring that the series would retain the beauty of Trnka’s original illustrations. While not a direct facsimile of Trnka’s artwork, Štěpánek’s rich art direction succeeds at creating a similarly enchanting, magical, densely-forested garden: it is filled with various kinds of intricately-sculpted trees and bushes—the abundant rose bushes, in particular, bring extra color and elegance—and its sense of mystique and wonder is furthered by the extensive shadows cast by the foliage, in tandem with the glimmers of sunlight that peek through (special credits must go to cameraman Vladimír Malík and his assistants in this regard). For that matter, even the less ambitious elements or settings, like the mossy, pebbly ground or the city in which the boys live, are simply staggering in their craftsmanship, with intricate details and textures that must have put the skills of Čiklovka’s preparation team to the test.
Where the series most deviates from the picture book artistically is in the character designs. Rather than trying to recreate Trnka’s very distinctive designs for the boys and the animals, Štěpánek and Pojar opted for a fun contrast in their own style. The four boys (reduced from five in the original book), in addition to being given their own personalities and looks to match, were crafted in a realistic style reminiscent of the characters in The Appletree Maiden; the animals, meanwhile, were designed in a stylized, cartoonish manner reminiscent of the second Bears series. The Tomcat, in particular, is anthropomorphized and animated in such a way that he could have been right out of the second Bears series, an impression furthered by how he is even voiced by František Filipovský.
As usual, Pojar’s rich character acting, channeled by veteran animator Boris Masník and newcomer Jan Klos—in a nice division of labor, Masník animated most of the shots done in semi-relief form, where the most complicated elements like the animals were generally handled, while Klos was principally in charge of the scenes shot on three-dimensional sets with classical puppets—is what truly brings the series to life. As with the later Bears entries, the major presence of dialogue meant that the characters’ movements and lips had to be animated in sync with the pre-existing audio, and the sheer amount and variety of characters here only further complicated the process. (Here I remind you, of course, that Masník in particular was deaf-mute, and would have had to rely on his observation of Pojar and his rhythms as he literally acted out the scenes for Masník to figure out the timing of the lips and acting gestures.) It remains a testament to their incredible skills that the character animation turned out so well: the lip-sync is almost flawless, and so too do the emphatic gestures and movements perfectly match up with the dialogue. All these efforts—from Pojar, Masník and Klos, Štěpánek, Malík, the other assistants and builders and artists at Čiklovka—must be kept in mind, as we now delve into The Garden itself…
A photo of Boris Masník at work on The Appletree Maiden, just prior to The Garden. Photo taken by Ivan Vít.
The Animal Lover / Milovník zvířat (1974)
Right from when Jiří Kolafa’s catchy, old-timey theme song begins with a lone whistler almost calling for our attention, heard over the Trnka Studio logo emblazoned at the front—while variations of this logo had been used in films from Konvikt since the late 1940s, this was the first film from Čiklovka to feature the logo, and quite fittingly so—we know that we are in for a special time in the garden. The first entry in the series, The Animal Lover, serves as an introduction to how the garden came to be, and taken on its own, it is easily one of Pojar’s most charming and brilliantly-constructed films. It is the heartwarming but melancholic story of a kind, lonely old man who decides to adopt and raise some small animals, treating them with such love and affection that, over time, they grow bigger and bigger until they have transformed into something much greater than he could have ever imagined.
Unlike the rest of the series, The Animal Lover was crafted entirely in cutout animation. In stark contrast to the more minimal art direction of Pojar’s previous cutout-animated films, however, here he and designer Miroslav Štěpánek opted for a warm, painterly, storybook-like look, perfectly befitting the film’s quaint setting and story; its rich textures and colors extend even to the character cutouts themselves. Of course, as Jan Klos has described in detail, the production of a cutout film at Čiklovka was only slightly less strenuous than that of a puppet film—essentially, Pojar planned out all of the character acting in advance, and from there supervised the preparation of a cutout “actor’s kit” consisting of all the parts and joints and bodily conformations and such needed for the animators to actually “phase” the movements he demanded (I have combined two different explanations, one he gave to Veronika Hanáková in 2019 and another he gave to Marin Pažanin in 2020):
[The Animal Lover] was made by the so-called “Paper Method” – it is similar to a cartoon, but it uses the so-called “Actor’s Kit”, which was prepared perfectly and economically by Pojar and a team of girls from “preparation”. [They] contoured it, colored it…The actor’s kit on tracing paper was transferred to moistened, tight-fitting paper, which tightens up perfectly as it dries, two girls transfer the game and the actor’s kit to it – in some cases it was put straight into the car on the boards of the original designer, so that the original graphics really played. The individual phases [of the animation] are pressed onto the background by a large glass.
The old gentleman’s longing for companionship is clear from the first scene in the film, as he watches and contemplates his neighbors through their windows. The silhouetted, touching views of parental affection and kinship, as we see a father and his son playing trumpets together, a woman rocking her angelic baby, and other another woman playing with her child by lifting him up and down repeatedly, convince the gentleman that he ought to get a pet of some kind, rather than remaining all alone with his stone gnome who, in the end, is no substitute for real companionship. (Of course, he does continue to see it as something of an old friend, often elbowing or prodding it as though asking it to agree with his excitement at his new pets and even carrying it outside to do so once he begins spending most of his time there.)
That very night, he goes out and gets a little pet fish, and spends his days playing with it and feeding it regularly, always with the rhythmic declaration of “For Hansel, for Gretel, and for Pepíček” (who is the other two’s cousin in some versions of their story), before rocking it to sleep in its bowl. The rings that the gentleman blows from his cigar as he watches the fish, and the colorful bubbles that the fish blows as it sleeps, always rise high into the air together, serving as an oneiric, lyrical representation of the peaceful bliss that the two feel together.
The gentleman’s routines prove to be the perfect foundation to show how the fish changes and grows miraculously over time. Early on, the little fish is already quite interactive, giggling and looping around and leaping out of the water (even twirling in the air at times) as the gentleman suddenly rushes towards it with funny faces and then begins acting like a monster, albeit it can do little more to play with him than splash drops of water onto his head with its tail. Soon, the fish grows so big that the old gentleman must relocate it to a washbowl (in a show of how much he cares for the fish, he even checks the temperature of the water before putting the fish in), and we see even more clearly how the old gentleman still has a lot of liveliness left in him as he begins deftly popping out from various hiding places around the fish’s new home to surprise it with faces and even rapidly shakes off the water the fish splashes at him before taking on the form of a weird neckless freak and jumping towards the fish; the fish, in turn, has become something of a lively, energetic child as it now imbibes tons of water only to squirt it all out at the gentleman, who recoils exaggeratedly and arm-thrashingly as though it were his deadly weakness!
Later, as the fish grows big enough to occupy a bathtub, the gentleman must change his game accordingly, making a much bigger funny face by wearing a closed umbrella as a mustache and then using the umbrella as a spear and even taunting the fish with it; the fish, in turn splashes water so profusely that the gentleman must rapidly dart away each time to avoid getting wet, and when he hits upon the idea of opening the umbrella up as a shield against the water, the fish, in an astonishing show of its newfound strength, goes as far as to drag the gentleman into the bathtub by the tip of his umbrella! (We then see that the gentleman has to literally dump the water out of his sleeve and pant leg, and even forces the water in his head out through his right ear by giving himself a good smack on his left ear while jumping onto his right leg to shift the water accordingly.) Finally, the fish grows so big that the gentleman can no longer even play with it, and eventually must go as far as to wheelbarrow each “scoop” of food; Bohuš Záhorský’s warm narration does an especially good job here of conveying the gentleman’s exhaustion, as each recitation of “For Hansel, for Gretel, and for Pepíček” grows increasingly tired and heavy—and upon making the mistake of forgetting the food “for Pepíček”, the fish, now a whale and able to talk in a deep voice, punishes the man playfully with a single thrash of its tail that floods the whole house with bathwater!
Jiří Kolafa’s score as a whole is as playful as it is gentle and melancholy, with many recurring themes and leitmotifs. It is particularly effective at underscoring the growth that takes place in the animals over time, an astonishing feat when one realizes that (as animator Jan Klos recalls below) the music was not actually created before the animation, and accordingly depended on the rhythms which Klos and Boris Masník instilled in their work without aural accompaniment. For instance, when the gentleman begins interacting with the fish, we hear a jaunty, but rather docile flute theme, in keeping with how these two are still getting acquainted with each other and the fish itself is rather small; this is followed by a whimsical, fluttery flute-led theme as the two begin playing. Both themes are then performed at faster tempos after the fish grows the first time, with the second theme in particular being played more loudly and led by a flute at a lower octave in keeping with the fish’s growth and higher playfulness; later, when the fish has moved into the bathtub and begins playing there, the second theme is performed more slowly and at a lower key led by a weightier-sounding clarinet, in accordance with how heavy and mature the fish has become. One theme that initially remains constant is the beautiful, violin-led lullaby heard whenever the gentleman is rocking the fish to sleep; however, after the gentleman, surrounded by bathwater, realizes that the fish has become a whale far too big for him to deal with, we get a minimalistic, pensive-sounding, clarinet-led variation of the lullaby punctuated by a marimba and some heavy bass plucks (and the perfectly-timed ringing of a triangle when the massive bubble blown by the whale pops with such strength that it rocks the gentleman on his wheelbarrow), expressing how the gentleman must be feeling as he has reached quite the dilemma.
Similar, but equally exciting and endearing patterns—growth-wise and musically—are followed when the gentleman decides to get some puppies. When the little puppies first emerge from their doghouse, they practically roll out of the entrance in their lack of control over their delicate limbs, which at any rate aren’t quite strong yet, as evidenced by how one of them falls over as it tries standing on its hind legs for the gentleman; when they try fetching a little flower that the gentleman has thrown (again, one of them practically rolls its way over), they are frightened away by a butterfly, and as they try to cuddle up to the gentleman, he has to pick them up so they can rest on his lap. Their bouncy theme, which should otherwise be frisky, is accordingly played at a slow tempo, sounding rather curious and uncertain. Soon enough, the puppies grow into energetic, excited dogs who barely fit into their house as they nearly break off a loose board over their entrance while rushing out, and who are now able to jump on their hind legs for the gentleman and fetch a stick on their own, even wrestling energetically over the stick as they practically spin each other around and carry each other along on it; it takes a larger amount of food to create a scent strong enough to attract them, and they can now hop up onto the gentleman’s bench on their own to rest in his lap. Accordingly, their theme becomes much faster and more playful, led by trumpets.
Not long after, though, the dogs grow large enough that they outright break their house into pieces as they try to leave it, and the gentleman, after nearly falling over from their sheer weight as they lean on him to lick him, has to throw almost a log for them to fetch and wrestle over; in addition to an even larger amount of required food, the two dogs also end up breaking the gentleman’s bench as they try to hop up to sleep in his lap. In accordance with their weightier, largely-on-twos animation, the music is slower and heavier, with a more pronounced tuba. Eventually, they become full-blown dog-eared elephants who “bark” through their trunks, whose excited steps thunder with such force as to bounce the man off the ground and reduce the even-larger doghouse to shambles, and whose bringing of a tree as a “stick” causes the gentleman to faint, such that they have to wake him up; the melody is reduced to a lumbering, brass-dominated shell of its former self! Of course, what remains constant is the gentleman’s love for his animals, as another beautiful string theme always plays, without any change, every time the dogs rest in his lap; at the same time, though, it should be noted that the gentleman is no longer actually playing with his dogs like he did with the fish—a subtle but foreboding sign of how his old age is more and more taking its toll on his strength…
At last, the gentleman obtains a little kitten. By now, he is significantly weakened and all but sedentary, as he feeds the kitten directly from a bottle of milk while seated on his bench; the wistful lullaby heard here will henceforth be used throughout the series, as a recurring leitmotif for the garden as a whole. It is at this point, before the kitten has even grown into an ordinary cat, that death strikes—the smoke rings indicating that the man was still alive and breathing, and which the kitten had begun playing with, suddenly come to a halt, and the bottle of milk collapses onto the kitten’s basket and onto the ground, followed by the cigar itself as it almost floats solemnly to the ground, letting out one final breath of smoke. Now deprived of the old gentleman’s nurturing love, the kitten will not be able to grow into a Barbary lion—and in a sad example of how people in this world, cynically enough, do not care much about a single old gentleman’s death as long as they can profit from it, the kitten is then rolled from its basket and the bench itself by a jerk who takes most of the gentleman’s and animals’ belongings away, even as a bell is heard repeatedly tolling to signal the gentleman’s death. The animals can only watch as they are buried in time, ignored even by the birds flying through the air nonchalantly; Vladimír Malík’s camerawork here is skillful, as layers upon layers of flora grow and gradually cover the garden up, and the house in turn is obscured by the literal rise of new buildings in the increasingly modernizing city.
As cruel as it is, life continues to go on as usual even after someone beloved has died, and the old man who loved his animals is no exception. Per the narration, these days the garden is supposedly frequented only by dogs who go there for drinking parties, and Pojar, as expected, portrays this fact comically: in a sequence very loosely animated by Jan Klos, two (literal!) party animals stumble drunkenly through the streets in the night, heckling the sleeping townspeople with their noisy bark-singing and ultimately causing a shipload of objects to be thrown at them (the inaugural bucket and boot, in particular, are then used very practically by the dogs as protective headgear). Cleverly, though, Pojar then sets this relatable scenario of animal hatred up as a contrast with the deceased animal lover’s kindness; even at this moment, up in the heavens, his spirit is feeding clouds, turning them into larger, fully-animated cloud animals.
This lovely final scene is accompanied by a music box-like rendition of the old gentleman’s theme, which makes way for a beautiful flute coda. A similar rendition of the theme had already opened the story, segueing into an affectionate-sounding trumpet rearrangement of the last few bars or so (sounding quite similar to the whistling at the very beginning of the film!) as we see the father and son playing trumpets (and continuing appropriately into the scenes of parental love afterwards), and the theme itself had reoccurred at certain transitional points in the film: a slow, solemn, trumpet-led version played as the gentleman said farewell to his whale, and a faster, brighter-sounding version was heard as the gentleman left the elephants to play on their own in the garden.
To close, this film is one of Pojar’s most heartfelt creations, with moments of fine visual poetry and genuine emotion, and it works wonderfully as a charming stand-alone entry in the Garden series. It is essentially a touching meditation on the passage of time—how quickly and unbelievably, it seems, we grow from infancy to adulthood, and yet also how much we can accomplish even in such a short span of time as our final months of life. As noted above, the repetition of the old gentleman’s routines is a perfect way of illustrating just how dramatically and beautifully his pets—and by extension, our own children and pets—change over time, from the delicateness of their infancy, to the energy and friskiness of their childhood, and ultimately to the unbelievable strength and power of their adulthood. In that regard, it is also a marvelous illustration of the wondrous things love can do: it is simply heartening to watch the man care for his animals like his own children, as he gradually increases their food supply, enlarges their living quarters, and spends time with them until, one day, they have miraculously grown into truly great beings. While he must set them free in the outside world (that is, his new garden), he still helps them out where possible, as evidenced by how he excavates a lake for his whale, subscribes her to several magazines, and even uses a crane lift to transport her, and later has a gazebo with circus equipment built for his elephants.
With that, here are Jan Klos’s reminisces of The Animal Lover, and animating the scene towards the end with the drunk dogs, to Marin Pažanin:
The Animal Lover moved me right to tears. If it weren’t for the situation that Krátký Film wanted to produce quickly and cheaply, so that there was no money for good sound engineering (sound effects and music), one could speak of a nice professional film. I already phased there as a “collaborator” recognized by Pojar (learned to use simple and primitive phases as I went along) but I don’t like to remember the “big responsibility” when I had to phase the end of the film for the ill Boris [Masník] – how drunk dogs go through the city – there was no music, no singing – the city was supposed to go out, and it couldn’t be made in “cutouts” – it had to suffice in 1 day, nerves on the march – SO: I actually spoiled Pojar’s impression at the end of the film.
Naturally, this was not the only film Masník animated on in 1974: he was also the main animator of this year’s two hunting cartoons by Josef Kluge and František Skála, Pozor, medvěd! and Na posedu, neither of which are particularly good shorts. To be sure, Pozor, medvěd! does have eminently satisfying character animation throughout (I do wonder if Masník animated the whole short himself or if Jan Klos actually helped him out here as well—sadly, until a version with full credits surfaces, we may never know for sure), even if the gags involving the pursuit of a mischievous bear who turns out to be part of a circus are a little too fatuous and lowbrow. Na posedu, meanwhile, is even more insufferable, with the remarkably poor execution of some sequences (the second animator here was Břetislav Dvořák, who was otherwise busy churning out Kluge’s Mikeš shorts at the time) adding to the annoyance and unlikability of the story of a guardian angel who fails to keep the hunter from getting drunk with calamitous results; it culminates in a truly lousy ending in which everyone is brought to tears in a mock-funeral for the now-wingless angel. For that matter, this would not be the first time that Masník fell ill during the production of the Garden series; to this day, it is regrettable that he was stretched far too thin in Čiklovka’s later years, with a corresponding toll on his health and—as we shall see—on the quality of his animation as well.
Various freshly-painted cutouts of the dog from Josef Kluge’s hunting cartoons, designed by František Skála. Photo from the book Zlatý věk české loutkové animace, provided by Marin Pažanin.
Of That Great Fog / O té velké mlze (1975)
We now enter the series proper as the story of the mysterious garden fast-forwards to the present day, with even the opening theme song being updated to a catchier, more percussive and “modern”-sounding rendition. In this re-introductory entry, in which four lads who get lost in the fog on their way to school wind up rediscovering the old garden, Pojar and designer Miroslav Štěpánek create a small world of interesting contrasts and several unique characters: there is no mistaking the realistically-designed humans for the cartoonish animals, or the four lads for each other, or—perhaps most importantly—the cold, foggy city, with its panelák buildings and merciless punctuality, for the exquisite, enchanted garden, where it seems life is carefree and time has stood still.
Vladimír Malík’s camerawork shines right from the start, in the opening shots of the lads walking through the fog on their way to school. In both the semi-relief shots of the lads walking along and the impressive three-dimensional shots of the barely-visible streetlights moving past them, the fog effects appear to have been created with a combination of special lighting (which appears to have been fixed in place with the camera, as in some three-dimensional shots the fog-like glare remains constant even as the camera moves forth) and a scrolling glass layer with thinly-painted fog of some kind; it would not have been possible to actually control and animate the fog moving past the lads frame-by-frame otherwise. Jiří Kolafa’s music here, consisting of a sporadic, suspenseful rendition of what will prove to be the lads’ marching-on theme performed mostly by alternating harmonica and clarinet, adds to a certain wistful sense of mysteriousness as the boys make their way through the fog, which is thick and obscuring enough that, when the lads suddenly see the old house with the garden in the distance, their memorable first impression of it is of a spooky, ruined fortress of some kind—a fascinating destination for this quartet of young adventurers, as a slow, ominous clarinet version of the leitmotif whistled at the very beginning of each film in the series is added to the music.
Upon arriving at the gate, we see that the lads (voiced by actresses Pavlína Filipovská, Iva Janžurová, Jiřina Jirásková, and Růžena Merunková) differ not only in looks, but also in their personalities and their interactions with each other, and they maintain an engaging chemistry as they try to open the locked gate with various objects, constantly reassuring and chiding each other but also working together with playful relish when the opportunity arises. It is easy to tell which one is the leader, frustrated whenever things don’t go his way and always having to rely on the others for ideas and help; the nerdy one, continually hesitant and nervous about taking risks; the more normal one, who mostly seems to tag along but occasionally has ideas and thoughts of his own; and finally the smallest one, who often seems to get the worst of a situation, and who is extremely possessive to boot, crying when he loses his money-box key to the gate and loftily referring to his harmonica as a “steamer”. Of course, they do not strictly adhere to these main personality traits either, making them all the more interesting as characters: it is the nerdy lad who comes up with the inspired but failed idea of trying to clog the lock up with various objects, and the smallest one, when pressured, can easily be the most bold and courageous, to the point where he personally marches over to the gate to sacrifice his treasured harmonica to the keyhole (which is what finally opens the gate) rather than letting the others take it and do it for him. (In a nice touch, this scene is accompanied by a solo-harmonica march.) For that matter, even with their semi-realistic designs and impeccably naturalistic character acting, the lads sometimes engage in cartoonish movements, like how the leader’s head bounces squashy-stretchily in surprise at the little key falling into the gate or how they stretch their arms or legs out at times to grab things.
The lads’ initial awe at the abandoned but sunlit garden, shielded from the fog outside, is well-conveyed by a pan through all the thick, dense shrubs and rose bushes with overgrown woods in the background, accompanied by a wondrous-sounding violin-led version of the garden’s leitmotif. But after wandering in too far after some butterflies, the lads are frightened off by a screeching, hissing monster of some kind, their heads briefly bouncing squashy-stretchily in shock and the yellow-haired lad even tripping over the smallest lad in his haste to get away! (With regards to the heads, I have to wonder how Miroslav Štěpánek felt about having to sculpt these squashed versions of the lads’ heads; per Pojar and then-costume designer Alena Meissnerová, as designer he was responsible for sculpting the heads of the final puppets himself even as Čiklovka’s preparation team did the rest.)
The monster turns out to be a massive, disguised Tomcat, grown up from the kitten who had been abandoned after the old gentleman’s death; perhaps the garden itself has some magic that allowed him to grow as big as he is. No doubt owing to his experience with the man who took everything away, the Tomcat is quite misanthropic, clearly relishing in how he scared the lads; even without taking his past into account, however, his eccentric old man-like mischievousness makes him impossible to truly dislike, especially with his very lively mockery of the lads (animated by Boris Masník who was almost exclusively responsible for the Tomcat), with its finger-pointing, nodding, and mattress-bouncing in tandem with his elderly laughing. Of course, the Tomcat is quite fine with mockery as long as he himself is not the target: his mischievousness quickly turns to violent crankiness after the smallest lad, in another show of his true boldness, jumps right up to him and calls him an old broom, and the ensuing mayhem in which he aggressively throws objects one-by-one at each of the insulting lads with his noodly arms (with each lad managing to dodge behind the wall just in time), uses his tail as a slingshot against the smallest lad, and finally lunges right into the door as soon as it is slammed shut is a particularly excellent example of Pojar’s knack for comic timing!
There are some intriguing quirks and errors, however, within this first sequence in the garden, making clear that the staffers were still getting used to working with this very elaborate set. The grasses that surround the garden entrance often shift and move subtly, as though Jan Klos could not avoid accidentally touching them while animating the puppets of the lads; for that matter, the tree branch above the mocking Tomcat is shifted upward during the second time he laughs at the lads, right before the shot zooms out slightly (perhaps the shift was necessary to hide some kind of flaw or cutoff in the branch?). Most notably, the first two shots of the lads insulting the Tomcat one-by-one and dodging his projectiles suffer from a strange lighting issue, such that a blue light is visible at the top-right corner of the screen; it noticeably disappears each time one of the Tomcat’s projectiles enters the screen at that very spot, only to reappear or flicker back into view, and the shots afterwards remedy it by readjusting the camera’s position outright. Of course, the fact that these errors exist in the final film is a valuable reminder that, due to both technological limitations and the budgetary and time restrictions dictated by the production plan, these films often had to be shot “blindly” and on the first try, with no real chance of previewing how the animation or camerawork would turn out or correcting any potential mistakes in them afterwards; it remains a testament to the abilities of Pojar and his team that they came out as polished-looking as they did.
As the lads flee back to the city with the cranky Tomcat’s insults continuing to echo out from the garden, they are seen by the four wrinkly elephants (multiplied from the original two that the gentleman had, and voiced by Vlastimil Brodský, Lubomír Lipský, Zdeněk Řehoř, and Stella Zázvorková). Realizing that they are almost late to school after all of this dawdling, the lads begin a mad, futile rush to make it in time (in their hurry, most of them unthinkingly start off in the opposite direction, with the leader having to yell after them and even bang on his head to let them know how stupid they are)—and it is then that the elephants, retaining their endearing friskiness and eagerness to please from when they were dogs in The Animal Lover even as their very stomps send the lads jumping along the sidewalk, begin to chase after the lads, believing that they are playing tag. Their earnest desire to play is met only with the lads’ hurried grief over their lateness to school, and their sincere remorse over the mistake is such that they all begin sobbing large tears—which, in a clever sight gag, nearly drown a street sweeper who has jumped into his bin out of fear at the oncoming stampede! (Some more shooting errors here, incidentally: the whole scene of the lads bewailing their lateness to the elephants has some noticeable fluctuations in brightness, and in one shot, the background scrolling behind the lads abruptly shifts downward.)
After hearing that the lads’ classroom is on a higher floor, the smallest elephant—smashing right into the others who, initially at a loss, have come to a halt—realizes that the elephants can help out with the lads’ situation, and with that, the elephants speed the lads along by letting them ride an elephant train: in an example of them (and Pojar) going the extra creative mile, the front two elephants sound it off with a fanfare, then (after bringing the boys on board) develop a train whistle, wheels, and smoke-blower, with Jiří Kolafa scoring the noise excellently via a ragtime soundtrack punctuated by elephant-like horns! Naturally, they continue to terrorize the city at this time, as they scare others into running away on stilts (you have to love how this man’s hat flies up and twirls in shock at the sight of the elephant train, or how he just happened to be carrying some stilts for whatever reason) or climbing up clocks to get out of the way—and then they pass behind some scaffolding, during which the lighting of the scene noticeably gets darker. According to Jan Klos, this particular shot and its execution was another result of animator Boris Masník’s poor health and his need for recovery during the production:
The elephants take the boys to school. They run through the city – a long job with each phase – Boris has paid the spa for three weeks, he has to leave tomorrow – we found a kind of “scaffolding” in the studio – as if the elephants are running behind the scaffolding. And when they ran behind it, we turned off everything, turned off the camera, and after three weeks of Boris’s treatment, we continued to phase the run – in the middle of one scene. You can see it there, how the scaffolding subtly changes the brightness. It’s an accurate picture of work in Krátký Film Prague, where the plan orders a scene to be shot in 1 day, and when you start shooting it, it takes 3 days from morning to evening.
In effect, the scaffolding was a convenient way to hide any obvious changes or flubs that would have been noticeable after Masník had not used the puppets for weeks. It is a good example of Pojar’s imaginative practicality as a director—aside from allowing Masník to rest and pick the work back up later without anyone noticing there had been a break in the middle of shooting, the scaffolding also works as a sort of extra atmospheric detail, illustrating the continuous urban development of this modern city.
This then leads to another funny gag, in which the elephants arrive at an intersection—scaring the traffic cop, who in his panic inadvertently orders a woman to stop right in the elephants’ path, in turn causing the (bare-legged!) woman to jump onto her car and tremble frightfully at the sight of the oncoming train before the cop, realizing his mistake, manages to kick the car away and grab the woman just in time! Per Klos, this was one of a number of special semi-relief shots in which he and Masník actually worked together: Masník animated the cop, while Klos animated the woman and the elephants, and the rapidly-trembling woman in particular is a brilliant early example of Klos’s exuberance, which would become even more pronounced by the end of the decade.
By now, all of the city’s clocks are striking eight, and we see the strict punctuality of the schoolhouse as its doors close almost immediately afterwards. It is then that the lads and the elephants arrive to find that the window of their classroom is luckily still open—and in a combination of brilliant camerawork from Vladimír Malík and skillful editing from Jitka Kavalierová, we rapidly truck into the semi-relief schoolhouse’s window to enter the three-dimensionally-depicted classroom (a seamless transition between the two different forms of stop-motion!), where the lads’ math teacher (almost certainly voiced by narrator Bohuš Záhorský) inadvertently buys extra time for them by believing they are once again playing a prank in which they hide beneath their bench to fool him into thinking they’re not there! (Quite a tangled web of trickery—of course, one has to wonder what mischief these lads are normally up to in school, that the teacher would be convinced they’re pulling something like that yet again.) As the teacher counts to three by literally adding 1 each time, the elephants manage to scoop the lads into an inverted umbrella—allowing them to be dumped in all at once, right on time and in perfect keeping with what the teacher expected! (I like the extra little gag of the leader and the smallest lad swiping their hats right off in keeping with proper indoor manners, preventing the teacher from realizing that they’ve just now entered.)
A cute running gag throughout the film is how the smallest lad’s pants keep falling off from time to time, after the other lads over-stretch them in their attempt to literally shake him down and dump his harmonica out to open the gate. It culminates at the end, when, having made it to class, he sneaks over to the window to wave the elephants goodbye, only for the pants to be left there as he returns to his seat; alerted by the other lads (the nerdy one even points at his own head repeatedly to convey how dumb the smallest one is), he jumps back into his seat before the teacher can notice and then extends his leg all the way out to swipe the pants back! A swell, cartoony way to end this lovely introduction to our many new characters, as the boys begin their math exercises—and elbow each other triumphantly at how they’ve managed to experience this wondrous morning adventure without getting in trouble. Naturally, they intend to return to the garden soon…
Aside from Of That Great Fog and the Mikeš shorts, the only other film to be produced at Čiklovka in 1975 was Carnivorous Julie (Masožravá Julie), directed and designed by a rather obscure figure named Pavlína “Pavla” Řezníčková. It is essentially a charmingly grotesque illustrated adaptation of an amusing tale by the great writer Miloš Macourek, about a carnivorous flower who causes an uproar in the city with her appetite, with sparse touches of cutout animation. The film is mainly notable as another example of how staffers from Konvikt (the actual Trnka Studio) began helping out at Čiklovka now that it was officially a branch of the Trnka Studio: aside from Čiklovka regulars Břetislav Dvořák and Jan Klos, the third credited animator is Konvikt’s Karel Chocholín (who would later animate the majority of the classic …a je to! series starring Pat and Mat), and the editor is Trnka veteran Helena Lebdušková, in the first of only two films she edited for Čiklovka after 1968.
As for Řezníčková herself, she was born in Prague on January 6, 1944, and studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, where she was a student of Adolf Hoffmeister, from 1963 to 1969, before becoming a professional artist in 1970. She had already designed and directed another film based on a Miloš Macourek story in 1973, Big-Eared Cecilia (Ušatá Cecilie), at the studio Bratři v triku; this was also mostly based on her illustrations, with bits of animation here and there drawn by Jaroslav Doubrava, one of the studio’s top veteran animators. (Doubrava, in fact, was already partnering with Macourek and designer Adolf Born by this time, serving as the lead animator on various satirical films like What If… (Co kdyby…) and From the Life of Birds (Ze života ptáků) and then the classic Mach and Šebestová shorts which the trio directed together.) After marrying a Spanish filmmaker, she immigrated to Spain in 1976, becoming a picture book illustrator of some renown; during this time, she managed to design two Slovak animated films, Ako sa Mišo oženil (1978) and Obyčajný príbeh (1982), both of which were directed by Zlatica Vejchodská. In 1990, Řezníčková became Czechoslovakia’s only post-Communist ambassador to Spain, from there continuing as the new Czech Republic’s first ambassador there (she served until February 1996); she eventually resumed working as an artist, with one of her more recent works being the 2007 picture book “O Dorotce a psovi Ukšukovi” (Of Dorothy and the Dog Ukšuk), written by Viola Fischerová.
Additionally, from this point on, Marta Šíchová is replaced as Čiklovka’s producer by Tomáš Formáček; like Šíchová, Formáček split his time between Čiklovka and Konvikt. The change seems to have taken place fairly early in 1975: the first Mikeš short produced that year, Překvapení v Hrusicích, still credits Šíchová as producer, while the rest of that year’s Mikeš entries (Mikeš hrdina, Tajemný kocourek, Jak se Herodes uzdravil), along with Of That Great Fog and Carnivorous Julie, credit Formáček. Lastly, animator Kristina Tichá, whom we had last seen taking time off before the end of the second Bears series, and who was now married with the surname Batystová, had returned to working at Čiklovka by this time, as she is credited as an assistant here and in the next entry. She would only become a full-fledged animator again in 1978, and even then only for cutout-animated films; as stated previously, she would remain a cutout animator for the rest of her career.
How to Catch a Tiger / Jak ulovit tygra (1976)
With the colorful characters and the world of the garden (re)introduced, it is now time for proper stories featuring them. The first of these later entries, detailing the lads’ attempts to hunt the Tomcat down and defeat him so they can enjoy the garden freely, is easily the best and most exciting by far: all of the lads have scenes where their unique characters get to shine, to say nothing of what they are capable of as an honorable band of adventurers, and the Tomcat proves to be even more of a deliciously cunning rascal than anyone could have anticipated with his many tricks and bicycle-riding antics. It all builds up to a very satisfying conclusion as, just when the Tomcat has the lads cornered, the elephants rescue them—and give them a ride through the sunset sky with their wing-like ears! For that matter, it is perhaps the most technically impressive: this is the first entry to feature extended sequences of cutout animation, mixed with the semi-relief animation here in a way that would be absent in the two entries afterwards, and by now Čiklovka’s team has improved significantly in its handling of the garden itself. Incidentally, even the series’ opening theme seems to have been re-recorded just for this entry, sounding much clearer and louder than usual; the shorts afterwards would simply reuse the version heard in Of That Great Fog.
We open on the sun, its flickering making clear right off the bat that today is an unbearably hot day. This impression is furthered by our view of the old house with the garden, blurred as it is by the intense, sizzling heat, as well as Jiří Kolafa’s intense-sounding rendition of the garden’s theme here, with its high, quivering tremolo strings that feel as though the blistering-hot sun were shining down upon us; the heat haze in front of the house appears to have been accomplished by placing a glass layer with some Vaseline over the shot, and modifying the Vaseline slightly in each frame. It is then that the lads arrive, clearly longing to enter the densely-forested, shaded garden—and from this point on, narrator Bohuš Záhorský introduces each story with a catchy rhyme: “Byly jedny vrátka, za nimi zahrádka. V té zahrádce stromy, pojďme si hrát do ní.” (There was a single gate, behind it a little garden. In that garden are trees, let us play in it.) Of course, the lads know full well, as shown by their initial thought bubbles, that the cranky Tomcat is in the garden and will terrorize them; naturally, the lion-hearted littlest one brags that he’d grab the Tomcat by its tail and throw it past the wall, but the nerdy lad, ever the voice of reason, reminds him of how fierce and bad-tempered the Tomcat is. (Note that, in the first few shots, the nerdy lad is actually wearing a kerchief to protect his head from the sun, but it disappears after the littlest lad proclaims what he’ll do to the Tomcat.)
Pojar integrates the cutout-animated thought bubbles and the semi-relief animation here in an especially playful, inventive manner to convey the lads’ thought process, reminding us of his knack for brilliant visual ideas. Rather than simply showing a cutout-animated version of the lads’ previous interactions with the Tomcat, Pojar separates the cutout lads and the cutout Tomcat into their own bubbles, allowing for a fun gag in which the Tomcat, in his sheer malice, literally pulls the substance of the lads’ bubble out from beneath their feet, causing them to fall down and bounce from the actual lads’ heads; as they are sent twirling back up, the Tomcat proceeds to extend his own bubble out so that the helpless lads can land right in it, trapping them in his own territory as he prepares to hunt them savagely! As the cutout lads manage to escape to their own bubble again and run for their lives within it, the littlest lad builds upon the others’ comparison of the Tomcat to a tiger to propose that they hunt him—and the leader, realizing that this would be a good idea, winds up replacing the thought bubble of the cutout lads cowering with one in which they stand firm as hunters, their new ironclad resolve such that the pursuing Tomcat and his bubble literally crash into the lads’ bubble (you have to love the squash-and-stretch as he rams into the lads’ bubble and is bounced back, a pliability possible because, as previously explained, Pojar planned the animation and the necessary cutouts out via the aforementioned “actor’s kit”), and fire at the cutout Tomcat such that his thought bubble explodes, sending him falling down and bouncing from the lads’ heads this time!
Of course, the leader and the nerdy and yellow-haired lads are so eager to rush into this exciting hunt that they forget they don’t even have a proper weapon, and initially cannot think of anything besides the littlest lad’s suggestion of a flintlock; they do know, however, as emphasized by the way they gaze towards the open door into the garden while we hear the garden’s leitmotif swell beckoningly (note how the littlest lad’s posture changes slightly in the middle of the shot of him just looking, as though animator Jan Klos wanted to fix his pose for some reason), that this lack of ideas cannot continue if they wish to enter this paradise. It is then that the nerdy lad remembers the bizarre tale of how his daddy once tried hunting a bat in the kitchen using a boot. The extended and very funny cutout-animated interlude that follows works on multiple levels: it captures the senseless uproar that often ensues when one is panickedly trying to evict a creepy intruder that has entered the home (most often a bug of some kind), it showcases Pojar’s trademark humor with multiple excellently-timed physical gags involving objects getting smashed and characters getting the worst of it all around, and even the thought-bubble fantasy format allows it to become a perfect example of the lads’ imaginative misinterpretations of things, as, for instance, the nerdy lad’s statement that his grandma fell to the ground in shock from the destruction of her cups is interpreted as his grandma falling from the cupboards as well, and the dog who visits the home is imagined as an affable dandy of a visitor who is, alas, angered into his primal form after his tail gets run over by the daddy, to say nothing of how the littlest lad initially interprets the boot as being a massive gun and then a karate-kicking boot! And of course, it’s simply hilarious to think that a subdued, unassuming fellow like the nerdy lad actually has such a bizarre home life, as it all culminates in him and his parents jumping out their broken window just to chase after the bat now that it has flown away into the night with the boot.
Still, as the leader’s frustration makes clear, none of this is of any help as far as their dilemma of what weapon to use against the Tomcat. After some more pondering, the nerdy lad (I like how you can feel his agitated struggling for a good answer in the way he scratches and rubs himself while tapping his fingers relentlessly on the side of his mouth, animated quite nicely by Boris Masník) finally comes to a more practical solution: how about they simply chase after the Tomcat as a group, until he’s tired out and cornered? All of the lads agree, jumping in jubilation and even bouncing their bodies in excitement as they begin imagining the chase—and in a rare and spectacularly failed attempt at adding to this sudden burst of inspiration, the yellow-haired lad goes as far as to suggest that they make the Tomcat drink cold water once he’s warmed-up and tired out to give him pneumonia, causing the others to imagine how the Tomcat will fall violently ill and be taken away to a malpractice-filled hospital as a result! His attempt to soften the implicit sadism by adding that they’ll visit the Tomcat, and even bring him flowers and candy, only further reinforces the others’ rejection, with the leader outright scolding him as a bad boy who tortures animals; thus, the three lads march off to the door, the other two lads even staring back at the yellow-haired lad with contempt, while the latter lingers behind and steps forth only haltingly (note how he even briefly walks towards the others with his hands out as though he were just about to try explaining himself, only to stop as he realizes that they won’t hear any further from him), clearly embarrassed at how roundly his idea has been rejected on ethical grounds. It speaks to this band of adventurers’ strong sense of honor that, while they certainly consider the Tomcat their enemy, they want to defeat him in a fair and honest battle—a remarkable contrast, as we shall see, with the unscrupulous Tomcat himself.
As we depart from these sequences of intermingled cutout animation, it would be remiss for me not to give some insights and speculation on precisely how they were accomplished (warning: extremely complicated details follow!). To begin with, there is no way they could have actually been filmed on layers above the semi-relief sets, as evidenced by how the bat-hunting and Tomcat-chasing sequences have their own backgrounds, making clear that these sequences were filmed separately; neither, however, were they incorporated into the frame by actually double-exposing the film. Rather, the pre-filmed sequences were most likely composited into the frame by installing a glass layer at an angle of 45 degrees in front of the camera lens, and then projecting each frame of the pre-filmed cutout animation in such a manner that the glass actually reflected the image onto the set; this would allow, among other things, the remarkable precision with which the visual gags of the cutouts bouncing from the lads’ heads were executed. Animator Jan Klos mentioned to Marin Pažanin in 2020 how this technique was used to create the double exposure-like translucency of Death in Lubomír Beneš’s 1984 film Muzikant a smrt (which Klos solo-animated):
The movement of Death was animated outside the decorations by reflection through glass installed at an angle of 45 degrees in front of the camera lens. It’s a traditional trick to do a double exposure at once…
Klos later discussed how this had already been a common technique to incorporate additional elements into a shot at Čiklovka—and how Beneš may not have known about it (or was unwilling to use it) at the time of their first collaboration on the 1981 …a je to! short Grill, resulting in a less-than-ideal execution of the ending in which Pat and Mat are overtaken by smoke (Beneš clearly resorted to just filming smoke overtaking the set in real-time, leaving little room for the two handymen to truly react):
We could not agree on how to make a burning and smoky situation in the interior. The time was burning when the part had to be handed in and Luboš did not want to convince Telexport (?) Bratislava that he would need another week for work that would significantly enhance the part. I wanted to use the so-called “forty-five” in front of the lens of the camera with which we in Čiklovka (Malík as the cameraman) had rich experience, when a second, complementary element is added to the shot. Here was an excellent premise, because smoke and fire were lighter elements to complement. Luboš probably didn’t know the “trick” and was satisfied (perhaps I remember it well) with a desperate loss.
One bit of proof that this sort of projection-and-reflection was how the cutout fantasies in The Garden were composited can be seen right as the littlest lad is releasing a thought bubble to imagine the nerdy lad’s daddy firing his massive boot-gun. The blurring of the shot (likely accomplished by panning the camera slightly while it was exposing the frame), intended to give an impression of the rapid speed with which the camera pans up to follow the developing bubble, noticeably affects the first frame of the cutout animation within the shot as well, making clear that the camera would have actually been looking down at that cutout image on the set at the time:
There is also the even more nebulous question of how the bat-hunting and Tomcat-chasing sequences, in particular, were actually filmed before being composited. If I had to guess, these sequences were animated beneath a layer of black paper with a thought bubble-like hole opened up as a “window” into the animation and backgrounds below, complete with a constantly-changing layer of Vaseline above this window to create the dream-like blurring effect. This strange use of such a hole would account for the additional effects of breaking objects and stars and such that actually go outside the bubble in a peculiar way, indicating that they must have been a part of this pre-filmed, projected-and-reflected footage as well: they are opaque while inside the bubble and even leave shadows over the animation within, only to become translucent once they move outside, leaving one with the conclusion that they were animated directly on a glass layer above the presumed layer of black paper.
On top of all this, the translucency of the projected-and-reflected cutout animation is not noticeable for the most part, outside of the initial fantasies of the lads and Tomcat in which the cutouts are forced outside their bubbles: Pojar and his team generally made the fantasies look much more “solid” by having the footage play out over opaque pieces of thought bubble-shaped paper, which may or may not have actually been layered over the sets themselves (and which are especially playfully handled in the first few fantasies). Even then, however, these pieces of paper do not always perfectly match the bubbles of the original footage, causing the translucency of the footage to become visible in some shots where its edges overlap the paper beneath it (see the shots above). For that matter, in the very first frame of the Tomcat-chasing sequence, as well as towards the very end of the shot in which the ambulance takes the sick Tomcat away, the opaque paper is actually missing, allowing us to see the pure translucency of the reflected footage:
The very last frame of this shot also serves as a bit of proof that the cutout footage was filmed in advance and then projected/reflected onto the set: a faint white line appears over the footage above the trunk of the tree, a typical indicator that a cut to another shot is about to take place, but the line does not go outside the boundaries of the bubble!
Back to the story: of course, the yellow-haired lad, in spite of his previous faux pas, soon redeems his importance as an extra source of ideas. When the other lads, for all the grandiosity in their march (played up by Jiří Kolafa’s rendition of the lads’ march theme here), begin to cower over the possibility that the Tomcat is hiding right behind the open door, he suggests that they all form a wall so that one of them can look over the actual wall and check where the Tomcat is. It’s a cute reminder of the value of their teamwork, how they can accomplish much more by working together than by trying to hand off inconvenient duties to individual members—albeit, in this instance, it ends catastrophically, as the wall is so high that the littlest lad on top is forced to jump up in order to hang onto the wall and get glimpses of what lies beyond, and his inevitable fall sends the lads toppling over onto the ground, the force of it all such that the rebound sends the leader rolling back over to the door (the realistic sound effects of all their bodies hitting the ground really sell this particular scene). Another wholesome moment of camaraderie follows as, realizing that they have no choice but to look through the entrance, the lads quietly shuffle over to the door together, holding each other’s hands as they do so.
Unfortunately for the lads, the Tomcat has been anticipating their arrival. Listening for them in the bushes as they step closer to the door, and rubbing his hands with conniving delight after he checks a second time to make sure, the Tomcat stealthily prances and then scurries between the bushes to move further away in preparation for his first trick; the rather slow manner in which Masník animates the Tomcat moving through the air does sort of work in conveying his ability not to ruffle the bushes too noisily. As the door creaks open, he puts on a homemade war bonnet and lowers himself into the bushes—a good indication that he’s about to pull a particularly sneaky trick on the lads.
As the lads, with the leader peeking in first to make sure the coast is clear, enter the enchanted garden once again, the rendition of the garden’s theme that had been heard when they first entered it in Of That Great Fog is heard here as well, evoking the same sense of wonder that they felt on that fateful first visit. This time, our impression of the garden is even more beautiful than before: the layout of the garden is more organized, with a clear path leading from the entrance to the interior, and the sunlight shining down on the garden is much brighter. In the latter regard, cameraman Vladimír Malík and his assistants now take things a step further and create a realistic effect of the trees wavering in the wind, as seen in the shadows they cast over the set. On top of this, the grasses for the most part no longer abruptly shift in position over the course of the sequence, making clear that animator Jan Klos had gotten much better at working on this set.
As awestruck as the lads are by the beauty of the garden, however (see how they look around as they enter!), they find it suspicious that the Tomcat is not on his mattress, or anywhere in sight; the seeming tranquility is underlined by the butterfly that passes through the area (note how the lighting strangely gets brighter when the butterfly comes in). This first gag, unfortunately, is rather overlong, as the leader tries to call out for the Tomcat only for him to respond with echoes denying that he’s home—even if it is a good opportunity to show off how lovely and multilayered the garden is—and the ultimate payoff is underwhelming, as the Tomcat merely tricks the yellow-haired lad into running into a nettle bush, though Masník and Klos do a great job animating the panicked, badly-stung way in which he repeatedly jumps in pain and tries to brush himself off desperately.
Realizing that the Tomcat will keep up with this charade for as long as possible, the leader decides to simply ask this “echo” directly for a chase. At this, the crafty Tomcat, ever a few steps ahead of the lads, decides to reveal himself—and his previously-unseen bicycle, his wicked sense of humor and confidence coming through in the way he outright sings a fanfare through a wrecked pipe to declare the beginning of the chase and then even encourages the lads to go after him! With that, the chase begins as the Tomcat hops onto his bicycle and speeds off with the lads in hot pursuit, accompanied by a deliciously hectic, chaotic chase theme filled with wacky sound effects from Jiří Kolafa. We watch as the Tomcat rides to and fro and repeatedly tricks the lads thanks to the dense foliage in the garden, where he can hide and pop back out on a whim. Sadly, it is also here that we really start to notice the decline in Boris Masník’s ability as an animator over the course of the 1970s: some shots move far more slowly and listlessly than they should, like the very first shot of the lads chasing the Tomcat around and the scene where the Tomcat kicks them all down tumblingly, without the manic pace that one would expect from such a high-speed chase. By stark contrast, the two three-dimensional shots animated by Jan Klos, consisting of the lads and the Tomcat winding between the trees and then of the Tomcat using his tail as a swing to fake the lads out, are almost bursting at the seams with energy: the latter shot is especially impressive in the way Klos keeps the lads running back and forth in a bubbly, exuberant fashion to try catching the swinging Tomcat.
It is then that the Tomcat begins an even craftier routine: he fakes a series of terrible cramps in both of his legs, tricking the lads into thinking they actually have a shot at capturing him. Of course, much like the Big Bear before him, the Tomcat is such a brilliant, entertaining actor as he rolls and widens his eyes and cries “ow” while grabbing onto his stuck-out legs in an over-the-top agonizing manner, and from there allows himself to fall off his bicycle and struggle desperately to get back onto it (just look how he tries to jump onto it only to roll all over it, and then gets dragged along as he tries grabbing onto the seat), that not even we can be sure at first if he’s faking it or not—only as the lads actually dive for him, whereupon he deftly dodges and takes the lads’ hats away (notice how he even curves his lower body back to prevent them from actually making contact with him as they roll along!) while claiming that the cramps have passed him by, does it become clear that it was all a convincing set-up.
This is followed by an additional series of creative tricks in which the Tomcat begins actively mocking the lads by wearing their hats, riding the bicycle in weird ways, and cleverly manipulating his surroundings to hobble the lads. At one point, he swings himself on the branches such that he nearly kicks the leader in the head, and then he bounces along on his mattress before curling it up so that it rolls into the lads and twirls them over onto their bouncy heads, and afterwards he rides onto a flexible branch such that his weight being lifted from it catapults the lads into a stack, and at last, he sends this toppling stack of lads hurtling right into a tree while he himself rides into the air using the diagonal roots at its bottom! It is now painfully obvious that, contrary to the lads’ expectations, the Tomcat has them completely outmatched; he has lived here all his life, after all, and knows the terrain like no one else.
From here, the Tomcat makes clear that he has no sense of honor or even morality. In a delicious moment of irony, the Tomcat has no qualms about suggesting that the now-tired lads do exactly what they themselves had rejected trying to inflict upon the Tomcat on ethical grounds, namely to drink out of a barrel of cold water so that they’ll be hospitalized and even get gifts of flowers and chocolates. This is in stark contrast to the lads’ own strong sense of honor and fairness: when the Tomcat then finds himself getting knocked into the barrel of water, the lads are genuinely afraid that he’ll drown, and at the sight of the wet, shivering, wire-skeleton Tomcat that crawls out, their pity is such that the littlest lad even offers his cap to the Tomcat to warm himself up with. Suffice to say, this offer is completely rejected by the incorrigible Tomcat, who now even goes as far as to accuse the lads of throwing him into the water—and he knows full well that he is lying!
With his ire now raised against the lads, the Tomcat declares that it’s his turn to chase them. His malicious intent is made clear as he hops right over to the lads so he can twist himself and splash copious amounts of water onto them like a sprinkler—a neat move that dries and fluffs his fur back up, to be sure—and from there begins threatening them menacingly, sharpening his massive claws with a file and assuring the lads that they and their clothes will go down with blood poisoning after he scratches and bites and tears them all up dirtily! Having found that they were unable to actually faze the Tomcat even when he was just having fun, the lads are now completely powerless in the face of his active malice—all they can do is cower as he rolls his eyes insanely and burbles and pounces at them madly like a devil, eventually cornering them against the wall.
Realizing that the Tomcat means to do them real harm even with their feeble protests that they don’t want to play this game anymore, the lads show their nobility one last time. As the sadistic Tomcat declares he’ll target the littlest lad first, the other three lads rush up and protect him; when he then switches to the big one, the littlest lad in turn bravely pushes the others aside and goes in front of them, proclaiming that he is the biggest! Ultimately, though, just as the elegantly claw-polishing Tomcat is preparing to pounce them all—note once again the unfortunate weakness in Masník’s animation here, as he pounces towards the lads in a very leaden manner that they could easily dodge—the lads are suddenly pulled out by some trunks, leaving the Tomcat to crash into the wall and roll away! (In a nice touch, Pojar and Masník emphasize the force of his rolling by having his body physically stretch out as it curves over from the lingering force even after he stops rolling.) Much to his shock, the elephants have saved the lads, and are now carrying them away.
Furious at this betrayal, and as a slower, waltz-like rendition of the elephants’ ragtime theme from Of That Great Fog starts up, the Tomcat begins to berate the whole lot of them as scoundrels and nosies and pot-bellies, swatting at them and shaking his fist before ramming himself right into a tree as though he were trying to break through it all. From there, he pounces his way to the door so he can begin railing at them—as the elephants, in a very Dumbo-esque twist, begin taking off with the lads using their ears as wings! As loud and vehement as the Tomcat’s fist-shaking and insults may be (he even goes as far as to act the more colorful ones like “earies” and “dummies” out to them), he can no longer actually do anything to them as long as he is unwilling to step beyond the boundaries of his garden home; with that, the littlest lad even waves the cranky old feline goodbye.
As the elephants and lads fly over the town, we close on a few more funny gags of the townsfolk: one awestruck fellow keeps staring out at them to the point where he falls from his window and lands in a pair of giant pink panties that a woman has just strung up to dry, and another fellow on a roof (the same guy who climbed up the clock in Of That Great Fog, if seems) is so frightened that he dives right into his soot-filled chimney! So it is that, as the sun sets, the lads are flown home—in spite of their disastrous underestimation of the Tomcat, they have nevertheless survived what could very well be the most exciting adventure of their lives, and on top of that have once again been saved and treated to a lovely ride by the kindly elephants…
Aside from this year’s Mikeš shorts (Lyšajův sen, Výprava do Hrusic, Pohádka o kozlu Kokešovi), the only other film produced at Čiklovka in 1976 was Straka zlodějka, the fifth of Josef Kluge and František Skála’s hunting cartoons; as usual, Boris Masník was the main animator (unfortunately, full credits for this one have not surfaced). It is a fascinatingly bizarre curio precisely because it takes a completely different tack from the rest of the series: here, the hunter is recast as a quirky nature-loving woodsman who lives in harmony with the animals and coordinates various activities with them, while the real antagonist is the titular thieving magpie who literally emerges from the woodsman’s record player as it plays the overture from Rossini’s opera La gazza ladra and is obsessed with radios! The opening scenes with the animals exercising and playing music and such are quite pleasant (the gag with the woodsman’s dog trying to urinate on the garden actually surprised me), while the whole middle section with the magpie trying to steal radios from folks elsewhere in the woods is pretty overlong and tedious (though the one scene with the very emphatic, exuberantly-animated football fan does make me wonder if Jan Klos animated on this short as well)—still, what makes this perhaps the second-best of the hunting [sic] cartoons is the absolutely insane climax, in which the magpie’s blaring, increasingly chaotic rock music (great job on composer Svatopluk Havelka’s part!) causes the dog to dance uncontrollably and then the forest to be ravaged, complete with the music ludicrously taking on Chopin’s iconic Funeral March! (And the musical magpie getting flushed down the toilet is just the cherry on top…) Still, it would seem that the relative lack of films from Čiklovka this year did not go unnoticed by the authorities—from the next year onward, there would be a significant upswing in content production at the studio.
Additionally, when Čiklovka’s up-and-coming animator Jaroslav Zahradník died tragically early in 1973, he left behind a scenario, titled U hrnčíře (At the Potter’s), for what would have been a third film featuring the clay family from his last two films Špacír and Na špagátě. This scenario was at last realized at the animation studio in Zlín (then known as Gottwaldov after the first Czechoslovak Communist president Klement Gottwald), where Czech animation legends Hermína Týrlová and Karel Zeman worked, under the direction of frequent Týrlová designer Ludvík Kadleček. It was a fitting place for this short-lived and sadly unavailable series to end, given that studio’s own remarkable experimentation with different materials and artistic styles throughout its existence.
Of Mice in Tinfoil / O myších ve staniolu (1977)
The fourth entry in the Garden series is, unfortunately, a weird and deeply disappointing step down from the previous shorts. It is essentially the fake cramp gag in How to Catch a Tiger drawn out to an entire film, as the Tomcat feigns illness from eating too many chocolates; while the gags and interactions are occasionally amusing, there is little of the strong characterization seen in the previous two entries, and the story does not go anywhere satisfying as the lads are just repeatedly tormented and humiliated by the supposedly sick Tomcat, whose antics here aren’t nearly as wild and creative as they had been in the previous entry. Ultimately, it is all just halted and forgotten as a transitory step on the way to the lads’ encounter with the old gentleman’s legendary whale, who still lives somewhere in the garden.
This time, the events take place on a rather cloudy and windy day. As a peaceful but somewhat foreboding flute-led version of the garden’s theme begins, the opening shot of the flickering sun is covered by a layer of clouds, and as the lads arrive outside the garden once again, we see that, in some nice attention to detail, Jan Klos has actually animated the yellow-haired lad’s flag blowing in the wind. A fluctuating Vaseline layer has even been placed over the foliage atop the garden wall to simulate the effect of the leaves blowing in the wind, and this effect is made even more obvious by the lovely close-up of the butterflies fluttering in the midst of the trees and rose bushes.
By now, as Boris Masník keeps their flag blowing in the wind, the lads have realized that physical, direct confrontation with the Tomcat is futile; what needs to be done is to outsmart him somehow. Naturally, the imaginative littlest lad points out that his book says tomcats attack mice, just as it had said dangerous tigers are hunted—though, unlike in How to Catch a Tiger, this time he actually brought the book with him to show off the beautiful, more realistic-looking illustration from Štěpánek—and we get another cutout-animated fantasy showing the clever idea the lads have in mind: they’ll lure the Tomcat out of the garden with a mouse, and lock him out. As usual, there are some nice touches of bizarreness and character acting that make it a good representation of the lads’ boyishly twisted point of view, like how the Tomcat actually takes out a fork and repeatedly tries slamming it down on the terrified mouse to eat it, and how the lads actually stick their tongues out teasingly at the now-locked-out, squashy-stretchily-shocked Tomcat before climbing and swinging on the trees like monkeys; Jiří Kolafa’s old-timey, harpsichord-and-flute-led comedy music here is also quite catchy.
As usual, the lads rejoice and begin bouncing their upper bodies in excitement—without actually having a mouse to carry out the plan; the leader shows his frustration over their lack of materials in an especially relatable way here, looking up and raising his hands up while his arms as a whole tremble. It is then that we get something of a retread of the unexpected solution in Of That Great Fog, as the littlest lad declares he has a “crayfish”—a tantalizing piece of chocolate, as it turns out after some arguing over how crayfish aren’t mice. Of course, all the other lads are so eager to contribute that they even pull out their own pieces of string to serve as the fishing line; in the end, though, all the littlest lad needs from the others is the stick that had served to hoist their flag, and his pride and possessiveness is such that he rejects any further help from them once the rod is complete, swatting their offering hands away, marching closer to the door, and, in another touch of boyish playfulness, spinning the rod around so as to cast the chocolate (with the line somehow magically growing in length!) over the wall himself.
As the littlest lad begins acting as though he were a real country fisherman—waiting silently and motionlessly for a catch as the bugs and birds around him continue chirping peacefully, and even taking a little twig and putting it in his mouth to complete the vibe—the other impatient lads decide to see what the Tomcat could be up to. The next shot is rather interesting in that, while framed as a flatter-looking shot that might have animated in semi-relief form by Boris Masník as the prior shots had been, it was clearly animated in three-dimensional form by Jan Klos, allowing him to convey the leader’s delicacy as he gently sneaks up to the door and actually turns his body to try getting a peek into the garden—only to accidentally shove the opened door in and fall through noisily, causing a great panic amongst the lads as they imagine the Tomcat has been provoked and is charging their way with a stake at this very moment (complete with the cutout version of the Tomcat rushing towards the screen)! The resulting chaotic retreat causes the unmanned fishing rod to go hurtling over the wall into the garden—even as the littlest lad actually takes care to plant it in the ground before running, the leader’s unfortunate tripping in his desperation to get away, at the worst possible spot, renders it all for naught.
Resigning himself to the situation with a shrug as a gentle, cautious flute variation of the garden’s leitmotif starts up, the leader sneaks back to the door to see if the Tomcat is really there, stopping to listen for any telling noises; unfortunately, the way he then gets down on his knees to crawl over more inconspicuously is quite botched, as the leader suddenly cuts from a pose of himself about to get down to a pose of himself already crawling, and the camera brightness noticeably increases as well, possibly indicating that (similar to the elephants behind the scaffold in Of That Great Fog) the shooting of the scene had been paused midway through. The chocolate suspiciously remains untouched, and certainly the leader cannot see the Tomcat; the others suggest that he might be lying in wait beneath the mattress, whereby the leader suggests that one of them come in and throw the chocolate at him. It is here that the littlest lad’s possessiveness comes back to bite him, as all of the others agree that, since it’s his “crayfish”, he should do it—and the littlest lad, after a brief but futile attempt to object, is forced to shrug and raise his hands in resignation to his inevitable task, as he imagines how impatient the Tomcat must be under his mattress after all this waiting.
As the littlest begins shuffling towards the door in an unwilling manner, however—the awkwardness punctuated by the stilted-sounding harmonica rendition of the lads’ march—he decides to ask if the other lads could at least go with him. In another heartwarming show of the lads’ camaraderie underlined by the beautiful rendition of the garden’s theme, he holds out his hand, and the leader gladly obliges as they all begin stepping closer to the door while holding each other’s hands; soon, the littlest decides that it’d be a good idea to keep himself at least somewhat disguised, rushing off-screen to grab a bush behind which he can remain hidden. As he begins to stumble nervously towards the chocolate, Kolafa plays up the sheer suspense and tension as though the Tomcat could jump out at any moment with a scratchy, somewhat discordant-sounding version of the garden’s theme backed by constant eerie strings, and the littlest lad’s sheer fright at the possible appearance of the Tomcat is clear in the way his arm violently trembles as he reaches out for the chocolate—and then swiftly grabs it and rushes away, his panic such that he brute-forces his large hiding bush through the door (causing the nerdy lad in the way to fall over) in his desperation to just keep running!
As the other lads chide the littlest for not throwing the chocolate back in (note how the camera position and brightness changes slightly as the leader pops back into view in the door, indicating Jan Klos must have begun animating this part at a later time), the littlest lad has decided that to use the “crayfish” would be a waste; at this point, they might as well begin going on the offensive, as he throws a stone at the mattress. With that, accompanied by military drums and bursts of trumpets as though they were engaging in battle, the lads begin casting stones valiantly at the mattress where the Tomcat is supposedly hidden; eventually, as the leader goes to look under the mattress, they all realize that the Tomcat is not there, and they begin rejoicing and even bouncing on the mattress victoriously—only for their hopes of victory to be dashed by the sudden echo of the Tomcat’s yowling, giving the impression that the Tomcat must be swinging their way right this instant!
The lads, briefly petrified and at first simply backing away uneasily, then try to dash away in fright—I like how the leader is the first to try actually running for his life, but the other lads don’t feel the same at that exact moment, causing him to bump into all of them in a chain—only to find, much to their great shock (emphasized by how all their heads bounce squashy-stretchily), that the Tomcat is now lying right above the door, moaning and groaning in his toothache bandage and then staring down on them as though waiting for their reaction! After a brief but funny moment of terror as the lads dive beneath the mattress and try to back away while using it as a shield—Jan Klos does an excellent job conveying their sheer anxiety as they tremble rapidly and violently behind the mattress—the lads realize that something is off; the Tomcat is not railing or berating them, let alone chasing them. The Tomcat claims that his teeth and stomach ache as a result of eating too much chocolate “mice” and “crayfish” (the latter causes the littlest lad to feel quite vindicated after his much earlier argument with the others about whether cats would eat crayfish!), and from there reaches down to close the door, revealing the numerous tinfoil wrappers and boxes behind it—we hear a subtle, plucked version of the elephants’ theme as the lads stare with awe at the glimmering wrappers, leading to the reveal that the elephants gave the Tomcat the chocolates in an attempt to make him friends with the lads as he curses them for causing his apparent sickness!
The strange feeling of this extended sequence, as the Tomcat carries on a fairly normal but bitter conversation with the lads, is furthered by how most of the shots of the Tomcat here were not animated in semi-relief form by Boris Masník as was usually the case with him, but in three-dimensional form by Jan Klos. This is the only sequence in the series in which the Tomcat’s classical puppet form is prominently featured—and according to Klos, this was a result of Masník once again falling ill during the production, so that he had to step in and animate these scenes:
There’s a situation when the lads are looking for the Tomcat and in the process he is above their heads and moans that he’s sick. It’s the only one in the series when I had to phase the Tomcat for time reasons – Boris had pneumonia and was in the hospital for a long time. Pojar didn’t feel like phasing it, so he risked it with me even though “ONLY THE MASTER – Boris – could touch the Tomcat”.
As the lads lament that they can’t play their hunting games—in particular, the littlest lad, as animated by Klos, beautifully gestures how they could have shot the Tomcat dead, buried his corpse in an anthill, and exhibited the remaining skeleton at school (the Tomcat even imagines the lads, in a twisted cutout sight gag, literally slamming a bowler hat and a cigar into his skull and then pumping his tail playfully to make smoke come out of the cigar—the very enthusiastic and emphatic manner in which the one lad shoves the objects is very Klos-esque, and of course the sounds of the schoolchildren in the background make this blackly-humorous gag even funnier)—the leader then suggests that the Tomcat jump down from the wall anyhow; they’ll play hospital to try and treat the Tomcat. The Tomcat’s nervousness comes through in how he scrambles to get back up after he nearly loses his footing at first, and continues to swing his tail (as though gauging the situation) as he prepares to fall for real; sure enough, the sheer size of the Tomcat causes the lads to be knocked back rollingly as he ends up falling smack onto the ground, and he puts on a very theatrical performance of how badly hurt he supposedly is as he repeatedly and rapidly feels down his body, puts his hands on his head in agony while rolling his eyes, and even grabs his leg, all while yelling and exclaiming he’s been killed or broken! (The zippiness and exaggerated gestures suggest that Klos may have animated this particular shot as well, even though we are now back in semi-relief territory.)
So begins the Tomcat’s extended new game of tormenting the lads—one could say the film turns from this point on into a satire on the inconvenience of fickle, uncooperative medical patients, albeit not a very good one—as he orders the lads to put him into a “stretcher”. Upon being rolled into a metal pan, he begins making them drag him all over the garden (set to a very fun, fast-paced rendition of the theme which had played when the lads were imagining their mouse plan earlier in the film, admittedly), repeatedly shouting out locations like the gnome only to change his mind once they arrive; one can see how the characters going off-screen as they make a U-turn around the tree provided another convenient place for poor Boris Masník to take a break, as the lighting conspicuously gets brighter and the camera even starts to zoom out slightly as soon as the lads re-enter the screen. The only real highlights of this sequence, of course, are the two hyper-energetic three-dimensional shots by Jan Klos, in which (as in How to Catch a Tiger) the lads speed along far more rapidly and fluidly than in the surrounding shots; the shot of the Tomcat grabbing onto the tree to force the lads to turn back to the gnome is especially marvelous, as the lads and then the pan-riding Tomcat himself all twirl around exuberantly from being forced backwards.
This culminates in a brilliant revelation of the Tomcat’s fakery, as he begins to enjoy himself so much as he whips the lads with his tail that he outright jumps out of the pan and bounces along just to torment them even more—the way Kolafa just dissipates the music into a very unamused trombone as everyone stops and realizes what the Tomcat is doing, and the way the Tomcat himself suddenly realizes he’s gotten carried away (even looking back at how he’s swinging his tail-whip around and stopping it, and from there trying to dismiss it all with what seems to be an amused laugh as he realizes he’s been caught red-handed), is quite amusing, and could have been a perfect climax. Alas, even as the littlest lad calls him out right then and there for his trickery, the Tomcat keeps the charade up, hopping back onto the pan and asking the lads to put him on the mattress, throwing in some more agonized gestures and “ow”s for good measure.
Jiří Kolafa’s music continues to do much of the heavy lifting as the lads begin to put on their doctor attire; the droning bass clarinet, with sporadic bursts of ominous harpsichord-playing, does a great job conveying how intimidating the lads look with their masks and frightful tools, and this is followed by a deep, officious-sounding trombone march as they make their way over to the Tomcat (in a nice detail, the littlest lad takes longer to adjust his outfit, such that he has to rush his way over to the other lads as they have already begun moving). Suffice to say, however, the “incapacitated” Tomcat foils everything: trying to insert a thermometer into his armpit causes him to react with such violent ticklishness that the lads all get kicked away, and their attempt to take out his sore tooth with a wrench is deterred by his repeated threats to bite them in return. After a scene in which the leader whispers to the others hissingly (a good sign of his increasing frustration), their attempts to feed him flowers and more chocolate are rebuffed as well (the former does result in a mildly amusing sight gag of the spoon landing in the leader’s masked mouth), and this finally ends in the Tomcat deciding he’s had enough of doctors—he wants the nurses now, tearing the leader’s mask off and banging on his head to the point where he is bounced rattlingly along like a bell! (Note how the other lads have already taken their nurse’s hats out in preparation—but also, before that, a strange shooting error as a significant chunk of the background scenery disappears while the Tomcat drags himself towards the leader.)
While the yellow-haired lad fans the Tomcat with a branch, the nerdy lad is forced to scratch the Tomcat’s back; the downright sensual pleasure the Tomcat feels is well-conveyed by Jiří Kolafa’s music track here, with its fluttering, otherworldly piano and flute glissandos. (It is actually reused from the scene in Of That Great Fog when the lads are escaping the Tomcat for the first time; there, it conveyed the sense of almost oneiric bewilderment they felt as they escaped that strange world of the garden.) We then get the Tomcat treating most of the lads as wire radios, using their pants buttons as “knobs” until they break off to make their pants to fall down; while the lads’ voice actors do a great job with their funny imitations of radio noises and programs, the repetition of this gag is simply underwhelming and even annoying.
In a nice callback to the running gag in Of That Great Fog, it is the littlest lad who avoids the pantsing treatment this time: he quickly suggests as he is dragged over that the Tomcat should be put to sleep with a fairy tale. At first, this only serves to hammer on home what a waste of time this whole ordeal has proven to be, as the Tomcat and the lads hurl more refusals and condemnations against each other before they all go to sleep. After this last profoundly unpleasant burst of sheer contempt, however, we at last reach a breakthrough: it turns out that the gnome can talk, as voiced by narrator Bohuš Záhorský, and what’s more, he remembers everything that he has witnessed over the years, as he begins retelling the beautiful story of the little fish who grew into a whale, and who still lives in the local lake to this day! The cutout-animated sequence, underscored by a lovely version of the old gentleman’s theme, features some nice simulated background animation as we “zoom” through the trees to where the whale resides (I would presume Pojar and his team had to create special cutouts of the objects for use in each individual frame), reading magazines delivered by the postman even now.
Alas, before the lads, excited by the dream the gnome has given them, can head off to search for the whale, it turns out that it is already noon: they must leave for lunch. With that, the lads sneak out of the garden, leaving the sleeping Tomcat and this awful morning behind them, while the gnome laments that he has no one to talk to—but conceding that, whether it is midnight or noon, they must sleep and eat, poignantly echoing the old gentleman’s beliefs. The search for the whale must take place on another day—in the meantime, the garden is once again at peace, as the butterflies flutter amidst the sunlit trees…
Along with this year’s first two Mikeš entries Co vyprávěl strýček Malinovský and Starosti s babičkou, this would be the last film edited by Jitka Kavalierová. It is unknown what happened to her, but henceforth, most of Čiklovka’s films would be edited by Věra Smetanová. Unlike Kavalierová, Smetanová was not exclusive to Čiklovka, but also edited films from the Michle branch of the Jiří Trnka Studio during this same period. As was briefly mentioned in the last article, the Michle branch was originally set up for the production of René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, and was headed creatively by designer-animator-director Josef Kábrt; he and the studio’s production manager Václav Strnad were both ex-Bratři v triku, while its animators seemed to be a mixture of ex-Bratři v triku (Zdena Bártová, Karel Štrebl) and ex-Trnka (Zdeněk Šob) personnel. After Fantastic Planet was completed, for a few years the studio was split off from the Trnka Studio and renamed Studio Prometheus, producing series like O klukovi z plakátu and films like Václav Mergl’s Crabs; by 1977, however, it was back under the Trnka Studio’s umbrella, as seen in films like Petr Sís’s Island for 6,000 Alarm Clocks, while the name of Studio Prometheus would be reassigned to Krátký Film’s Ostrava studio in 1978. (As for the evidence that this branch responsible for Fantastic Planet and the like was based in Michle, this extended scholarly document on Boris Baromykin, who had been the cameraman in the studio’s first several years, contains a filmography which specifies that those films were produced at Michle; it also has an interview with Baromykin himself, in which he specifically mentions that he switched to screenwriting-directing after 1976 because a serious eye disease left him unable to continue his camera work.)
Whale, Elahw / Velryba Abyrlev (1977)
The fifth and ultimately final entry in the Garden series is a tad more interesting and fun than the previous one, even if it still does not really live up to the promise of the first three entries. In the first third of the film, we finally get to meet the various other quirky inhabitants of the garden as the lads search for the whale. Their long-awaited meeting proves to be a complete fiasco, however, as any real sense of narrative or purpose, to say nothing of the lads’ own characters, is quickly smothered by the barrage of nonsensical verbal and visual gags inflicted upon the lads by the overbearing, know-it-all whale and her crew of frogs. To be sure, it is a fascinating attempt to portray the dangers of the ivory tower, so to speak, and how one can have all the theoretical and esoteric knowledge in the world without actually having any awareness of how to live in the real world. Ultimately, this unrelenting insularity and disconnection from the outside world could be considered the tragic flaw of the seemingly paradisical garden as a whole, as the lads, in the end, seem to quietly realize that the garden can never truly be their playground.
We open on now on a relatively normal, partly-cloudy day, with the trees in the garden blowing fairly mildly in the wind (as created by the shifting layer of Vaseline over the foliage), as the lads arrive; this time, in an amusing little gag, the yellow-haired lad follows the leader a little too closely, causing him to bump into the leader as the latter comes to a stop before the garden (and from there bumping back towards the lads behind him as well). Today, their mood is much lighter than before, as they are going after the whale; however, the littlest lad questions the wisdom of undertaking such a major excursion today, since they have an important exam tomorrow to study for—and none of them really know anything, as they all admit meekly. But then again, as the nerdy lad suggests, perhaps this is all the more reason to seek the whale: she *is* terribly learned, from what the gnome has said, and maybe she can help them study! With that, they all rush into the garden, and even greet the Tomcat in a very friendly manner, complete with the leader and the littlest one tipping their hats; by now, it seems they have come to accept the Tomcat’s presence after everything he has put them through, and at any rate, they now have something else to do in the garden besides trying to evict him.
The Tomcat, for his part, is in an unusually skittish and cowardly mood today. Almost as soon as he is awakened by the lads and their questioning, he begins feeling around himself rather hurriedly as though he’s been caught in a vulnerable position and is trying to literally find his answer—and then, upon realizing that they’re asking about the whale, goes into full-blown panic mode, screaming that the whale is coming and trying to run away without realizing he’s being hindered by the gnome’s protruding cap! This leads to another amusing little gag when he tries telling the lads to ask the gnome, even pointing somewhere else—and only then finds out, thanks to the impatient lads, that he’s now sitting on the gnome’s head. The leader, for his part, is so anxious to get going that he can’t even wait for the gnome to tell them where the whale is; after only a few seconds, he decides to drag all the lads off to split up and search for the whale—and the gnome can only lament the rushed, impatient modern world, where everyone’s just running somewhere. Almost as a contrast to this, we see the Tomcat does *not* want his nap to be bothered; all it takes is a butterfly landing on his belly before he begins frustratedly thrashing his tail around, even vibrating it threateningly to warn it to stay away.
As the lads wander into the deep but beautiful woods of the garden, there’s a brief scene of pure, carefree fun as the yellow-haired lad begins jumping up repeatedly from the thick bushes to call for the others, with the nerdy and littlest lads responding in kind (the littlest, of course, has to physically climb onto the nerdy lad to respond); one wishes there was an entire entry of just the lads getting to fool around and play some kind of competitive game within the garden, or even one in which they actually go exploring and work together to get through some terrible situations before finding something truly unexpected, but alas, the series is what it is. Upon heading further into the garden, the lads have three encounters with the much smaller but equally odd denizens of the garden, none of which give them any leads as to where the whale could be. The first two illustrate how insular and rather unwelcoming most of the inhabitants are towards outsiders: there’s a train-snail who ignores the nerdy lad’s stuttering attempts to ask him and then goes speeding off in fright when the littlest whistles at it, and then two little mice who scurry into their castle when the leader tries asking them about the whale, squeaking that they’re not allowed to talk with strange animals. (Jiří Kolafa’s music for the two mice playing is especially fun, with its sped-up, squeaky-sounding la-la-las.)
By far the most interesting and fun is the yellow-haired lad’s encounter with a worm and a bird, which shows that there are real predator-prey rivalries within the garden—and that even those who are willing to help are simply too busy with their own lives to do so. The worm’s interaction with the lad is interrupted by the sudden arrival of the bird, who, in keeping with his fancy white-collared design, turns out to be quite the posh gourmand: upon capturing the worm, he flings it into the air so that he can begin setting his table, unfurling a cloth and quickly setting down his tableware in such a way that the worm lands right on the plate in a perfect finish, the almost-theatrical and choreographed quality of it all underscored by the operatic vocalizing in Kolafa’s music! This sequence also benefits greatly from its deft execution and unusually fine comedic timing: the abruptness of the bird’s appearance comes through in the way it rushes into the frame as we see it arrive, and the bird’s high-speed pursuit of the worm is exhilarating as well, to say nothing of the zippy and masterful manner in which the bird deals with his tableware—and the downright excellent way in which the worm smashes the plate lid on the bird’s head just as he is distracted with the yellow-haired lad’s question, gradually and sneakily raising it up and then slamming it right down to deal as much shattering damage as possible!
Of course, the conspicuously more energetic animation made me suspect that this scene was animated by Jan Klos—and he would unexpectedly confirm that it was his when Marin Pažanin asked him what works he was most proud of having animated, making it another rare example of him animating a semi-relief sequence in The Garden (rather than just the three-dimensional sequences as he was normally assigned):
I remember what I would describe as a satisfactory performance of the phaser Jan Klos, but it would always be only individual episodes from the whole…like in The Garden you recently sent (how they look for a whale), when the lads want to ask a bird where the whale resides and disturb the bird when it’s about to eat a worm and temporarily covers it with a lid and the worm smashes it on the head and runs away, etc. (Pojar’s exemplary preparation in terms of making props and semi-plastic puppets – so Pojar actually animated it and I then “pushed” it under the camera – phased it)
Anyways, as the lads find themselves reconvening—in another cute bit of youthful indiscretion, the yellow-haired lad backs right into the littlest as the latter is crawling along, causing him to fall over and tumble into the leader—the only place left to look is beyond an elderberry thicket. In an especially wonderful show of boyish, mischievous daring underscored by Kolafa’s rising, anticipatory clarinet music, the yellow-haired lad outright shoves the leader and sends him rolling into the thicket to find out whether this is it—and sure enough, the leader exclaims that she’s indeed here, even stretching his arm out from within to beckon the other lads in! With that, underscored by a lovely flute version of the garden’s theme, they all crawl through the shadowy bushes to find stacks upon stacks of magazines, the leader even taking one up and shaking it out for the others as proof that this has got to be the whale. Klos does a marvelous job animating the lads here as they discuss how to greet the whale: aside from how the nerdy lad’s whole body stutters with his voice as he begins to suggests that they use the old-fashioned “Ruku líbám” (I kiss your hand) in keeping with the whale’s age, the way he raises his hands and even his head suggests an unusual amount of enthusiasm on his part, and then there’s the exuberant, violent shuddering and flat-out rejection of the yellow-haired lad in response to the clarification that they say “I kiss your flipper” due to the whale’s lack of hands, not to mention the excited clapping and shoulder-patting of the littlest lad when the nerdy one finally decides on the brainy-sounding “Knowledge for wisdom”!
Unfortunately, as we move into the second half of this film, the whale (voiced by Martin Růžek, albeit his voice is sped up to make him sound more fittingly like an old lady) proves to be far from the incredible surprise that we, or the lads, were hoping for. There’s a good impression left by the first few visual gags, as the magazines’ front pages are visibly blown by the whale’s booming voice in an omen of her massive size, and from there the stacks of magazines seem to sprout arms and legs as they are carried away by what prove to be her frog assistants to allow her to see the lads. Over time, however, as the film devolves into little more than an extended, rambling lecture from the whale and her frogs about all the obscure, bizarre facts and ideas she has gained from years of reading magazines, these extra sight gags from the whale and her not-so-bright frogs—along with the lads’ cutout-animated fantasies, further illustrating the absurdity of what the whale is saying—prove to be about all that Pojar and his team can do to maintain interest, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the whale—and this story—has nothing of any real substance to offer. While it’s certainly fun to watch, say, the lads imagining the whale literally cutting 25 decagrams’ worth of magazines to read on a daily basis or a drummer getting completely mangled up as he performs a backwards version of the children’s song “Tluče bubeníček”, or the frogs’ earnest attempts to visualize the whale’s teachings only to repeatedly get smacked for their stupidity, one cannot help feeling that this whole situation really didn’t need a whole episode devoted to it, especially when it all just ends in the obvious conclusion that this whale has no practical knowledge for the lads or anyone else.
Even from a technical standpoint, the whale and her frogs simply weren’t worth the effort. As animator Jan Klos recalled:
LUCKILY for me, Boris had to animate the whale (a poorly-chosen construction and artistically incapable of any expression), and to me was “left” the failed “office work” of the frog helpers. It was not a success – a lot of work and UNCLEAR movements. (for an apology: when the puppet has a low weight – here wire-thin and dark hands, legs – and it must, for instance, play in a larger environment, you can’t manage a faster rhythm)
To be specific, Klos appears to have animated the frogs in the shots where they’re on this particular set (shown in both screenshots here), as it’s only in these shots that his characteristic energy and fluidity is evident, for all the difficulty he had in handling these puppets. All the other shots with the frogs appear to be Boris Masník’s work, especially when they’re on-screen with the whale.
A photo of Jan Klos working on the set of the whale, taken by Ivan Vít. This version of the photo is from the book Zlatý věk české loutkové animace, provided by Marin Pažanin.
As the lads escape from the whale in the midst of a bizarre musical number from the frogs about reversing and rearranging words—the final nail in the coffin is a backwards-spoken question about how many steps the Eiffel Tower has, which I could only find out because the Japanese subtitles on the sole DVD release of the series actually transcribed it (did the producers of that release have access to the original scripts!?)—their gibberish-spouting awakens the Tomcat, who is once again quite frightened by what sounds to him like a Tatar invasion! In the end, perhaps the lads’ improved relationship with the difficult Tomcat is the one thing they have gained from their days in the garden: by now, he is able to listen and chuckle with amusement as the lads complain about the whale, and even as he tries to get aggressive to drive them out so he can sleep, he noticeably mellows out as they start to exit, as though gradually realizing in his tiredness that, in their own way, they’ve been quite a fun bunch to have around. At any rate, it seems the lads have no intention of ever coming back to the garden; it was, after all, a paradise created by the old gentleman specifically so that the animals within could live their own lives carefreely, without any human interference, and perhaps it would be better if it stayed that way. Adding to the sense of finality is that there is no closing narration of any kind from Bohuš Záhorský as we see the sun shining down upon the peaceful garden one last time, and to top it all off, the ending card simply fades in this time, rather than flipping in as it it did in previous entries…
Animator Jan Klos was not complimentary, to say the least, in describing to Marin Pažanin how he felt about this apparent finale as a whole:
Because of that passage with the whale (a lot of incomprehensible text and stupid frogs), that episode is a SHAME on the series. Only the passage with the bird and the worm is good, as I PROUDLY wrote to you last time – one of the few successes (in which I didn’t spoil Pojar’s good work as a technologist).
At the time this film was produced, however, the series was not supposed to end on such an underwhelming and downbeat note. As documented by Jan Hořejší’s contemporaneous 1978 article “Bears, Lads with Elephants and a Tomcat and Now Dášenka” (Medvídci, kluci se slony a kocourem a nyní Dášenka), written to commemorate the production of what would turn out to be The Garden‘s successor series Dášeňka, there were supposed to be two more entries in the series: Červený Karkulík (a male version of Little Red Riding Hood—the iconic girl is known as Červená Karkulka in Czech), in which the lads would watch the elephants put on a theatrical performance, and Kocouru, blechách a psí víně (A Tomcat, Fleas and Dog Wine), which would have taken place at a dog party under a full moon. Conversely, Jan Klos recalled that, while there were supposed to be one or two more entries, these would have had the lads as grown-ups, seeking out the garden they once loved as children and wanting to visit the Tomcat and the dwarf again; new puppets and even sets were painstakingly constructed for the purpose.
So, what exactly happened? The gist of it, as Klos recalled, was that tensions between Pojar and designer Miroslav Štěpánek had reached such a point that the two of them could no longer agree on anything, resulting in the collapse of The Garden‘s production—and a waste of one-and-a-half to two months of effort (Klos’s memory has varied in this regard) on Klos and the others’ part:
“For two months I animated two big scenes for FREE into the upcoming sequel to Pojar’s adaptation of Trnka’s Garden – all puppets – four adult boys, new decorations made, a lit scene and Pojar could no longer agree on “horseshit” with “Mirek” Štěpánek and the project was over – for all co-workers basic salaries = it was barely enough for food!”
With regards to Klos’s salary woes, here it must be noted again that, for the duration of a film’s production, animators were only paid a minimal basic salary, and any extra payment from there would be based on the amount of footage they did that was in the finished film. Ergo, for a film or a series to be halted in this manner was strongly discouraged—to do so would create serious trouble and agony for all involved.
Yet, perhaps it was inevitable that The Garden would come to an end in such an ignominious manner. The sheer technical complexity and ambition of the series no doubt required close collaboration between Pojar and Štěpánek, which, given the disputes and tensions that already existed between them, almost certainly led to a further deterioration in their relationship—and once again, the largely pro-Štěpánek film criticism of the era could not have helped matters. Petr Zvoníček, who would later be a dramaturg on the anthology series Mistři českého animovaného filmu, recalled a less-than-cordial visit to Čiklovka during the production of The Garden:
During the making of The Garden, I once witnessed how Štěpánek imaginatively developed the filming on the set. Then the head of the studio Pojar called me into his study and surprised me with a proposal to write about him. I recognized his work as an animator, but I didn’t want to believe my own ears: he stated that Štěpánek was an unfashionable artist, who would not stand out in the world as he did. In fact, Miroslav Štěpánek is a sovereign artist among our film designers, comparable to the work of František Tichý or the French graphic artist [Jean] Gourmelin.
On the one hand, it was undoubtedly tactless of Pojar to so openly disparage Štěpánek to an outsider, given that it was his talent as a designer, after all, that Pojar was relying on for The Garden and many of his other projects of the era. By the same token, however, Pojar’s less-than-stellar behavior could also be considered a rather heavy-handed attempt to get Štěpánek’s professed admirers like Zvoníček to recognize the reality of work at Čiklovka: Štěpánek was far from the only visionary artist defining these films, and for many at the studio, it was only thanks to Pojar’s strong direction that the problematic Štěpánek could even work in animation with any regularity at this point, let alone that the films could turn out as well-crafted as they did.
Even after The Garden came to an end in this way, however, Pojar and Štěpánek would somehow manage to continue collaborating for at least one more year. Perhaps they had no choice, given that their last series together, Dášenka, had evidently already begun production while The Garden was still supposed to be ongoing; they would now have to see it through to the end, lest they and Čiklovka be embroiled in the potentially catastrophic scandal of two series being halted as a result of their crumbling relationship.
Dášeňka: How She Was Born / Jak se narodila and How She Saw the World / Jak uviděla svět (1977)
As the normalization era began towards the end of the 1960s, one of the main concerns of Krátký Film’s new management, led by the capricious ex-secret agent Kamil Pixa, was to ramp up the country’s animation production. Towards this end, a contract was signed with the state broadcaster Czechoslovak Television, by which Krátký Film’s studios would begin producing animated series for television, specifically the Večerníček children’s programming block which aired on ČST’s TV stations every night. It was a crafty way of ensuring that most of the studios would always be working on something, and it helped significantly in this regard that shows would be commissioned not only by the main station in Prague but also by the Slovak-targeted station in Bratislava which had its own version of Večerníček—and it was a shift that ironically mirrored the decline of the animation industry in the United States, where cheaply-produced, rushed-out TV series became the main focus of most of the major animation studios from the late 1950s onwards.
Leaving aside an in-depth discussion of the various beloved series produced for Večerníček (most of them, while certainly nice-looking and good as comfort food, are far from the best that Czech animation has to offer), or the block’s value as a way of introducing children to a number of classic series which had originally been produced for theaters (including Zdeněk Miler’s Krtek, the Macourek-Born-Doubrava trio’s Mach and Šebestová, and of course Břetislav Pojar and Miroslav Štěpánek’s own Bears and Josef Kluge’s Mikeš), it should go without saying that the demands and constraints intrinsic to television production were emphatically not what a well-established, distinctive visionary like Pojar would have ever wanted to labor under. Nevertheless, even as Pojar and his team were still in the throes of The Garden, it seems that in 1977 they were commissioned to contribute a series of their own to Večerníček.
At first sight, Dášeňka, or the Life of a Puppy (Dášeňka čili život štěněte) would hardly seem like good material for an animated series. An odd curio in the oeuvre of science fiction author Karel Čapek, it is essentially a humorous slice-of-life account of Čapek’s fox terrier, the titular Dášeňka, and the mischief she wrought from her birth until she was given away. However, the book also featured various fantastical canine tales written by Čapek, and this division between real-life anecdotes and fairy tales led to a particularly inspired idea on Pojar’s part: what if each episode was half-live-action footage of Dášeňka, and half-cutout-animated fairy tales?
Of course, such a decision was not only interesting from a creative standpoint: it was a clever way of circumventing the production limitations that would have severely hampered the quality of Pojar and his team’s work. As animator Jan Klos put it:
In order to “fulfill the plan”, Pojar invented the application of real to Čapek’s text – it was about one half of the performance (and the then-star of documentary films Jan Špáta usually made it in 1 to 2 days – for financial reasons he couldn’t spend more time) and the second half, about 4 minutes “filled” the animation of the fairy tale for Dáša (so we had twice as much time for animation due to the total footage (7-8 minutes) than if we had to animate the total length of the so-called Večerníček). In this way, Pojar and us, the Čiklovka collective, managed to “fulfill the production plan” so that the idiots in television and in Kr. Film Prague could be satisfied.
In effect, by formatting Dášeňka such that only about half of a given episode would be animated, Pojar ensured that he and his team would have practically twice the amount of time and money that was normally allotted to Večerníček’s animated series—allowing them to continue creating cutout animation of a much higher standard than was typical for the era.
Naturally, there was no question of Miroslav Štěpánek’s art direction being nearly as rich as it had been in The Garden. His work in Dášeňka opts for a very pared-down, minimalistic, sketchy look, somewhat like a slightly more colorful version of the lads’ cutout fantasies in The Garden. The character cutouts, in particular, are very often left uncolored or are only partially colored, as though reveling in their abstraction; their strength rests largely on the charming, somewhat grotesquely-stylized designs in themselves, especially the variety of distinctive dogs that appear over the course of the series, as well as their convincingly canine movement and character acting as provided by Pojar and his animators. Suffice to say, as Jan Klos recalled, Pojar as usual played a huge role in determining how Štěpánek’s designs turned out:
The value of Štěpánek’s art SUPERVISED by Pojar and Pojar’s animated preparation of some expressions and the determination of the ideal size of the figures in both wholes and details were given by his animated talent “from the Lord God”.
It is hard not to be amused, and also a little saddened, when one compares Klos’s assessment of the production with that of Štěpánek admirer Jan Hořejší. In his aforementioned 1978 article “Bears, Lads with Elephants and a Tomcat and Now Dášenka”, his reaction to the first two produced episodes of Dášeňka would once again leave readers thinking that Štěpánek was the outstanding genius around whom everyone and everything revolved:
Take a look at Štěpánek’s drawings and you will be convinced of their irreplaceability. It is a typical Štěpánek concept, as we have already seen it in KAMENÁČ BILL, in the popular “Bears” series or in the puppets and cleverly astute “bubble” drawings in some episodes of THE GARDEN. And in its first episode, THE ANIMAL LOVER. After all, in contrast to Trnka’s Garden, Štěpánek has an easier task, as Čapek did not illustrate the “dog fairy tales”. Naturally, Štěpánek was able to use this advantage in the best sense of the word to develop his own distinctive approach to the fairy tales and their canine heroes. His valiant Foxlík is, for instance, a true fox terrier, in fact an extract of the avid nature, as it is known to all lovers of this lively race. Simply, even here Štěpánek fully succeeds – as we are used to with him – in expressing the exact character of the figure, the expressiveness of the action and the sparkle of the gag.
If anything, it would probably be more accurate to consider Dášeňka the finest expression of Pojar’s distinctive brand of cartoonish cutout animation. Unlike Pojar’s previous cutout-animated films, in which the animation was very often in service to strong themes and ideas, Dášeňka‘s canine tales are pure whimsy and folk entertainment; it is accordingly much easier to appreciate and enjoy the fun animation and charming visual ideas and gags for their own sake. Even in such an unpretentious series, it is astounding how much care Pojar put into planning out the characters’ acting and even deformations beforehand, and from there overseeing the preparation of actor’s kits in which all the cutout parts necessary for the various unique movements that the characters would do or undergo were crafted according to Štěpánek’s designs, ensuring that they would be more richly and pliably animated than even many hand-drawn animated films.
The first episode, How She Was Born, features a fairy tale about Foxlík, the mythical hero and ancestor of the wire-haired terriers, which Pojar embellishes with his usual penchant for creative visual ideas and gags. He introduces us to Foxlík in a nice, artistic way, as his features are sketched onto his form in accordance with Karel Čapek’s narration (spoken by Martin Růžek), and it all culminates in his long tail sprouting from his rear end as he starts to walk along. His strong sense of smell is emphasized by the way his snout actually extends out as he sniffs and finds that a dog princess is nearby, and he is shown to be able to whip his long tail so fast and so powerfully that he cuts down not only the tulips’ heads mentioned in Čapek’s narration but also a small tree—and in a bit of Pojarian practicality, this act creates a convenient bouquet of tulips for Foxlík to give to the princess. Jiri Kolafa’s music is more whimsical and gentle, led predominantly by flute and harmon-muted trumpet, in keeping with the softer bedtime-story atmosphere.
The most fascinating sequence is Foxlík’s battle with a six-headed dragon (reduced from the original seven—even as the narration here still claims it’s seven-headed!). In a nicely-timed introduction, Foxlík barks at the dragon to come out, and at first only a single head emerges to the ominous thumping of war drums, playing up the sheer scale of its neck—and drops the giant bone in its mouth onto Foxlík, squishing him! Of course, Foxlík then immediately bounces himself back up and demands that the other five heads come out—and they all come out as well to the war drums, in turn dropping their bones all at once onto the dog! Suffice to say, even this does not faze Foxlík, and the path to victory proves to be quite simple, as, to a triumphant fanfare, he proceeds to make the heads chase after him in such a way that they all get tangled up in each other; notice how, at one point, a piece of the dragon’s neck slides along the bottom of the screen for a few frames, serving as a nice little clue to how complicated it must have been to even construct this cutout dragon, let alone animate it. The way that the complex jumble of heads and necks quivers as it starts to trudge off in defeat, as though they were still struggling to free themselves, is a stunning detail—and it all ends in a funny little sight gag as, after forcing the dragon to hurry off more quickly, Foxlík indulges in a bit of bodily business, symbolizing that he has triumphed and all is well again! That is, until he must chase after one Khan Pelican to rescue the princess; while this is even easier, the Khan gets so fed up with how Foxlík keeps happily wagging his long tail, to the point of slicing pieces of his cigar and even his mustache off, that he decides to slice it right off with a meat cleaver—whereby Foxlík retaliates by chasing after the frightened Khan (note how, in a nice bit of character acting, the Khan even tries hiding the cleaver behind him at first while trembling in fright as he realizes the terrible force he has unleashed) and biting down on his rear with such strength that he is able to lift him up with his teeth and send him speeding away in his carriage in a very Pojarian exit! Of course, in keeping with Čapek’s original narrative that Foxlík bit right through the Khan’s heart, the piece of the Khan’s pants he has torn off is heart-shaped (and the Khan hismelf is left completely lifeless as his carriage takes him away), and this, along with Foxlík’s chopped-off tail, proves to be a wonderful symbol of Foxlík’s romantic adventure.
Boris Masník was the sole animator of this first tale, and he manages to do a fine job conveying Foxlík’s sprightliness and energy for the most part, especially when he’s slicing things up with his tail. Unfortunately, even here there are a number of scenes in which his decline is evident: for instance, when Foxlík’s fearlessness is being portrayed by way of a canine criminal and a vulture who flee at the sight of his approach, the ways in which they are jolted with fright and then run or fly away from their trees play out much too slowly and casually, and there’s also how, as Foxlík begins chasing after the Khan for chopping his tail off, the pursuit suddenly becomes slower and animated on twos as they re-enter the screen from the right side.
Even more disappointing from an animation standpoint is the fairy tale in the second episode, How She Saw the World, pertaining to how Foxlík’s legacy lives on amongst the terriers, and how the search for his legendary tail to prove the spiteful dachshunds wrong about his fictitiousness is why they like to dig. Although Jan Klos is also credited with Masník for the animation here, not much of it stands out as potentially being Klos’s work; it could be that he was too busy with the Josef Kluge-supervised film Tylínek (of which there is more to say shortly) or even Whale, Elahw around this time to actually contribute much, or at least to infuse the animation with his increasingly characteristic energy. At any rate, even more than in the first episode, it is Pojar’s ideas and gags in themselves which do the heaviest lifting entertainment-wise.
The animated section begins, in an obvious time-saving measure, with a recap of Foxlík’s battle against the Khan Pelican; to be sure, Pojar does try to make it a little more interesting by opening it on a theatrical, even heroic-feeling view of clouds dispersing to reveal Foxlík running towards the Khan (a shot which was not in the previous episode). The new animation then continues right where the first episode left off, as Foxlík and the princess notice some mean-looking cats slinking towards his cut-off tail and even stretching an arm out stealthily to take it for themselves; upon chasing them into a tree (their intense fright such that all of the foliage trembles with them), Foxlík decides that his tail must be preserved as a precious relic, taking it up and solemnly marching to place it on the princess’s pillow. But there’s the issue of where to place it, as Foxlík imagines the petty, spiteful things the cats will do if the tail is not hidden away properly: a hole will not work, as the cats can just dig the tail up and use it as a fake mustache, and putting it under a boulder won’t do either, as even a single cat can roll the boulder away and use the tail as a pipe cleaner—and then slap it on its car as a radio antenna to dance to rock music! The best solution, it seems, is to bury it in a hole and then bury this spot in turn beneath a massive cliff: in a reflection of his almost mythical powers, Foxlík accomplishes this by simply giving a single thunderous stomp to the ground, bringing the entire cliff to the ground as he salutes the forces of nature.
We then get a series of fun drawings from Miroslav Štěpánek of canine historical figures, all of whom noticeably have stubby tails: as Čapek’s narration puts it, the fox terriers are so proud of their heroic ancestor Foxlík that they all get their tails cut short in his memory, a quirky explanation for the traditional practice of docking fox terriers’ tails. As it happens, the latest little descendant of Foxlík is about to get his tail docked, with his daddy reminding him that this is a long-standing family tradition; he is clearly not keen on going through this, as evidenced by his shrug of resignation and timid walk into the doctor’s room (note how the doctor is eagerly snipping his scissors as he waits for the pup, as though he enjoys cutting tails off)—and he lets out such a loud, shrill yelp as the deed is done that his daddy must cover his ears wincingly, his body bouncing from the sheer force and speed with which he does so! The pain proves short-lived: after shedding a few tears as he walks out of the doctor’s room, the pup almost immediately perks up and marches with pride at how he has officially joined the ranks of Foxlík and his descendants, with his daddy even letting him keep the book of the Foxlík family line as a reward.
The trouble begins when this little fox terrier encounters some long-tailed dachshund pups, who begin mocking the idiocy of his docked tail. The terrier pup attempts to show them his Foxlík book so that they may understand—but the dachshunds proceed to jump off with the book and vandalize it, and from there scribble various crude-looking animals on a wall as a way of further mocking the fox terriers’ culture! (The last of them noticeably resembles the insults that the spheres spew out at the cubes in Pojar’s classic Balablok…) The way that the dachshunds’ floppy ears actually dangle around even after they stop and get up (very nice follow-through!), not to mention the sheer gusto with which the one dachshund scribbles on the book (especially the overly graceful, virtuosic way he finishes doing so, raising his arm up and gradually easing it to a stop as though he has just painted a perfect masterpiece) and then adds the eye to the last wall drawing, make me wonder if this particular sequence was animated by Jan Klos.
Sadly, almost as soon as the offended little terrier pounces towards the dachshunds to fight with them, the animation begins to especially suffer: for some reason, the scuffle is animated on twos, sapping it of the energy that it should have had. This continues even as the dachshunds’ daddy, and then the terriers’ daddy, get in on the fighting as well; while Jiří Kolafa’s skittish rendition of the fox terriers’ march here is quite fun, and while the drawings of the scuffles are quite lively in themselves—to say nothing of the visual gags involving the dachshunds’ sausage-like shapes—it feels like a real sense of excitement is missing here. We only get a sudden, short-lived burst of energy at the very end, when the victorious daddy terrier stamps his feet rapidly and threateningly at the dachshunds, who in turn flee around the corner in fright—and one can’t help thinking, “Why wasn’t the actual fighting as intense?” These rather unsatisfactory animation performances would continue into the 1978 episodes.
As it happens, Dášeňka was not the only Večerníček series that was produced at Čiklovka around this time. 1977 would also see the production of all 13 episodes of About Mr. Krbec’s Pets (O zvířátkách pana Krbce), directed by the uber-prolific Václav Bedřich (who worked for both the Trnka Studio and Bratři v triku). Unlike Dášeňka, it is a more typical example of the low-rent series that were generally produced for Večerníček, and is useful mainly as a point of comparison to see what a difference extra time and money—and Pojar’s gifted direction—could make. The cutout animation by Milan Svatoš (another outside staffer from the main Trnka studio on Bartolomějská, though he would spend the next few years at Čiklovka), while certainly quite active and fluid, is largely wooden and never convincing as character animation, and both Bedřich’s direction and Vladimír Renčín’s design are thoroughly pedestrian.
As for Josef Kluge’s side of things, Martin Růžek was quite busy at Čiklovka in 1977: in addition to voicing the whale in Whale, Elahw and narrating the first two Dášeňka episodes, Růžek also served as the narrator for the final Mikeš entry, Pepík ševců malířem, owing to the death of the series’ longtime narrator (and prolific actor) Karel Höger on 4 May this year. Aside from finishing Mikeš, Kluge also served this year as the supervising director for the children’s film Tylínek, designed by the great illustrator Josef Paleček and written and directed by his wife Libuše, with animation by Břetislav Dvořák, Jan Klos, and Milan Svatoš (Svatoš, in particular, already had some experience animating Paleček’s designs in the 1973-74 series Kašpárek, Honza a drak, produced at Konvikt (Trnka’s original studio on Bartolomějská Street) under the direction of veteran Trnka animator Bohuslav Šrámek); unusually, the film was edited by Helena Lebdušková, in her only other post-1968 film for Čiklovka. While not the most memorable story—a little hippo transforms into a bunch of other animals and realizes he prefers his true self—Paleček’s design is certainly beautiful, and of course there’s no doubt that Klos is by far the outstanding animator here. The climax, in particular (8:27 to 9:40), has all the hallmarks of Klos’s budding style, with its graceful, fluid movement and the effortlessness with which Tylínek’s characterful actions (just look at how earnestly he keeps trying to sniff the flower!) flow or lead into each other; it is staggering how crudely animated the denouement afterwards (almost certainly Břetislav Dvořák’s work) looks in comparison. Lastly, Kluge’s daughter Kamila Šilhanová-Klugová appears to have made her debut as a director, designer, and animator on a film titled Drum (Buben), written by Miloslav Jágr; unfortunately, very little is known about the film, besides that it was clearly produced at Čiklovka based on Vladimír Malík’s presence as cameraman.
Dášeňka: How She Grew Up / Jak rostla and What She Had to Do / Co měla na práci (1978)
The fairy tale in the third Dášeňka entry, How She Grew Up, was once again solo-animated by Boris Masník. It is the shortest and most unremarkable segment in the series, essentially a miniature about a Doberman who chases his extremely long tail around a tree after mistaking it for a sausage. There’s a bit of fun, to be sure, as the tail becomes sentient (note how the camera brightness dims for a frame as this happens) and begins mocking the dog, even beating its nose repeatedly to provoke it (giving us some nicely-drawn scrunched-up versions of the dog’s head cutout); things get out of hand as the Doberman whirls around like a tornado in a vain attempt to chase after the errant sausage-tail, to the point where a street sweeper must intervene to put an end to the farce, smacking the tail-biting Doberman down such that his tail is essentially chomped off for good (with the very unamused tail springing away). Once again, Masník’s largely tired-looking animation makes it rather more boring than it should be: he is unable to keep the Dobernado drawings (pun very much intended) moving consistently on energetic ones, and there’s the way that the sweeper just sloooowly and repeatedly walks back and forth to get his tools, which could have been animated at least a little less tediously.
The fourth entry, What She Had to Do, features a much longer fairy tale about the very first fox terrier, named simply Fox, and his literal fall from grace as he is exiled from Paradise over his devilish dealings. As in How She Saw the World, although Jan Klos is credited as animator with Masník here, his work does not really stand out; it’s possible that this was around the same time that the sixth Garden short began production only to crash and burn, not to mention there was, like in the previous year, another Josef Kluge short in which Klos seems to have put much more effort. Once again, Pojar’s creative embellishments to Čapek’s story in themselves are what make this entry worthwhile.
Štěpánek manages to come up with some fascinating designs for the moon and the sun to start us off with, their rays of light literally protruding from their bodies like stumps. There’s a lovely visual gag, indicating the pure, heavenly matter with which Fox seems to be made, as we see a cloud wake up and pandiculate—and its eyes turn out to be Fox’s, as he emerges from within. Pojar wastes no time establishing his mischievous nature: upon witnessing the canine angels waking up, Fox reaches over and pulls their bed out slightly from under them, causing them to fall and then chase after him all over the clouds in their fist-shaking anger! Of course, they all go crashing right into the stern, foot-tapping headmaster (I like how the angels, in their haste, all trip and roll right back onto their feet just before then), who forces them to start marching in place; we get another very Pojarian visual idea as their chalkboard descends in the form of an angelic robot, pointing them to their seats for today’s lesson.
Naturally, Fox manages to avoid school by acting very convincingly like he needs to use the bathroom. Once the gates out of Paradise are opened, he makes an insulting gesture towards the canine angels within and merrily steps out, doing his business on a streetlamp along the way; it turns out that Fox has made friends with a little devil, who plays teasing little tricks on him from the start, tapping and pulling on him from below the clouds! There is a tinge of subversion in the whimsical way Pojar depicts Fox’s playful but unequal friendship with this crafty devil, furthered by Jiří Kolafa’s happy, even soothing woodwind music: we watch as Fox swims and dives after the little devil in the clouds, with the devil eventually shoving Fox down as he jumps up onto the streetlamp just to tease him, and things become even more Bears-like as the devil then transforms into a ramming goat and a rolling, bouncing, springing ball! Eventually, the two of them are spun around and thrown high into the air from a cloudy platform, in turn rolling down a rainbow together—all while the sun looks on quite happily, and we see that the headmaster in Paradise has already fallen asleep as the sun sets. His incompetence is only played up by how Fox, now covered in the dirty spots that will become a trademark of fox terriers, manages to avoid being found out simply by diving beneath the clouds to get past the headmaster as he re-enters Paradise, as though he were already in the crowd of angels marching back to their resting places. (He even winks at the angels before jumping into his bed, as though they’re in on his secret.)
The next day, however, Fox is shocked to find that the little devil wants to take things to the next level and enter Paradise. At first, Fox actually tries pulling the devil away by his tail, only for the imp to swat at him with amused scorn; in some very Big Bear-esque moves, he begins tenderly stroking Fox’s head to convince the little pup to let him in, and from there even transforms into a dunce hat and a collar (not even trying to hide how little he thinks of Fox!) to show how he could disguise himself. In the end, they settle on Fox simply smuggling the devil in his mouth—but this immediately proves to be a failure, as a bunch of literal alarm bells start to go off as soon as they re-enter the gates of Paradise, and eventually even some police cars and fire trucks arrive in a gloriously over-the-top display of how seriously demonic invasions are taken here! And so, the headmaster literally drops the demon-infested Fox from the clouds of Paradise for good (not without a prepackaged, self-deploying parachute, to be sure!), ordering him to accompany men on Earth from this point on. Once again, Pojar puts a subversively positive spin on the fall of fox terrierdom, showing how, if anything, this is quite good for all involved—the children below cheer and jump with joy as they see the descent of Fox, who in turn barks and waves at them happily!
As for the other things produced at Čiklovka this year: to begin with, we have the final two entries of Josef Kluge and František Skála’s seven hunting cartoons. The first, Na kamzíka, may be the best and most wholly satisfying entry in the series by far. To begin with, the scope feels much grander, as the hunter and his dog go out on a disastrous excursion in the mountains with a friend, and cameraman Vladimír Malík creates a great sense of atmosphere in that regard with darker, more cinematic lighting. The gags are also a tad more inspired than usual, with several situations relating to how the three characters are tied together, causing sheer mayhem as, for instance, the friend is carried off by a eagle with the dog struggling valiantly to pull everyone back down safely (and the hunter’s long, bouncy hat is what ultimately saves him and his friend from a nasty impact), or the dog chases after a sausage manipulated by a clever chipmunk even as he is trying to pull the two humans up a high precipice! For that matter, while it is unfortunate that Svatopluk Havelka did not provide the soundtrack here, Kluge’s regular composer Miloš Vacek manages to provide an unusually excellent, at times downright haunting symphonic score, complete with occasional cimbalom solos that add to the feeling that our heroes are out in a truly precarious, untamed wilderness. To top it all off, per the thankfully-surviving credits on the Swedish Film Database, the animators were Boris Masník, Jan Klos, and Alena Meissnerová (making her debut as an animator after years of working as a costume designer at the studio), with Břetislav Dvořák serving only as an assistant, and the film benefits considerably from Klos’s presence: the character animation is much more consistently convincing, funny, and energetic than usual, ensuring that the gags actually come off well, and it all culminates in the downright impressive climax in which the crotchety old man loses it over his chamois sculpture getting destroyed (the lead-up to which is itself well-executed, as we get a beautiful shot of clouds parting to reveal the seemingly heaven-sent chamois standing nobly atop the mountain)! I am even willing to bet that Klos animated this climactic scene, precisely because of the old man’s ferocious and distinctively emphatic character acting as he goes ballistic—an incredible performance that points the way forward to the heights Klos would reach in the following year.
Unfortunately, the last of the hunting cartoons, Mokré halali—involving another visit from the hunter’s friend as they go to a lake—is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum: it is easily the single worst cartoon in the series, and I would even say that it feels like a film in which no one cared anymore and just wanted to get it over with. Most of the animation is remarkably stilted and amateurish, with almost nothing that looks remotely convincing even as movement, let alone character acting—it is too obvious that the vast majority was churned out by the novice Alena Meissnerová and the subpar Břetislav Dvořák, with maybe a few sequences by the deep-in-decline Boris Masník. The gags themselves range from bland to downright asinine, made even worse by the leaden pacing (what was the point of showing the hunter imagining himself as tall water grasses in such a time-wasting and frankly stupid-looking manner?), and even Čiklovka’s preparation team—or František Skála himself in his capacity as designer—seems to have been calling it in here, with the dog’s cutouts looking much, much more poorly-drawn than usual in several scenes. Even Miloš Vacek’s music is bland, sounding no different from what he typically composed for the Mikeš series and whatnot.
Staff-wise, however, this terrible end to a very uneven series is quite significant. It is the first Čiklovka film to credit editor Věra Smetanová by her new married name of Věra Benešová (intriguingly, she would continue to be credited as Smetanová for the rest of Dášeňka), and what’s more, one Viktor Mayer is credited as producer alongside Tomáš Formáček here; Mayer would completely replace Formáček as Čiklovka’s producer the following year. Lastly, this would be Čiklovka’s final film with animation by Břetislav Dvořák; henceforth, Kluge would rely much more on Boris Masník for his films, even the ones based on other works by Mikeš creator Josef Lada. Perhaps Kluge felt that Masník, even at this late stage, was a better animator than Dvořák, and given that Jan Klos at least once referred to Dvořák as an outside collaborator, it was probably more convenient at any rate to resort to Masník as he became more available in these final years, when Pojar was no longer undertaking any ambitious projects at Čiklovka. A more tragic possibility was that Dvořák himself was simply burned out after having animated the vast majority of Kluge’s films for the past several years; he would not be credited on any other known film until 1981’s obscure Splněná touha, and appears to have spent most of his remaining career back at Bratři v triku—though his very last work before his death on 22 June 1988 would be, in a throwback to his Mikeš days, the animation of the Lada-style cutout sequences for Stanislav Látal’s new 1986-88 series based on The Good Soldier Švejk (which used Jiří Trnka’s original adaptations as the starting point, as described in the appendix to the previous Pojar article).
Mayer then served as the sole producer for Čiklovka’s last two films in 1978. One was Panika, another cutout film directed by Josef Kluge and designed by František Skála; the animation was by Masník, Meissnerová, and Kristina Batystová, the latter in her first work as a full-fledged animator since And Don’t Call Me Vašík in 1972. The other, however, was the semi-relief Riddles for a Candy (Hádanky za bonbón), the debut film of Czech animation legend Jiří Barta. An enigmatic children’s film based on an idea by poet and children’s book author Věra Provazníková, it depicts a strange transforming creature working its way through three esoteric riddles presented by a magic book in order to obtain a piece of candy. The bizarre, creative transformations that the protagonist puts himself through are strikingly reminiscent of the Bears, albeit not quite in the same pliable manner, with the forms being much more rigid and solid; the technology to pull these off was created by Milan Svatoš, who would come to be one of Barta’s most frequent collaborators, often serving as an animator or assistant director on his films. Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly, who was otherwise one of the top animators at Konvikt, was brought in to animate the film in his characteristic fluid, hyper-smooth style; he, too, would become one of Barta’s most trusted collaborators, with both of them singling each other out for praise over the years, and as late as 2020 they were working together on tests for Barta’s long-gestating project Golem (the third person pictured is, of course, cameraman Ivan Vít who posted the photo)—fingers crossed that it eventually gets the funding that it needs. (For more on AMP’s career, I highly recommend this interview he gave just earlier this year, when he won the Lifetime Achievement Award at Anifilm.)
Dášeňka: A Lot of Water Has Flown Away / Mnoho vody uteklo, How She Did Sports / Jak sportovala, and How She Went Into Service / Jak šla do služby (1979)
The animated sequences in the final three episodes of Dášeňka are, without a doubt, the very best in the series. This largely has to do with the fact that, in a real sense, they were the films in which Jan Klos truly came into his own: the first two were the very first works that he animated by himself, and now that he was given his own spotlight without being in the shadow of his mentor Boris Masník, it seems he sought to prove that he had become an incredibly gifted animator in his own right, capable of even exceeding Pojar’s own demands as director. There can be little doubt that Klos’s background in puppet theater, spending years manipulating puppets in ways that would entertain large audiences, played a major role in how he developed his meticulous yet captivating style; now, for the first time, we see Klos’s desire to entertain the audience in a pure, unhindered form, as he gives us the most excitingly-animated, well-acted fairy tales to come out of the little sculpture studio on Čiklova Street in its waning years. I would go as far as to say that they are the Dášeňka episodes which truly merit serious analysis as far as the animation goes—and this is precisely what I shall try to do here.
The fairy tale in the fifth episode, A Lot of Water Has Flown Away, is a special change of pace for the series. In addition to being Klos’s first solo-animated work, it is not based on any tale in Čapek’s original Dášeňka book, but on the story “A Dog Fairy Tale” (Pohádka psí) from a different Čapek anthology, Devatero pohádek, allowing Pojar’s team to deal with much more fantastical subject matter than was typical for the series. Pojar’s ideas, Štěpánek’s designs, and Klos’s animation all succeed eminently at conveying the original story’s enchanted atmosphere, giving this segment a higher level of artistry than the earlier episodes. Incidentally, this was the last work at Čiklovka to be produced by Tomáš Formáček; by the time of the next episode, Viktor Mayer had officially replaced him as the studio’s producer.
We open on a miller’s wagon moving through the forest, as the miller himself sleeps in his seat; his dog Voříšek is clearly the one in charge at the moment, watching the road happily. This plucky dog is quickly outraged at the criminal sight of a squirrel happily munching in the horses’ path, his initial shock conveyed by how his head violently trembles upward and then his offense by how he bends towards the sight with such swift, rageful force that his head and body are bobbed even further than their final positions for a single frame. Even in this opening scene, Jan Klos demonstrates his uncanny knack for making his characters’ actions look especially emphatic as the sitting Voříšek prepares to bark at the squirrel to get off the road: on twos, Voříšek lifts his rear up (supported by his front legs) so that he can stomp his hind feet down, with the rear being held at its highest point for an extra two frames as though Voříšek were working up the energy to unleash a terrible storm (note the follow-through as his tail continues to curve down even during the pause, and how at the same time his head begins to curve up in preparation for the barking)—and as soon as his hind legs are brought down onto his seat, his whole body snaps forth to begin barking, as though his stomping were both an angry gesture in itself and the trigger for the reaction forces from the stomped-on seat needed for him to fire himself forth! An ordinary animator probably would have had Voříšek simply get up and bark; by adding in such a well-handled, weighty anticipation, Klos more effectively conveys Voříšek’s rising anger and frustration at the squirrel, who in turn is jolted with fright and prances off onto a tree with unusual gracefulness (the very luxurious use of ones, along with how the squirrel kicks its back legs out as it runs and the waving of its tail, are what really sell it).
Of course, Voříšek’s anger is such that for the squirrel to get off the road is not enough: he must chastise the poor thing as much as he possibly can, prancing onto one of the horses and then onto the back of the wagon just so he can keep barking at the frightened squirrel even as he is carried further off! As the squirrel is left behind, Voříšek shakes his fist at it, and from there turns and marches back to his seat: Klos really drives his haughty attitude home here, what with the way he briefly squats his legs and uses the extra burst of energy to raise his leg up (ostensibly in preparation for his march back) in a very overt, almost “Hmph!”-ing manner while continuing to stare contemptuously at the squirrel, and from there literally turns his nose up as he begins to march back loftily, in turn taking on an even more disdainful crossed-arms pose right as he leans back one-leggedly at the edge of the wagon’s bags to bring himself down onto his seat.
With this business done, Voříšek immediately reverts to his happy self, whipping the horses to speed up—only to then be flabbergasted at the sight of some birds pecking crumbs on the road. Once again, Klos puts Voříšek and his relentless desire for a smooth, obstacle-free journey home into action with an almost slingshot-like anticipation: the dog swiftly bends back (on twos, with only one intermediate pose of him starting to move between the beginning and ending positions of his torso—just these extra two frames of him budging slightly are enough to make his swift backwards shift look more natural without compromising the speed), his forcefulness emphasized by the excellent follow-through on his whip and the way his legs are bent up and back, and the latter allows him to bring himself onto his legs in tandem with how he springs the rest of his body forward, so that he can bend forth and bark at the birds in an especially overt, forceful manner! Similarly to the squirrel, Voříšek tries to show just how infuriated he is by practically shoving the whip back into the sleeping miller’s hand and climbing onto the bags so he can shake his fist at the departing birds—but this time, just as he is leaning towards the birds on his right leg in his spiteful fixation on them, the carriage comes to a sudden halt, causing Voříšek in his continued forward momentum to stumble around arm-flailingly (clearly desperate to maintain his balance) and then fall right into the bags!
As it turns out, the horses have stopped in front of a pub, and the miller, awakened by the lack of motion, is quite pleased at where he has ended up, underlined by the festive drinking song we start to hear here. He conveys his enthusiasm through the very emphatic, Klos-esque way he puts his whip and the rope down: he raises them up in preparation to do so, easing his hands to a much slower speed as they reach their highest point without actually stopping them, and the on-twos but swift way he then slams them down onto their resting places is conveyed by how the very next posture after his descending hands reach the midway point is of the slamming action already completed, after which he moves his hands back towards his body in a much more rapid fashion (two frames of this are on ones) in preparation to jump off of his wagon! Soon, as the miller finishes putting muzzles on his horses, he pats one of them gratefully on the head, his easygoing nature evident in the way Klos has him lean forward in anticipation of doing so.
By now, it is too late for Voříšek, who has been struggling to escape the bags in the meantime, to stop his master from jauntily entering the pub (just look how Klos has the miller bend his whole body forward just to open the door). His barks go completely unheeded as the miller begins drinking with a friend (some more attention to detail on Klos’s part: he continues to tilt his head back slightly in tandem with his mug as his drinking progresses, and upon finishing he brings his whole body down with the mug, allowing him to bounce back up hand-raisingly to get more beer). As night begins to fall, conveyed by the darkening of the backgrounds and Vladimír Malík’s lighting, Voříšek decides he has no interest in waiting: he prances over to the horses in such a way that, right as he skids his feet to an abrupt stop, he is able to use the continued forward momentum of his upper body to bark at the horses and grab their attention in a more vehement manner, from there snapping backwards as he strikes a commanding, warrior-like pose to let them know he is going to check on the miller and, failing that, to start off on his own, even bulging his eyes to a bigger size and then closing them nobly to make clear that he’s serious about it. With that, he turns and begins another haughty, nose-turned up march to the pub’s window, noticeably speeding up as he draws closer—making it all the more striking when he raises his leg especially emphatically before his last step, anticipating his swift, pompous turn-around (see how he even tilts his head up briefly upon turning around in another show of arrogance) to see just what his master is doing. As it becomes clear that his drinking will last for a long time, Voříšek swats at the miller in disgust (note how, a frame after Voříšek starts to move, the camera lighting suddenly gets brighter) and sets off on his own.
Voříšek then begins dashing through the dark woods on his own, along the way stopping on a stump to look out at what lies ahead. Note once again the ardent way that Klos has him enter his looking-out pose as he gets up on his hind legs: he stretches his whole torso up in tandem with how he raises his left arm up in preparation to place his left hand above his eyes, with the movement getting a tad slower as both torso and arm reach their apex to emphasize that they’re about to get to the really important action, and from there they quickly drop back down to settle into Voříšek’s final pose. (By now, it should be obvious that overt, even graceful anticipations, often with a sort of easing and slowdown as the anticipation reaches its culmination that gives the impression that the best part of the action is just around the corner, leading into fast, energetic main actions is one of the defining traits of Klos’s animation.) As the full moon rises, however, we begin to see that Voříšek has wandered into a beautiful silver glade: in an enchanting shot, three glimmers of moonlight shine through in the darkness, with some very elegant, delicate-looking plants popping out beneath these spotlights, and Voříšek himself begins scurrying along more slowly, awe-struck as he looks around the area (one nice detail that adds to the enchanted atmosphere is the moths that flutter out of some mushrooms as the dog passes by)—and then skidding to a stop as he notices something approaching.
So begins one of the most beautiful performances ever created by animator Jan Klos, as, heralded by some more glimmers of plant-growing moonlight, three dog nymphs jump out and begin performing a balletic dance. As Voříšek scurries for cover behind a bush, even he cannot help being captivated by the agility with which these nymphs glide through the air and step around delicately while doing various moves with their arms, to say nothing of their many incredible spins, their cartwheels and entrechats, and their impressive leaps so high that they reach the moon. What really makes this performance look especially graceful, however, is the impeccable follow-through and overlapping action on the dog nymphs’ long, floppy ears, how Klos paid close attention to the ways that they flitter along and wave and float in the air according to the nymphs’ various moves. Of course, as Klos would surely remind us, special kudos must go to Pojar himself: he would have been the one who planned out the nymphs’ dancing, after all, and from there supervised Čiklovka’s preparation team as they crafted all the cutouts necessary—all the different angles of the nymphs’ spinning bodies, all the different forms that their ears and other appendages take on—for Klos to create such a brilliant, lovely interlude. The sequence is buoyed as well by Jiří Kolafa’s wonderful, caninely enchanted-sounding music here, led by musical dog whimpers and flute; now I wonder if Klos actually got to animate to this soundtrack, or if he had to do so based purely on his (or Pojar’s) own sense of rhythm, in which case the almost-perfect synchronization would be all the more incredible.
Voříšek, meanwhile, is curious whether these nymphs might just be ordinary white dogs; accordingly, even as his eyes remain glued to the dance, he begins scratching all over himself to get his flea out so he can try unleashing it upon the nymphs in the ultimate litmus test. In the interesting way that Klos animates even just the flea bouncing off of Voříšek, we get the simplest possible example of how Klos highlights the anticipations in themselves to make the action more spectacular and rhythmic: as the flea reaches its highest point above Voříšek, it noticeably slows down without actually stopping (easing in and out of the key part of the anticipation), making clear that it is about to do something major, and this slower phase of the movement in turn makes the flea’s rapid drop down onto Voříšek’s hand all the more sudden and even thrilling. Of course, almost as soon as Voříšek has the flea take a look at the nymphs, his idea that they might just be dogs is completely rejected: the flea swats scornfully at Voříšek with especially pronounced vehemence, punctuated not only by how much he raises his arm up for the swat but also by how his torso and his left leg are tipped forward (and off the ground in the latter’s case) from the sheer force of the swat, and from there he stamps his left foot back down and bangs on his head especially rapidly and violently (his head even bobs slightly from the hits) as though telling Voříšek “You $#%&ing IDIOT!!!” before bouncing right back onto this dog’s body, this time slowing down for even longer as it reaches the height of its bounce. As Voříšek checks to see where the flea has landed, he goes back behind the bush, making the comedy that follows even better: his eyes, still visible through the bush, start blinking rapidly as an indicator of how the flea has begun making him itch, and after the inevitable jumping-out in pain, his scratching is so desperate that he causes the entire bush to tremble violently!
As the nymphs conclude their dance, Klos conveys the gracefulness with which they even sit before their elder by having them twirl over their spots and float down gently, their delicate bodies leaning down from the gentle landing even so; once again, the follow-through of their ears is crucial to the overall impression, especially the way they swing along briefly upon the nymphs’ landing. They rub their hands together in a begging posture towards the elderly nymph, wanting her to tell a story: in another enchanting scene, the old nymph blows some bright fairy dust from her hand, and this, in turn, swirls and spins itself into a thought bubble, illustrating the tale of how dogs once had their own kingdom on Earth, including a great castle.
The wicked human magician who brings about the downfall of the dogs’ kingdom is, naturally, another work of excellent, richly-animated showmanship from Klos. As he turns towards his magical pickaxes, he crouches down slightly in a sort of anticipation-for-the-anticipation that allows him to exert more force in the theatrical, wizardly way he then prepares to point his wand towards the castle, gathering all his strength to unleash it in the castle’s direction as he not only raises his arms but tilts his entire body towards the opposite direction; as he eases his right arm with the wand to an almost-complete stop at its apex, he keeps the anticipation going by lifting his right leg and stamping towards the castle, which proves the catalyst for him to at last bring his right arm and the rest of his body swiftly down to a pointing posture (doing so with such force that they bounce slightly) so as to send his pickaxes digging beneath the foundations of the castle. An even faster, more flamboyant version of this arc of movement plays out as the magician then summons his mice to do the same: this time, he goes as far as to begin twirling his arm around in a circle during the anticipation instead of letting it come to a halt at its apex, making for an even showier shift to his pointing posture! Finally, as the coup de grâce, the magician bounces giddily in place, allowing him to spring from the ground to the top level of the castle—and with one nasty, insulting gesture towards the dogs within, the castle goes falling into the giant hole created by the pickaxes and mice, with the crown in turn being sent flying right into the very satisfied magician’s hand.
From there, the elderly nymph begins discussing the dogs’ hidden treasure, which is a good showcase of Štěpánek’s sketchy art as he illustrates a beautiful hall made entirely of meats and bones. The possible existence of such a delicious treasure is too much for Voříšek, who, drooling an entire puddle’s worth of saliva, makes the mistake of speaking up and demanding to know where the treasure is—causing the unpleasantly surprised nymphs to fade away into the darkness! Voříšek attempts to scurry hastily over to their area—his drool puddle results in another funny visual gag as he accidentally steps into it and desperately struggles to get out—only to come to an especially abrupt halt as he realizes the nymphs have completely disappeared; his surprised self tries to feel around the now-unoccupied stump and look all over the now-empty forest, before finally looking up at the full moon itself as its glimmers of light disappear from the area, its very presence above seemingly mocking him as he imagines it having a smirking face and sticking its tongue out.
Just as he begins barking and shaking his fist at the moon in rage, however, Voříšek’s ears are jolted by a familiar sound: the miller’s wagon is approaching at last! Reminded that at home, he already has a delicious snack of bread crumbled in water, he jumps with joy and runs back towards the wagon with great enthusiasm, barking happily and friskily at the horses (who in turn are quite pleased to see him again) and then giving his master an especially affectionate lick as he takes his seat once more; with that, we end on a remarkably contented note as Voříšek takes up the rope and whip once again, excitedly whipping the horses to head home faster. It must be said, by the way, that this is quite the opposite of the ending of Čapek’s original story, in which Voříšek continued to agonize over the existence of the dogs’ treasure, and ultimately this desperation to find the treasure is why dogs dig as they do; nevertheless, it’s a good way to end this lovely segment, a remarkable solo-debut for animator Jan Klos by any measure.
The sixth episode, How She Did Sports, marks a return to the Dášeňka book’s own tales; this one is essentially a series of vignettes divided into roughly three parts, namely why dogs and man did not live together at first, how dogs lived in packs, and how man and dogs eventually came to be best friends. Once again, Jan Klos imbues the animation with much more life and intricacy and excitement than had been seen in the series’ pre-1979 episodes, turning the rather pedestrian story into a delightful little spectacle in its own right.
We begin on a rather unassuming scene: a dog is trotting along merrily, bone in its mouth. Paradoxically, it slows down by taking much more rapid but smaller steps, as it notices a scent: upon leaning its head forward to sniff it, however, it decides to hide behind the nearest tree, smelling trouble of some kind. Sure enough, a caveman is chasing after a frightened worm, with Klos creating a contrast between the desperate worm’s rapid squirming on ones and the primitive caveman’s crawling on twos; even so, the caveman goes faster overall than the worm, and once he gets close enough, he quickly pins the worm down with a rapid, forceful swat on ones, using the whole strength of his body as it goes down with his left arm! From there, he takes the worm up and prepares to eat it, with his untamed, wild nature coming through in how his body continues to jitter slightly even after he gets up, not to mention how his lip-licking causes his entire head and even his torso to move in a similarly circular manner.
Just as he is about to shove the worm in his mouth, however (and the way he tilts his head up and opens his mouth wide just to eat is another potent illustration of his barbarity), the worm is swiftly swiped from off-screen by another caveman (who we’ll call B), who we see has even gone as far as to stand on a single leg’s toes just to reach out more easily, the instability of his posture evident as he bends down and back from the sheer force of his worm-pulling in tandem with gravity acting on his other foot. He prepares to eat the worm in the same manner as the first caveman (henceforth known as A), albeit he seems to have a harder time keeping the valiantly-struggling worm in control, as his own body jitters somewhat and the extent of his crouching never stays consistent in the course of his opening his mouth.
Initially flabbergasted by how quickly the worm was taken away as he just stands there staring and blinking, A becomes infuriated: shaking his fist madly at B to the point of moving his upper body towards him in targeted malice, A proceeds to leap right into B at a dangerous speed, resulting in a scuffling wheel of legs and facial parts that runs and bounces all over the place! The exuberantly-animated chaos is such that even the worm’s initial delight at how this in-fighting has saved him, for all that the wheel runs over him, turns into speechless astonishment at the sheer relentless savagery of it all; just as things are about to get especially vicious with A repeatedly bashing B into the ground, however (Klos conveys the swiftness and force with which A slams B into the ground through the classic trick of having the very next frame after A has fully lifted up B, or is just starting to shove him back towards the ground, be of A having already finished crushing B into the ground with the weight of his whole body), both A and B are joggled by the arrival of caveman C, who uses their being distracted to jump out and grab the worm for himself, even adding insult to injury by sticking his tongue out at them in a classic bit of Pojarian character acting! (Note the continued attention to detail as the worm is squirming once again in his grip.)
With that, both A and B team up and begin throwing sticks at C, the force of their throwing conveyed as usual by some slower, overt anticipations on Klos’s part: you can tell how much strength they are putting into each throw from the way they lean their entire bodies back to concentrate all their power into their right arms (as they jump up to begin their first throws, in fact, they both lean back to the point of standing only on their right legs, and caveman B can be seen doing this on his second throw as well), not to mention the way that their arms themselves ease almost to a stop as they reach their furthest points behind them in preparation for the actual throws. At this onslaught, C ducks, leaving his right arm extended over his forehead to shield his cranium, and, on a split-second whim (his eyeballs peek back towards the tree next to him for only three frames), escapes by leaping onto the tree and climbing up, his haste conveyed by the very limited anticipation in which he merely swings his right arm around and lowers his body very slightly in preparation for the leap; the other two cavemen in turn run up to leap onto and climb the tree as well, with caveman B’s energy in particular coming through in how he prepares to leap even as he is still speeding forth by crouching his left leg down much more than usual upon taking a step with it (while continuing to move his right leg forward), and a chase through the trees ensues, the cavemen’s brute strength further conveyed by how the trees are visibly rocked by their departures (as though their jumping legs were kicking the trees back) or their arrivals! The fluidity and even grace, but also weightiness, with which the cavemen then swing across the trees above the dog, and from there land on the ground and continue throwing sticks left and right, is easily on par with anything Pojar himself animated in his cutout films; realizing it is not safe here (the point driven home by how one stick crashes right into the tree that the dog is hiding behind), the dog decides to flee this warzone, initially crawling out stealthily to make sure he is not noticed before prancing off for good. As the dog moves further away from the cavemen’s territory, we see that the numerous sticks they throw around go flying even outside of the area, so that the chaos is still visible even at this distance—a perfect illustration of the brutish savagery of man at this early stage of history.
As we enter the second section of the film, we see that dogs at this time lived in packs on the prairie; in a subtle but fascinating detail on Klos’s part, the dog noticeably ducks its head as it arrives at a mound, as though bracing for the sudden rise in the terrain, and its trots also change to more rapid but little steps that are more suited to scaling the slope. It looks out as, in as majestic a view as is possible with the series’ art direction, the sun sets on the vast prairie, and from there it gently puts its bone down (its delicacy evident both in the use of twos and in the way it crouches its whole body down while stepping back slightly just to place the bone carefully) to begin howling for its pack, with Klos conveying the quick rise in the howl’s pitch by having the dog (who we’ll call the main dog from this point on) rapidly turn its head up and even stretch its body up with it on ones. As it then listens carefully for a response, three other dogs arrive at a mound, and one of them howls back, its loudness emphasized by the distant shot of this prairie (note also how this dog’s tail is cranked up with each howl, a sort of reflection of how much strenuous effort is put into each howls); satisfied, the main dog wags its tail very rapidly and happily (there’s some more care for realism in how, as the main dog turns its head back from its listening posture, it moves its slightly stretched-out body back as well), and it even hops slightly before taking its bone back into its mouth and scurrying over to the other three dogs, in a mini-anticipation that further expresses its excitement at reuniting with its pack.
Upon arriving at the other dogs, the main dog stretches itself forth to sniff the other howling dog for whatever scent it may have picked up today (note the meticulousness as it bends its head up), and the howler does likewise. With that, the main dog makes its way over to a stump (tossing its bone into the air as it starts to move in a reflection of its carefree attitude), watching as the other three dogs run around in their places to trample the tall grasses into their beds and fall asleep (I like how the dogs slow down as they get settled and curl up to sleep, clearly relaxing after stepping around so rapidly). Now that its pals are asleep, the main dog can get to work: it unleashes a stream of urine to literally mark the stump as its own (note once again the slingshot-like anticipation Klos gives to the action, as the dog bends forth briefly and then back to get its private part going), revealing that his name is Alík, and from there he makes his way to the other side, where he digs a hole behind the stump with great strength (his body bending quite visibly from the exertion). From there, he zips back, deftly easing into this further-off position with Klos-like grace by continuing to move his body and especially his head back ever so slightly—sure enough, this zipping proves in itself to be the anticipation for how he tosses the bone in his mouth into the hole! This is then compounded by two more graceful zips back (yes, with easing as Alík reaches his furthest position to make clear he’s about to get to the real action) that each serve as the anticipation for his next move: with the first, he pushes all the dug-up dirt back into the hole to bury the bone, and with the second, he trots back to the front of his stump, whereupon he very quickly and briefly eases to another stop so that he can jerk back and unleash another stream of urine, adding two exclamation marks behind his name for good measure—and he puts the dots in the !! down in an especially punctuative manner, jerking himself down and up twice such that only two brief splatters of urine are released!
With that, Alík begins to settle down and sleep in much the same manner as his pals, only to notice that something is approaching: a hedgehog, which stretches its snout out enthusiastically to sniff what it quickly realizes is a bone, in turn licking its lips and leaping towards the stump excitedly to get itself moving faster! However, upon arriving, it takes a closer sniff with a decidedly less enthused look—sure enough, it is the urine that Alík used to mark the stump as his property, emphasized by how his name (including the exclamation points) briefly flickers on-screen, and upon imagining how angry Alík will surely be, the hedgehog is jolted with terror, his body even bouncing squashy-stretchily for a split second as it trembles violently with its hairs standing on end! With that, it attempts to start leaping away—only to crash right into a rock nose-first, the impact heightened by how the screen shakes as the poor thing lingers there squishedly for a bit before its sheer momentum causes it to roll over the rock even so. And the pleased Alík can rest peacefully for the night, knowing his urine is enough of a deterrent against any possible thieves; there’s another bit of attention to detail as he lifts his head briefly even after he first closes his eyes to move his left arm more over his right, allowing him to settle down to a more comfy position…
Now begins the third section of the film, as Alík is trotting on merrily as usual one day, once again switching to more rapid but tiny steps as he ascends another mound—only to immediately be jolted by an unwelcome sight before him! At first, he lowers his head to look more closely, and then crouches down against the ground and crawls backwards so as to hide; once below the top of the hill and out of sight of whatever is approaching, he stands back up to continue observing what is happening before him in relative safety. As it turns out, a pack of three cavemen are sneaking up to a dinosaur’s tail, with the leader shushing the other two in a reminder to keep quiet as they lift the tail; in turn, the leader swiftly swings his axe down, slicing it right off, much to the dinosaur’s shocked, trembling pain followed by eye-bulging curiosity at the cavemen carrying its tail back to their cave! These cavemen get right to work cooking the tail, as shown by their chimneys literally puffing smoke out; this delicious-looking change in their demeanor, in turn, attracts the pleased Alík, who crawls much closer to get a better look.
So begins another beautifully-executed, charismatic performance from Jan Klos, featuring some fittingly gruff-sounding but catchy and folkish music from Jiří Kolafa, dominated by the primal, cavemen-like vocalizing of male singers singing “yoo-hoo” and “yum” and the like! To begin with, Klos animates even the bones getting thrown out of the cave with great zest, having them rattle quite visibly and rapidly and all over the place as they hit the ground; the sight of so many bones induces Alík to come even closer, and he is so taken by their scent as he stretches out his snout to sniff them all that he sits down to get an even better scent, his nose trembling even more rapidly from the sheer pleasure, in turn licking his lips delightedly before bending his head forth to see what happens next. At that moment, one of the cavemen is walking out with a bone, stepping onto the pile of bones just outside without realizing it—causing him to slip on the highest bone, whereby he struggles desperately to somehow slow down his inevitable fall as he flails his arms twirlingly while lingering in mid-air for a while! Ultimately, gravity continues to slowly act on him even so, eventually sending him crashing swiftly down into the bones—his squashy-stretchy impact in turn sending most of the bones flying up and crashing right back down onto his head, their own impact such that they even bounce up a little from the sheer reactive force they induce from the ground! In turn, the caveman jumps up with trembling fury, its intensity magnified by how high he jumps and how he eases into a slower speed as he reaches his highest point as though gravity were taking a little longer than usual to counteract his forcefulness, and he can barely contain his anger as, upon landing, he trembles even more rapidly and violently to the point of raising his body from his crouching position! With that, he bends down with rage towards the nearest bone, his bounciness such that his furious crouching proves to be the anticipation for how he swiftly raises his leg and entire body up to prepare to kick the bone, from there easing into his final position in this regard as he then curves his body over the bone to bring his leg even further up and back for a more powerful kick—this whole process, incidentally, is emphasized magnificently by Kolafa’s music, as we get a tuba burst accompanying the initial crouch and then an extra “YUM!” as his leg reaches his furthest point back—and with this extensive preparation done, he gives the bone an incredible kick! (Incidentally, I cannot go without mentioning the very prominent use of dry-brushed smears in this episode, which adds greatly to our impression of the incredible speed at which a lot of movements play out here.)
Alík, in turn, his eyes briefly bulging with excitement at the oncoming bone, pulls off an impressive trick: he quickly bends his body down and straightens it out towards the bone such that he is able to catch it with his nose, absorbing its force with typical Klos-esque deftness as he allows it to bring him back and down to a bent crouching posture while resisting just enough that he is able to ease into said posture’s lowest position without falling over outright, and from there he springs his body forth in such a way that he ensures the bone is well-balanced on his nose before finally sitting back down! Now very much in control, Alík brings his head down just enough that he is able to swiftly jerk it all the way up, sending the bone flying high into the air (once again emphasized by the “YUM!” in the music)—and into his mouth, the force of its landing well-conveyed by how Alík deliberately brings his head down in turn to begin eating it up in such a showy manner that he jerks his head and body up with each chomp. With all this done as he licks his lips, Alík then begins behaving exactly as a dog eager for more would, taking on a begging posture and wagging his tail friskily.
This stunning performance has naturally impressed the caveman, who, realizing that his fellow cavemen need to see what this dog is capable of, calls them out to take a look: once again, he kicks a bone over, and once again, Alík catches it marvelously with his nose, this time springing his body forth right into a renewed sitting position while briefly swinging his upper body back and forth to ensure the bone is well-balanced. This time, he undertakes a whole series of tricks with the bone, bouncing it with his nose onto his tail, which he then uses to spring the bone back into the air (the manner in which the weight of the bone brought it down serving as the anticipation in this regard) such that he is able to run to the left and, once again catching the bone with his nose as he stands on his hind legs, begin spinning around rapidly while keeping the bone on his nose! With that, he launches the bone into the air, jumping twirlingly onto his arms so that he can begin twirling the bone with his legs as it falls back down, eventually balancing it on his right leg such that he launches it into the air once more—and, bringing his legs back down in anticipation, undertakes one last twirling jump, landing perfectly in such a posture that the bone falls right into his mouth! Licking his lips as the cavemen applaud, Alík closes his routine with one last crowd-pleaser: he gets back into his begging posture, and from there kicks his legs out dancingly and jauntily, his canine showmanship underlined by the rhythmic whistling in Kolafa’s music! (Of course, as with the dog nymphs’ dance in the previous episode, I have to wonder if Klos actually got to animate to Kolafa’s music or if, as usual, he had to figure out the rhythm on his own with Kolafa working from there—the synchronization between the animation and music really is just impeccable.)
With that, the first caveman runs back into his cave, bouncing up as he does so in his sheer excitement, and re-emerges with a stone hammer and chisel, raising it up eagerly (to the point of his arms rapidly trembling for a moment) with a “Yoo-hoo!” as though showing the other two how he’s going to give Alík his own home as a reward for his fine performance today. Taking off, he hammers Alík’s name onto the top of a cave with great zeal (note how his name was clearly sketched into the background from the start, with conspicuous gray covers over the letters ensuring that they would not be seen before the caveman “hammered” his name into those spots); upon finishing, he begins to move back ever so slightly even as he takes the time to let out another “Yoo-hoo!” at his fine handiwork, as though excited to get to the next thing he wants to do—sure enough, as he runs back to the cave once again, and as we get a brief close-up on Alík’s newly-carved name with a triumphant fanfare signaling the beginning of mankind’s close relations with dogs, the caveman comes out with a whole pot of bones, practically skipping along the ground in his giddiness! He looks down to ensure that before the entrance to the newly-labeled cave is a good place to put the pot down (he eases into the sudden drop by initially moving it down at a slower speed to allow himself to step back, in turn letting it almost fall to the ground once he is out of the way), from there bowing graciously and lowering his arm out (note once again how he bounces his body slightly beforehand to really work up the momentum to bow) to introduce Alík to his new home, even looking up to see how Alík reacts!
Of course, Alík is very happy: in an especially overt anticipation, he curves his upper body back and lifts it up so that he can fall back down and stretch himself out to bark even more powerfully in a show of his delight, and from there runs over to the pot (there’s an unfortunate error after Alík skids to a stop as the caveman suddenly pops to a more bent-down pose without any frames in-between), wagging his tail friskily before leaping a bit more (I like the brief anticipation even here as he crouches down to do the leap) to get up on his hind legs using the pot as his front legs’ resting place, allowing him to give the caveman an especially loving lick (note how the caveman even stretches his arms out at Alík for fear the dog might overpower him). With that, the very happy caveman gives Alík an especially strong and warm pat on the back (so strong that, in addition to Alík getting bent towards the caveman more, Alík’s head is briefly curved up from how it is not directly jolted by the force coming from behind), as the iris closes in on this new picture of loving, licking companionship—bringing an end to this second early triumph from animator Jan Klos.
At last, we come to the final episode, How She Went Into Service, the animated segment of which consists of a series of advice for dogs on how to live with mankind in the present-day. Boris Masník animated the majority, in particular the first three minutes, while Jan Klos did most of the remaining less-than-two-minutes; by now, it is painfully obvious when setting the two’s work side-by-side just how creaky and leaden Masník’s work had become, and how exciting Klos’s animation had become by contrast. Pojar himself may have realized this, as the first half involving the dog and the parents is undeniably carried largely by the visual ideas and gags in themselves, while the second half in which the dog plays with the children is where the energetic movement really counts.
We open on an admonition for dogs not to believe those who say that man is evil, as represented by a beautifully grotesque, snarling, six-armed neanderthal who, upon getting his face sketched in, brandishes weapons in all his hands! As the caveman afterwards (in a callback to the previous episode), and then the sketches of other happy dogs and their historical masters, reminds us, dogs would not have joined man if man were not so affectionate towards dogs. So we come to the present-day, in which a daddy whistles and calls for his dog (also named Alík like the one in the previous episode): Alík , in turn, begins doing all kinds of good deeds for the daddy while having some fun, swiping his hat with enough force that it is conveniently hung on the rack, and then retrieving the daddy’s slippers by jumping into them feet-first such that he is able to act like an ice-skater and a dancer before tossing them into his mouth with his feet! He then shoves the couch so that it goes sliding into the daddy’s legs, allowing him to fall right back onto the couch, and as Alík marches over and begs for more duties, the daddy gives him a coin to buy a newspaper with. There’s a cute little gag after he buys the newspaper in which Alík reveals his canine behavior is all just an act, as he stands by a pole and begins reading the paper himself, even initially dismissing the daddy’s renewed calls for him with a typical Pojarian scornful swat; as the daddy’s calls prove relentless, however, Alík decides he has no choice but to return, shrugging with resignation as he proceeds to shake his head and scratch it, thereby reverting to a sort of wild, panting form as he begins leaping back with the newspaper in his mouth! (Of course, it is hard for this viewer not to notice how Boris Masník animates Alík’s leaping very similarly to that of the dog in the Kluge-Skála hunting cartoons Pozor, medvěd! and Na posedu.) Upon placing the newspaper in the daddy’s lap, he continues panting relentlessly—pausing briefly to wink at us knowledgeable viewers along the way—before the daddy gives him a nice rub on the head.
It is then that the mommy emerges from the kitchen to call Alík, with lovely scents emanating in the form of wispy, cloudy birds and fish and sausages (bearing quite the resemblance to the cloud animals at the end of The Animal Lover some five years earlier); Alík is so taken by the scents that he feigns sleepwalking into the kitchen, in a show of his supposedly mindless devotion to the food within! Upon hopping with joy at the scent of the food the mommy has scooped out for him, he prances over and eats his food rapidly (in an all-too-rare instance by now of Masník using ones), in turn demanding more by flipping his plate twirlingly into the air and holding it in his mouth while begging; the mommy obliges the first time, but when he tries demanding more the second time (even going as far as to stand and bang his plate on the stove), she gently wags his finger at him, placing his plate on his head like a hat and then satisfying his appetite with a cube of some kind, the very scent of which hypnotizes Alík as she moves it back and forth before putting it on his nose. Finally, as Alík is lying down contentedly after bumping the cube into his mouth, two lads whistle for him at the door; knowing that they want to play, Alík once again leaps out in the same way as when he was bringing the newspaper back, leaving the plate on his head to rattle on the ground.
Jan Klos takes over as animator right as we see the two lads and Alík sliding down the stairs, and it is immediately obvious just how much more filled with life the characters become in his hands. They each land outside the door in a downright graceful manner, easing themselves as they crouch from their landings and then springing from these crouches with renewed energy (either leaping or running off), with Alík in particular flailing his arms twirlingly as he flies from the door to come to an especially nimble landing! From there, as the two lads run along with a ball, they pass by another lad building a dirt castle—and Alík decides to stop and have a little fun here, pushing himself against the ground such that he goes springing onto his left leg, and from there leveraging the force with which he is pushed back as the anticipation for him to fall right back down in a graceful, curving manner to immediately begin digging through the castle, burying the lad in a pile of dirt! As Alík emerges from the other side, he barks so that the rather confused lad emerges from the pile, and with that, he starts off once again, while the lad bends his head forward as though trying to see what Alík will do next.
So begins an amazing, almost hyper-speed game of ball (accompanied by more skittish, whimsical music from Jiří Kolafa), as the lads rush through the park to try kicking it only for Alík to quickly catch up and bounce it into the air with his nose! He continues to lean downward even as he stands for a bit, as though anticipating just the right moment—and sure enough, right as the three lads are all jumping in a chain to try and catch the falling ball, Alík hastily scurries beneath all of them and practically runs straight up into the air to bounce the ball slightly away from their reach, from there hurrying to bounce it even further away in the opposite direction right as the lads are all gaining on it! Now in complete control of the ball, Alík goes wild with his playful tricks as he runs away with it, sliding his foot under it such that it is thrown up so that he can begin bouncing it on his head, and then kicking it such that he balances it on his tail while walking on his front legs, and from there kicking his back legs up with such strength that he twirls back onto said legs and begins bouncing the kicked-up ball on his nose! All the while, the lads are in hot pursuit, and they all jump Alík right as he kicks the ball up with the back of one of his feet, resulting in a chaotic, messy, bouncy, ball-grabbing scuffling wheel that various other kids decide to jump in on as it twirls through the park and even bumps into a tree that sends it rolling in the opposite direction! Ultimately, Alík is victorious, as he eventually jumps right out with ball in hand, while the rest of the kids go crashing right into a bigger tree—and in a further show of his sheer power, as another dog invites him to a tree, Alík puts the game aside by kicking the ball right into the kids such that they are practically smashed into the tree in another screen-shaking impact!
Thus, we begin to wind down as, in a scene of canine companionship that reminds the dogs of their origins, Alík and a bunch of other dogs gather around a big tree to mark their names on it with urine, all while the sun sets on the city; the much slower, less detailed movement here makes me wonder if Masník animated this particular part. The scenes that follow, meanwhile, are definitely Klos’s work, especially the toddling baby: the little guy reaches out and swings his arms around erratically in an attempt to start moving forth, his instability evident in how he keeps leaning back and forth, and eventually bumps himself up by straightening his crouched legs, such that he begins stumbling rapidly forward in an extremely precarious manner! Luckily, his dog swoops in before he falls, grabbing the baby by his suspenders and then rediverting the forward momentum with almost effortless grace (the dog allows its legs to lean forward, even raising one of the front ones up, and then uses the curving up of his head to sort of turn the forward momentum backwards, all while letting the baby swing into the air); with that, they and the baby’s mommy all begin walking home, and we get a succession of other folks and their dogs doing the same as night falls. The old man and his dachshund, in particular, move much slower than the others, but the nice follow-through on the dachshund’s floppy ears, the way they swing along briefly as the dog stops to do its business on a streetlight (lighting it up!), makes clear that they are also Klos’s. And so, as Kolafa’s lulling music here comes to a close, we end on a happy scene of domestic life, as Alík and his family are all seated together in the living room watching TV; Alík and the lad, in particular, sit right at the front, licking cotton candy or popsicles or some other such snack…
These final episodes of Dášeňka stand at a crossroads in the history of Čiklovka. They mark the beginning of Klos’s reign as one of the finest animators in the history of the Trnka Studio and its branches; at the same time, however, they were the very last films on which Pojar collaborated with designer Miroslav Štěpánek, and as Jan Klos recalled, the final episode ran into some trouble in this regard:
Štěpánek failed only in the last episode, at that time Pojar had “business” in Canada and could not correct daily what Štěpánek would bring.
We shall return to Klos’s observation of Pojar’s return to Canada shortly; for now, it would seem that this failure was the final straw in Pojar and Štěpánek’s deteriorating relationship. For his remaining handful of films at Čiklovka, Pojar would have to handle the art direction entirely on his own, just as he had in his Canadian films. I shall leave you with some more words from Pojar himself on why he preferred to rely on others to design his films, even with his strong vision (from the previously-linked 2007 interview with Agáta Pilátová):
My studies [in visual arts] lasted only a short time. But above all – I forgot everything while working as an animator. Trnka, granted, gave me a free hand as far as the decorations, but I preferred to leave the figures to him. So I forgot to draw there. When, for instance, you don’t draw for just half a year, then you can draw only wires, not drawings. It’s the same as a piano player or a violinist: if he doesn’t practice, he loses his skill. I only returned to drawing in Canada because it’s such a custom there that everyone does everything.
Jan Klos animated on two other films at Čiklovka in 1979, both of which were directed by outsiders, and neither of which are particularly great showcases for his skill like the final Dášeňka episodes are. One was the ribald, adult-oriented Farewell, Ophelia (Sbohem, Ofélie), directed by Dagmar Doubková. Written by Edgar Dutka—a fascinating figure who, along with Jiří Kubíček, sought to help the new generation of Czech animation filmmakers attain success during this era by creating interesting scripts for them (or, as dramaturgs, helping them polish their own stories)—it is essentially a satirical lecture on how women and girls ought to deal with domineering men. The film’s feminist perspective extends to its staff: in addition to Doubková designing the film in her usual freakish style, the two other animators on the film besides Klos were Alena Meissnerová and Kristina Batystová, and of course the narration was spoken by actress Jorga Kotrbová.
The other was The Stupid Wolf (Hloupý vlk), a film that is the very definition of an interesting curio. A co-production with Bulgaria’s animation studio, it was designed and directed by the Bulgarian animator Assen Münning from a fairy tale by the author Elin Pelin (original text here), with an incredibly dated synthesized soundtrack by composer Boris Karadimchev. Münning was in fact a recent alumnus of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, with his graduation film being 1977’s Zahradník a jeho pán (a cutout-animated film produced at a different, unknown branch of the Trnka Studio), and this appears to have been his only other Czech involvement. Fascinatingly, animators Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly and Karel Chocholín were once again loaned out from Konvikt to animate a few sequences, while animator Milan Svatoš is credited here as an assistant: Chocholín animated the scenes involving the horse and the pigs in his jerky, pedestrian style, while AMP managed to bring his usual fluidity and finesse to most of the scenes involving the tailor, including when the wolves sniff around for him and then figure out how to reach him. The vast majority of the footage, however, was by Klos, who clearly put up a valiant struggle against the film’s low production values (in particular the wire-based, inflexible puppets) to imbue the titular wolf with as much of his now-trademark exuberance and knack for fun character acting as possible: the calisthenics that he puts the wolf through over the course of the film, as he hops around and trembles and falls in all kinds of different ways, make for a more entertaining experience than the film would have been otherwise. (Another highlight of Klos’s animation, of course, is the ram, especially the scene where it prepares to charge into the wolf in an over-the-top, head-twirling fashion.)
Suffice to say, as Klos recalls, the production of The Stupid Wolf was a nightmare for almost all involved. It is hard not to feel sorry for Münning himself, who clearly had to deal with a less-than-welcoming environment and was simply not very experienced:
I really felt sick at the reminder of the despair which I had to go through at that time. The “fraternal collaboration of socialist states” was realized. The management of the studio behaved almost hostilely towards the young Bulgarian collaborators, because the realization of the “fraternal film” disturbed the fulfillment of the production plan (the business with films which was promised by Krátký Film Prague to foreign customers). I don’t know anymore what I actually moved there, but I remember well the despair over the amateur mistakes of the novice director and designer Assen. How many shots, for example, take place on a dark background with a black wolf! There were no instructions or comments, nor an opinion on the hustles and bustles which have a certain character and a certain length and so on. The only thing that truly impressed me was the incredible skill of Assen’s young colleague [possibly the top-billed assistant J. Gjuladžieva?], who could brilliantly shape the surfaces of those unfortunately very small and wire puppets by hand. And unfortunately, it is very difficult to work with a wire skeleton. Now I remembered that Assen made the floors from cork and the puppets had to be fixed to the ground with a pin! The atmosphere was truly unpleasant – at that time we were more technologically advanced (or so we thought “at Pojar’s” at least).
As for Boris Masník, his time was exclusively spent on cutout films this year. For Josef Kluge, he solo-animated the Josef Lada adaptation Budulínek Mandelinka, also written by Edgar Dutka; the animation is marginally better than in the Mikeš series, insofar as Masník had a better command of character acting than Břetislav Dvořák. He also animated two other films for Pojar, both of which Pojar designed himself: the first was Why Man Has Dogs (Proč má člověk psa), which in many ways appears to have been an extension of Dášeňka‘s production and subject matter, complete with live-action sequences filmed by Jan Špáta. In this case, Pojar himself wrote the more didactic script, pertaining to the history of dogs and their usefulness to mankind over the centuries, and the film also puts greater emphasis on his own interesting visual ideas and gags, giving it an atmosphere much like his Canadian works. Ultimately, though, what makes Why Man Has Dogs less enjoyable than Dášeňka is Masník’s tragically unsatisfactory phasing: even more than in Dášeňka, his work here feels intensely tired, with far too many scenes lacking any real sense of dynamism or excitement even as the very subject matter demands it, as though he were only putting in the bare minimum of effort needed to convey the animals’ movements and Pojar’s character acting at this point.
The second, meanwhile, was the fascinating Booom (Bum), the only satirical film that Pojar was able to produce in Čiklovka’s later years. This was entirely due to the fact that it was commissioned by the United Nations, in the first of two films that Pojar produced for the organization around this time—his very last works at Čiklovka in its heyday—and in that regard, the film’s biting satire on the arms race, culminating in how even ordinary citizens’ houses turn out to be stockpiles and hiding places for deadly weapons, did have certain limits:
One of my Canadian filmmaking partners [possibly executive producer Peter Hollander, although he was not Canadian?] got a job in the United Nations, and as a producer he commissioned from me a film about the arms race. Quite a demanding theme! I remember how the producer explained long-windedly to me what I was not allowed to do, to make the film acceptable to the whole world. In the end I approached it as a satire and the film then won the jury prize at Cannes [in 1979].
This brings us back to Jan Klos’s observation that Pojar was already returning to Canada by this time. Did Pojar’s status as a U.N.-commissioned filmmaker allow him a bit more freedom to travel abroad than was typical for the normalization period? Of course, things get even spicier when one realizes that the film Pojar would have been working on for the National Film Board of Canada around this time was his classic anti-totalitarian satire E. Did Pojar already begin to sense that, owing to his meticulous directorial style and possibly the unfortunate failure of The Garden‘s production, it would only be a matter of time before, as Klos unflatteringly put it, “the communist comrades began to liquidate Pojar as the comrade who did not fulfill the [production] plan”, and decide to go ahead with what was essentially a middle finger to the regime in Czechoslovakia anyhow? These are questions to which there may be no satisfying answers at the moment, but which are worth keeping in mind as we briefly examine Čiklovka’s final years as a semi-thriving branch of the Trnka Studio…
The fall of Čiklovka (1980-81)
1980 saw Josef Kluge’s own attempt at directing a series specifically for the Večerníček block, with the extremely obscure 7-episode Fairy Tales from Linden Blocks (Pohádky z lipových špalíčků). Boris Masník animated the majority of the series, as he is known to have animated episodes 2, 3, 4, and 7 (1 and 5 are not available at the moment, and I have not linked episodes 2 and 7 because the available copies of them are digitally corrupted), and while Arna Juračková’s design is fairly charming, on the whole the series is another sad work that epitomizes Masník’s decline: the animation is even duller than it had been in his episodes of Dášeňka, which admittedly could also be attributed to how, unlike in Pojar’s series, Masník had to churn out the entireties of the episodes himself. (Episode 6, meanwhile, was animated surprisingly decently by Alena Meissnerová, though it’s still nothing too special.) Masník also animated another Lada adaptation for Kluge this year, Of the Brave Princess (O statečné princezně), which, as usual, is really only worth watching if you’re already a fan of Lada’s work to begin with.
Somewhat less depressing, meanwhile, is the semi-relief film How a Farmer Sent His Ox to Study (Jak dal sedlák študýrovat vola), based on a story by Jindřich Šimon Baar; it was animated solely by Masník, but directed by Zdeněk Vinš, who I believe was associated with Konvikt but largely serving as the main Czech animator and director on the Trnka Studio’s East German-co-produced Krakonoš shorts at the time, and designed by Václav Pokorný, who had hitherto been an assistant at Čiklovka. (Pokorný would later design Pojar’s 1997 film Narkoblues.) While the animation is still not up to the level of what Masník had been putting out just years earlier on The Garden, the use of actual puppets and malleable parts no doubt made it much easier for him to show his talent at creating subtle, intricate character acting than the cutout films did. Alena Meissnerová, meanwhile, served as the animator of Aucassin and Nicolette (NSFW), designed and directed by Nina Čampulková under the supervision of Zdeněk Smetana, and crafted with both cutout and semi-relief animation; Čampulková’s decorative, colorful, naïve designs and compositions do have a certain charm, and there are a few lyrical visual ideas, but it really isn’t much more than a curious trifle.
By far the most fascinating work to come out of Čiklovka with a 1980 date, as anyone would expect, was Diskjockey, the second film by Jiří Barta. Animated by Milan Svatoš, it is essentially an artsy, esoteric look at a disk jockey’s daily life, and all of the circles and rotations that he encounters, including in the images brought to mind by the music he plays. It’s a perfect opportunity for Barta to come up with a slew of creative visual ideas and abstractions, and of course, major kudos must go to composer Petr Skoumal, who provides an incredibly catchy series of pop and rock tracks to accompany the visual kaleidoscope.
This leaves two major staffers at Čiklovka who were conspicuously absent in 1980, namely Břetislav Pojar and Jan Klos. With Pojar, the answer is obvious, namely that he was probably busy filming E in Canada, but what about Jan Klos? To make a semi-educated but risky guess, based on both Klos’s recollections of his final months at Čiklovka and the credits on the films themselves, it would seem that 1980 was in fact the year when episodes of Lubomír Beneš’s famous …a je to! series, starring the two handymen who came to be known as Pat & Mat, began to be produced at Čiklovka. The first two episodes made at the studio, Gramofón and Grill, bear a 1981 copyright date, but were produced by Viktor Mayer who was replaced that year, and do not credit Darina Plichtová as an assistant even though she had already been working on some of Čiklovka’s other films since 1979 (and would be credited on the 1982-copyrighted Čiklovka entries of the series). Marin Pažanin has already written excellent analyses of both episodes here, to which I would like to add some additional remarks Klos made afterwards on them (and on Beneš’s arrival at Čiklovka; I have already reproduced Klos’s terrible disappointment over the ending of Grill far above):
Luboš suddenly appeared in Čiklovka to the considerable joy of the tribal directors and founders of the “secondary” studio of J. Trnka (they were J: Kluge and B. Pojar). I think that Luboš was already considered by the production in Bartolomějská Street to be an unbearable, actionary, second-league creator, so they “transferred” him to an associated studio so that someone other than the master [Jiří Trnka]’s workplace in Bartolomějská Street would bother with him.
Gramofón is an independent work of [Karel] Chocholín, especially handicraft. He made most of the props, including the gramophone, himself, at home, so he then had little time for phasing [that is, animating] due to fulfilling the plan. Admirable performance in materials processing. That was his passion.
[On Grill], I recognized Luboš’s unpleasant feature: “don’t mess with it much, just make it fast”. I couldn’t see at all what the episodes [Vlasta] Pospíšilová and Chocholín and [Xenie] Vavrečková had done previously in Bartolomějská looked like, and I had to form my opinion on the character of the heroes.
1981 would be the year in which everything fell apart at Čiklovka. The last film at the studio to be produced by Viktor Mayer was The Puppet, A Friend of Man (Loutka, přítel člověka), directed by outsider Ivan Renč; it appears to be quite an interesting film, consisting of three short live-action/animated vignettes (Sladké sny, Strč prst skrz krk, Hlad a žízeň) animated respectively by Karel Chocholín, Jan Klos, and Boris Masník, but unfortunately it is not available for viewing. Henceforth, the producer on the remainder of Čiklovka’s films in its heyday would be, intriguingly enough, Václav Strnad, who up to this point had been exclusive to the Michle branch of the Trnka Studio.
One of Strnad’s first involvements at Čiklovka was Of the White Princess (O bílé princezně), a terribly mediocre fairy tale film conceived and directed by Václav Bedřich. The sets by Růžena Urbanová are quite nice in themselves, but her puppet designs are quite unappealing, and the story is muddled and not particularly intelligible, to say nothing of the unimaginative direction; to add insult to injury, none of the animation particularly stands out as interesting, in spite of Jan Klos animating on it with Milan Svatoš. Ultimately, the sole saving grace of the film is Luboš Fišer’s lovely score, which is best listened to on its own. Staff-wise, the film was notably edited by Jiřina Pěčová, who was the editor for several of Bedřich’s projects at Bratři v triku (a fuller biography of her can be found here), and aside from Strnad himself, another staffer from Michle who unusually shows up on the film is animator Jiří Miška, credited as an assistant. As I will elaborate on later, it appears that the Michle branch was actually shut down around this time, with most of its staffers thereby being relocated ultimately to the mother studio at Bartolomějská and then the new studio at Barrandov—and yet, intriguingly enough, they would stay a rather closely-knit team even within these new environments. The top-billed assistant, meanwhile, was ex-Konvikt staffer Pavel Šimák—according to Klos, he had been a colleague of Lubomír Beneš’s when Beneš was still at Konvikt, and was appointed the head of Čiklovka’s preparation team around this time.
On that note, it was likely around the same time as O bílé princezně that the first three 1982-copyrighted episodes of …a je to!, namely Sťahovanie, Voda, and Záhradka, were produced at Čiklovka as well. As in O bílé princezně, Šimák was the top-billed assistant, and in yet another apparent sign of Michle’s collapse, both Sťahovanie and Voda were edited by Magda Sandersová (née Borowianová), who had also worked primarily on Michle films in the years just before 1981. Sandersová would also edit the one short Josef Kluge directed this year, Cheers…? (Na zdraví…?), an anti-alcohol satire designed by František Skála and animated with both semi-relief puppets and cutouts by Alena Meissnerová.
Alas, at some point after animating on O bílé princezně and Sťahovanie, disaster befell animator Jan Klos: he injured his right hand. Amazingly, he tried to keep working even while his right hand was incapacitated, animating the opening scenes of the next …a je to! episode, Maľovanie, with his left hand; ultimately, the episode would be finished at Konvikt, with Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly handling much of the animation. (As usual, Marin Pažanin has the full story here.) Lastly, we come to Pojar’s final film at Čiklovka in its heyday, and also the final film there to be animated by Boris Masník at the time: The Big If (Kdyby), Pojar’s second film to be commissioned by the United Nations. As expected, it is a creative, fantastical, and lightly humorous depiction of an unfortunately hypothetical scenario: what if everyone’s tanks and weapons and destructive technology and such were transformed and used to actually help people out, creating and delivering food and technology and clothes and raising their standards of living?
Once The Big If was finished—and with E being completed in Canada this year—Krátký Film’s administration wasted no time in their next move. From this point on, Čiklovka would no longer produce films animated using physical puppets, and in that regard, the top staffers at the studio like animator Boris Masník and cameraman Vladimír Malík would be relocated to Konvikt, from which they then moved to the new, larger studio complex at Barrandov. Pojar himself was effectively blacklisted: he would no longer be allowed to come up with his own scripts, and could only direct films that were specifically commissioned by the authorities. By the end of the year, he was forced to design and direct two cutout-animated episodes of a road safety series, Pohádky pro benjaminky silničního provozu, with animation by Alena Meissnerová and possibly others; he seems to have resigned from Krátký Film afterwards, as he would focus on other things for the next few years, like his elusive Břetislav Pojar Presents TV series from 1983 (one of its episodes was an hour-long documentary on Boris Masník!) and even a version of Jiří Pauer’s children’s opera Žvanivý slimejš for the Laterna magika theatre in 1984.
In tandem with a brief look at Boris Masník’s post-Čiklovka years, it is important for me to clarify my conclusion that the Michle branch of the Trnka Studio, too, was liquidated with its staffers largely being relocated to the main studios around this time. In the years immediately after he was relocated from Čiklovka, Masník largely seems to have worked on films which had animators from Michle—1981’s Královna Koloběžka I. (designed-directed by Dagmar Doubková) had Helena Jiskrová as animator alongside Masník, 1983’s The Impossible Dream (also by Doubková) featured some animation by Jiří Miška, and the 1984 Večerníček series Malá čarodějnice (by Zdeněk Smetana) also involved Miška and Jiří Tyller. (It does not look like Masník was involved with anything produced in 1982, a possible result of how, in another sad example of his ill health, he contracted shingles from the trauma of his relocation.) What’s more, these films and others with ex-Michle animators seemed to always have Václav Strnad as the producer and Jiří Ševčík as the cameraman, just like in Michle’s earlier films. My first presumption, for a while, was that Masník was in fact relocated to the Michle branch, which in turn appeared to have lasted as a separate studio for quite a bit longer; however, the presence of certain notable non-Michle animators in the latter two works, in tandem with how Václav Strnad had served as Ciklovka’s last producer before it stopped producing puppet animation and the unusual, transitory presence of Jiří Miška as an assistant on O bílé princezně, makes it more likely that Michle’s ex-staffers simply continued to work together as a mostly-separate production team within Konvikt and then the new complex at Barrandov. The Impossible Dream also featured animation by Milan Svatoš and Xenie Vavrečková, the latter of whom was definitely part of the “A-team” that carried over from Konvikt, and Malá čarodějnice, too, had animation by Jan Zach, who like Vavrečková had been part of Konvikt; both Vavrečková and Zach would soon afterwards serve as animators on Jiří Barta’s legendary adaptation of The Pied Piper.
Vladimír Malík, meanwhile, had by far the happiest fate of Čiklovka’s relocated key staffers. Upon relocating to Konvikt, he was given the honor of serving as the cameraman for the very last two films to be produced at the studio (which had to be shut down due to its dilapidated state), namely Jan Švankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue and Jiří Barta’s The Vanished World of Gloves. From there, of course, he relocated to the new Trnka Studio complex at Barrandov, serving as the studio’s main and most experienced cameraman for the remainder of his career. (It was only February last year that he passed away, after a long life of 91 years…)
At last, we come to animator Jan Klos, who wished to continue working on puppet films. As he was evidently not considered an important staffer, the only option was to follow director Lubomír Beneš, who wanted to continue producing …a je to! at any cost. In a truly dramatic tale that potently symbolizes the end of Čiklovka’s former glory, the two of them, aided by cameraman Jan Müller who had been an assistant at Čiklovka in the early 1970s (Klos professed to not knowing where he came from—the period in which the two of them would have been in Čiklovka together was exceptionally brief, as Müller’s final credits at the studio were Hello Kohlrabi and The Appletree Maiden, the very films on which Klos was just starting out), outright ransacked Čiklovka’s remaining puppet film equipment and moved it all to a semi-secret new makeshift workspace under the umbrella of the Trnka Studio, from which the remainder of …a je to! and other projects of Beneš’s like the Jája & Pája series would be produced:
It was December 1981. I quietly helped Luboš steal the equipment, the puppet workplace – material and what was possible from the props left over from older films, including tripods, lights, 35 mm cameras, zigzag heads, “sledges” for camera travels, legs under sledges, planks on wooden floors to the new but old space at Wenzigova No. 5.
What was Wenzigovka? Sometime in the 1930s (1930 + -?), the then progressive studio AFIT was established – a studio for film tricks. The founders were Vladimír Novotný (?) – I don’t know exactly, but he was a world-class Barrandov trick maker and his partner after the war – I don’t know the name. They specialized in the production of subtitles and the like (when the Germans came and the occupation forced both of them to run the famous German-Czech studio of animated films AFIT). Luboš visited the place in Wenzigova Street and found out that the house housed the design office of the State Secret Security on all floors, and that they had vacated the room for a gym for employees on the ground floor. When renovating the ground floor, they left the water supply, but disconnected the “toilet” sewer for space reasons. The power lines were fine. With the help of their friend – a military attaché in MOSCOW, they persuaded the leadership of the secret security to discard the place for ping pong on the ground floor for the studio for the production of the series, because at that time “it was in a hurry” as a currency order for a Slovak agency in Bratislava.
In reality, however, it was “the existence” of Luboš (and me as well) at stake because there would be no work for us in Bartolomějská Street. And Luboš was already an unwanted director at the time, recently moved to Čiklovka. With the help of a young “cameraman” Honza Müller, we started moving to Wenzigovka at night with our own cars what could be stolen in Čiklovka, including an old and beautiful lathe and other machine tools, but in advance the boys laid the stolen floorboards on the tile floor, into which tripods, decorations, etc. could be hammered.
It was a fight for a new puppet studio (about which Kr. Film Prague knew nothing) and we called that workplace (me, Luboš, Chocholín, Müller and another boy, a graphic artist) BENEŠ FILM Prague (existed from 1982 to 1987 -? I don’t know exactly – when the mother studio “swallowed” us again at that time already in the new premises in Barrandov – a great reconstruction of the life of an animated film).
Nightangel / L’heure des anges / Romance z temnot (1986)
Pojar would eventually return to Krátký Film in 1985 to create another cutout film for the United Nations, in this case UNICEF more specifically. For All the Kiddies in the World (Aby všechny děti světa…) was again designed by Pojar himself, with animation by Boris Masník and Kristina Batystová; the cameraman was Miroslav Kuchař, who had been Vladimír Malík’s assistant at Čiklovka in the 1970s, and who had already served as a full-fledged cameraman on the road safety films Pojar was forced to do at the end of 1981. Given the presences of both Batystová and Kuchař, I am inclined to believe that For All the Kiddies in the World was produced at the reduced-capacity Čiklovka: Batystová and Alena Meissnerová would soon afterwards be the animators on Josef Kluge’s final film Zahradníkův rok (from a story by Karel Čapek, with cutouts based on his drawing style as well), a film said to have been produced at Čiklovka as well, and of Kuchař there is a bit more to say shortly…
It was presumably thanks to this film that, as related in the interview far above, Pojar was at last able to leave for Canada once again under the auspices of the United Nations, and from there begin conceiving Nightangel (though its Czech title, which translates to A Romance from Darkness, is more poetic) with Jacques Drouin. To Pojar’s own remarks on the film, I would like to add that the coloring of Drouin’s pinscreen animation was accomplished by lighting the pinscreen with colored light; animator Jan Klos, from whom I will quote more shortly, has even claimed that it was Pojar himself who figured this solution out, which admittedly would not be surprising given that it was Pojar’s idea to have Drouin handle the colorful sequences after a certain point.
The filming of the stop-motion sequences, meanwhile, was in fact a lot more eventful and potentially disastrous than Pojar himself let on, with Jan Klos’s unusual involvement being indicative in this regard. Things seemed to go smoothly at first, as Klos recalled:
Pojar started filming it in J. Trnka’s studio in Barrandov, with the fact that the studio gave him two of the best animators at its disposal. All the most demanding shots were done by Vlasta Pospíšilová (whom the then-management of Kr. Film Prague contracted for “all lucrative jobs”). When Vlasta finished what she had, a terrible defect in the negative material used became apparent: a red mist flickered on the side of all shots. Vlasta got paid and the management of the studio refused to “loan” her to Pojar. Pojar and one female member of the production staff remembered that I was still alive (I hadn’t seen Pojar since December 1981).
I had to return to Čiklovka for a few months (?) and re-record all the footage (some of which had already been sounded). Inspect the shot in the editing room, count the number of frames from sync to sync, write it down, march 25 meters to the shot and shoot on film. But it had an advantage, because I could “fix” all of Vlasta’s phases, that I did not like and regarding which I was convinced that my variant was “more cultured”. HORRIBLE WORK, endless trips to the editing room and back (we didn’t have any other technology). LUCKILY, we managed to find money for half of the animators’ fee – at least something.
In practice, it appears that Jan Klos wound up (re)animating the vast majority of the film himself, almost three-fourths of it. As he elaborated afterwards in quite some detail, this was a very unusual case in which he was able to reshoot already-filmed footage, in large part because the NFBC could afford to pay for more film stock to replace the defective footage—and it was a special reprieve from this period of his career, when he was largely stuck working for Lubomír Beneš:
It was a special moment at the time in which I could leave Luboš and Wenzigovka for a few months (?) and do it again with Pojar, who here was “on the hop” from Canada as an external director in J. Trnka’s studio. The memory is something important: At that time, for economic reasons, we could not reshoot – correct already-shot footage (expensive, Western film material and strict adherence to the “production plan” regardless of the level). So we HAD to work “in one go” [the idiom Klos used was “z jedné vody načisto”, which is explained here], it’s a terrible thing. You shoot the shot, you painstakingly rhythmize the movement, the “call” comes, it’s stupid and you can’t shoot it again without mistakes. Whoever was unable to comply with this system, COULD NOT get a job – NERVES! Today, animators can immediately view it on a computer and correct their opinion of the event. And the case of “reshooting” Vlasta’s footage was the only one in my practice where I (and the cameraman too) could have that advantage even though it was poorly paid. But a big role was played by the fact that the Canadian client could pay for a larger amount of expensive film material.
Of course I have and at that time had reservations about the quality of the main heroine’s construction (it was an uncontrollable “wire”), and I was bothered by a small artistic difference between her appearance when she is supposed to be the fantasy of a blind hero and then an “ordinary”, good nurse. I was still not satisfied and to this day the same applies to Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly’s passage when the Hero does not see and collides with the obstacles of the apartment – walls and the like. There, Pojar also disappointed as a director. If any shot of Vlasta’s was used – I think not (?).
Of course, Klos himself had evolved into a rather different, perhaps even better animator from how he had been in 1981: it was arguably thanks to his time at Benešfilm, where he could no longer indulge in the hyper-energetic movement that characterized his Čiklovka work, that he learned to gain as much mileage out of his animation as possible. By continuing to pay scrupulous attention to the acting and the intricacies of the characters’ movements, Klos could now create rich, detailed character animation even when he was working mostly on lower frame rates like twos—indeed, it was during this period that he became an expert at varying his timing, switching between ones and twos and even threes within a single shot, to create a more nuanced, compelling performance. This new style of Klos’s, as painful as it was for him to adapt to, proved a perfect fit with the more naturalistic, often delicate acting that Pojar’s latest film demanded.
So, how does the film itself hold up? Well, even after all these years, I maintain that this is a hauntingly beautiful, delicate, yet sadly overlooked gem in Pojar’s oeuvre, his fruitful collaboration with Drouin illustrating a lovely story of a young man who, upon being temporarily blinded after an encounter with his lover gone horribly wrong, often imagines that a lovely, magical angel is helping him; when the day comes in which he has recovered, he is at first disappointed to find a seemingly ordinary nurse, but in the end, he is able to recognize his lover for the angelic soul she really is. Drouin’s ghostly animation powerfully evokes not only the man’s fear and bewilderment as he suffers from his blindness, but also his wonder and joy whenever the nightangel is around; in the latter sequences, especially, it blends in perfectly with Jan Klos’s intricate, sensitively-handled animation.
Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly also does an excellent job in his own way with the sequences of the man’s troubles while he is blind, and how his usual routines—cleverly introduced by Pojar at the beginning of the film—become much more difficult and even dangerous; the characteristic fluidity of his animation, combined with his impeccable handling of the man’s physical movements, gives the man’s travails a certain harrowing sense of realism. When he gets home from the hospital, he attempts to feed his fish, only to wind up dropping the bottle as he attempts to grab it; upon reaching the bottle, he stands up such that he accidentally overturns the table with his head, setting off a terrible chain of events that feel as though the man’s furnishings and even his ceiling light are attacking him! The uncanny horror is furthered by their bizarre pliability as they seem to turn savage, to the extent that the light is even imagined turning into a swordfish—and the manner in which the frightening objects shift at times to pinscreen animation drives home how, to the poor man, they have become almost otherworldly demons. Later on, the man’s habits of boiling hot water to drink, leaving his newspapers in a single stack on a table by the window, and checking how the weather is via the window all collide in one massive catastrophe: as he opens the window to feel how rainy it is, the wind suddenly picks up, blowing his papers all over the place, and they wind up catching on fire thanks to the still-burning stove and the man’s inability to properly put the initial flames out, causing them to fly around as though they were firebirds!
Vladimír Malík’s cinematography, for which Miroslav Kuchař is also credited—I presume his role was to replicate Malík’s work in all the scenes that had to be re-animated by Jan Klos at Čiklovka—shines in a way unseen in Pojar’s films for years. Several scenes are shot in almost complete darkness, mirroring the man’s own impaired vision, with just enough lighting to highlight him and whichever part of the environment he senses at that moment; even they are often veiled in cold shadows. One of the film’s most brilliant sequences, in which the man desperately searches for help after his windblown papers catch on fire, is a beautiful collaboration between AMP’s deft animation and Malík’s cinematography as they convey the man’s point of view and trouble; the things he comes across are briefly lit up or appear only at the moment of encounter, such that he “sees” walls only as he bumps into them or crawls against them, or realizes there were stairs behind him only as he finds himself taking a painful spill down them. In a virtuosic display of skill, the camera then follows the man around as he stumbles panickedly through the darkness and crashes from wall to wall, and from there it begins to feel as though the environment itself is torturing him, with alleged doors where there are none swiftly slamming shut in his face and the walls seemingly bashing him and closing in on him out of nowhere as he enters a narrow hallway; suddenly, the nightangel arises from out of the darkness, and the camera follows her as she, remaining lit amidst the darkness, guides the man back to his room.
Michael Kocáb’s music, performed by the Prague Chamber Orchestra, is crucial to the film’s otherworldly, mystical atmosphere. His leitmotif for the nightangel is an elegant yet eerily introspective string piece, at times accompanied by sublime female vocalizing; indeed, most of the music is played by chilling strings, particularly the opening theme which is heard again near the end, with occasional vocal solos heralding the nightangel’s arrival. It becomes truly creepy in the scenes in which the man is terrorized by his surroundings, reduced as it is to synthesized drones complemented by frightening noises (like the whispery growls and sputtering pants and coughs in the furniture scene, or the abrupt, unnatural electronic snarls as the man is running around in the dark) or, in the scene where his burning papers take the form of firebirds, skittish electronic beeps.
Of course, aside from the more horrifying sequences described above, the best and most visually rich sequences invariably involve the nightangel; she is alluring even from her very first, most ghostly appearance, animated in pinscreen by Drouin, in which she gracefully twirls around as two violins play around her. The first time she comes to the man’s rescue, she feeds his fish as they splash around in the pinscreen-animated water, and lets the man feel one of the fish; suddenly, as a sign of her care, the fish begin to multiply as the water becomes warmly lit up, and as they jump to and fro, the man juggles the vivaciously-colored fish playfully! The second time, the nightangel turns most of the monochromatic paper firebirds in the man’s room into lovely butterflies, with the last of them (animated by Drouin) finally perching on the table and transforming into a cake with lit candles and a bottle of wine; after the man steps up and blows out the candles, the wine bottle spontaneously pours glasses for him and the nightangel, and after their toast, the couple dances around the dark room as mystical pinscreen-animated fog gathers below them, with colorful butterflies and lanterns above them.
Through its many brilliant components, this masterpiece shows how easily reality can be conflated to romantic fantasy, and there is a certain bitterly ironic humor in how the man’s blindness was caused by his running out into the street towards his romanticized lover; yet it is also a testament to the power of unconditional love, especially for one who has become impaired, that it can inspire such beautiful illusions and sow the seeds of true love. When the man disappointedly returns home only to find his lover, ever-caring, has filled his vase with roses, he hurries her back into his dark room and, closing his eyes to simulate his blindness, feels around for her, whereby she tenderly reaches out for his hand; opening his eyes, he at last sees before him his beloved nightangel, and together, as the fish begin jumping out of their tank colorfully and rejoicingly, they embrace and ascend into the sky, vibrant violins around them, to the gentle vocalizing of Kocáb’s music! As they descend, the fish continue to jump out vividly, and the vase’s roses grow brilliantly; in a last piece of visual poetry, as they kiss, the clock flies away into the night, symbolizing that their love is eternal. Of course, it should go without saying that films like A Romance from Darkness (to use the more beautiful Czech title) will continue to shine through the ages; even if time will unfortunately always pass in this world, the time one spends savoring this great achievement in Pojar’s oeuvre will always be worth it. (And be sure to watch this beautifully-restored, HD copy from the National Film Board of Canada!)
The following year, Pojar was at last allowed to create his live-action/animated feature film Butterfly Time; it is worth noting that the story had been co-written by Jiří Fried, who was blacklisted as normalization began after 1968, which would be one good explanation for the film’s long wait. While produced mainly at the Trnka Studio’s new complex at Barrandov, a number of scenes were purportedly animated at Čiklovka, with these scenes being the very last done at the old studio; this seems to be corroborated by how Miroslav Kuchař is credited as assistant cameraman on the film. Notably, the film was co-produced by the Canadian studio Les Productions La Fête, headed by Pojar’s old friend Rock Demers, and released abroad as part of the studio’s Tales for All series; Demers’s stated mission behind the films he produced was to convey to young people that, while life is hard, it is worth living.
On that note, I would like to conclude with some details from Jan Klos about Pojar’s family life that most people do not know of, the tragedy of which came to a head right around this time. One can only feel sorry for Pojar that he had these immense personal tragedies (his wife would predecease him too, leaving him all alone), on top of everything else he had to deal with on a professional level; in that regard, one cannot help wondering if Pojar had Demers’s mission in mind at the time, given his poor second son, especially…
The name Jaroslav Pojar bore the firstborn son of Pojar. I don’t know when he was born, but by asking Kristýna Tichá – Batystová I found out that they animated together in Čiklovka. When I got there, Jarda was already an emigrant. I only found out about this in 1987, when I phased on Pojar’s Butterfly Time. Pojar was released to Annecy for the festival on Thursday and someone told me: “He has a son Jarda in Switzerland, who has a small, successful studio of animated films there. He will certainly visit him on the way from France.” Pojar came to work on Monday. I asked him if it was true and he wondered how I knew and said carefully “Yes I was with them, I have two grandchildren there.” No one heard us. On Wednesday morning, Pojar said: Jarda died of the flu – and the Communists did not let Pojar go to the funeral!
Pojar’s second-born son was named Jiří. I couldn’t see that one either. I know this from the stories of younger co-workers in Čiklovka who knew him. Jirka had a serious illness and allegedly made two suicide attempts. His mother picked him up “on the reverse” from the insane asylum, took him home – the third floor on the banks of the Vltava River. The postman rang, and his mother went to open it, and Jirka jumped out of the window. After many years, some people found Jirka’s paintings in the house where the Pojars once lived (?). A certain Ivan Vít, who knew Jiří, told me the place where (after Pojar’s death and after the death of his mother) they offered the paintings for sale. I took a photo of the thirty small oil paintings, had them recorded on disk, taken to the department of the National Gallery, where they have a department for Art Brut.
on the ones 
Dear Toadette, Just a comment to thank you sincerely for all the wonderful work and incredible insights that you have shared through your blog over the years. You have done an incredible service to animation history by writing in such detail and in such depth about the work of Pojar, his creative associates and the history of the Čiklovka studio. Thanks to your generosity, your readers also learnt far more about the personalities and history and making of the films than they could ever have imagined. To be given the opportunity to read such a comprehensive history of the Čiklovka studio, a topic of such specialism, is to feel very privileged indeed.
To write so extensively and empathetically about the films and personalities, and to examine the animation and production processes in such forensic detail, you must have had to identify deeply with the different personalities and situations involved for a long period, and I imagine such identification must have come at some personal cost to you. One feels a strong sense of gratitude to you for completing this work so successfully.
From the point of view of all those who have gained so much from your generosity in sharing your research and detailed studies of the films, your efforts were most definitely not a waste of time and energy and emotion. Your writings will take their place as an extremely valuable addition to knowledge about this particular aspect of the Golden Age of Czech puppet animation, and I do hope that you will look back on your blog as the significant and valuable and worthwhile achievement that it is. I wish you the very best for all your future creative endeavours.
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Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly worked in other films at Konvikt. In 3 Czech legends (Faust’s House, Jerusalem Street, Daliborka), he was the animator along with Vlasta Pospíšilová. Faust’s House also includes Karel Chocholín, a guy who worked in the 1979 film about the wolf and other animals (Hloupý vlk) in Čiklovka.
Václav Strnad worked with Věra Benešová at Michle in Svatební košile and Ostrov pro 6000 budíků, but Benešová was still Smetanová in those two (they also worked on Všehochlup and Drátovat flikovat directed by Zdeněk Smetana, and narrated by the guy from Josef Kábrt’s O klukovi z plakátu, František Filipovský).
After Věra Henzlová worked in Nightangel, she was replaced with Klára Stoklasová/Alena Dětáková (if cameraman is Vladimír Malík) for Rok se skřítkem Vítkem by Ivan Renč, while the other one is Věra Šašková (if the cameraman was Miloslav Špála who associated with Ivan Renč (Koulelo se jablíčko), Zdeněk Smetana (Kubula a Kuba Kubikula), Zdeněk Vinš (Barevnost, O poctivém Matějovi), Garik Seko (about the teddy bear and alarm clock series), Jan Švankmajer (Mužné hry, while Alena worked in Tma, světlo, tma) and Nina Čampulková (Kolik je na světě věcí)).
In 1998, Pojar reunited with Benešová for the work, Duel directed by Pavel Koutský. Additionally, Viktor Mayer had reunited with Věra Benešová since 1992 after the establishment of Studio Anifilm Rychecký under the helm of Milan Rychecký. The last time Benešová and Mayer worked together was on the 2012 episodes of O skřítku Racochejlovi by Jiří P. Miška for Via Lucis.
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I also noticed that Helena Lebdušková worked in The Fall of the House of the Usher which is done in Čiklovka/Wenzigowka studio under the helm of the producer Viktor Mayer, oddly Bedřich Glaser was the animator while the cameraman is Miloslav Špála. Later Mayer and Spala become Hafan film workers for Jan Balej’s puppetry like The Doings of Hippopotamus Family aka (Jak to chodí u hrochů) and then Mire Bala Kale Hin directed by Katariina Lillqvist.
In 1982, Milan Svatoš participated as assistant in final episode of the Večerníček called O klukovi z plakátu. A few months later, Milan Svatoš worked in Dagmar Doubkova’s Impossible Dream with another Konvikt animator, Xenie Vavrečková, as well as Čiklovka animator, Boris Masník and Michle animator Jiri Miška. Also Milan Svatoš worked even in Pavel Koutský’s Co oko neuvidí and Média (2000).
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Yes, as Ivan Vít recalls in his memoirs (which I have just summarized in the comments section here), Švankmajer’s Usher was indeed prepared at Čiklovka, but the actual production appears to have taken place at a different branch of the Trnka Studio, hence Miloslav Špála as the cameraman and Bedřich Glaser as the animator. This branch *may* or *may not* have been based on Wenzigova Street: on his website, Glaser posted an old photo of him and other folks celebrating the New Year of 1978 with the caption, “A budding promising animator in Krátký Film’s studio in Wenzigova Street”. Unfortunately, Glaser has no known on-screen credits before 1980, so at the moment it’s impossible to know for certain who else was involved at this studio and if they may have worked on Usher as well, or if Glaser was even still working at this studio on Wenzigova Street by 1980 – or, for that matter, if this was the same Wenzigovka at which Lubomír Beneš and Jan Klos eventually continued …a je to!.
With regards to these issues, Klos had this to say after Marin Pažanin sent him Glaser’s photo—of course, it’s not impossible that the other workplace Klos refers to was where Glaser worked in the late 1970s (and maybe afterwards): “Our Wenzigovka – Benešfilm was in house number 5. In this short street a few houses away, there was another workplace where animated films were shot. I was there once on a visit – and I don’t know if it was a studio of Kr. Film Prague. If you write that the shots with Glaser are from the 70s, it would be possible that the workplace in number 5 was still in operation for animated films at the time (the famous AFIT company – animated film studio – worked in that house in the 1930s, which ended with the German occupation in 1939?). I learned about the existence of number 5 in December 1981, and the State Security was already operating there.”
Thanks for letting me know that Svatoš was involved on the very last episode of O klukovi z plakátu in 1982. That would seem to be another bit of proof that Josef Kábrt and the others at Michle had relocated to the new studio complex at Barrandov (and, just before then, to Konvikt) by this time. On that note, as I already mentioned above, The Impossible Dream was almost certainly produced at the new Barrandov complex as well, hence the unusual animation team.
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Marin Pažanin recently sent my article to none other than cameraman Ivan Vít, who started his animation career as a technical assistant on Čiklovka’s films from 1969 to 1981. I am very pleased to say that he enjoyed the article, and also sent along a copy of his own memoirs of his time at Čiklovka. Below are various portions of the memoirs which caught my attention (along with my own observations), and which provide additional valuable insights on Pojar’s films during this period:
-Ivan Vít joined Čiklovka in 1969. The studio’s staff, composed of various professions, never exceeded 15 people; for Vít, the greatest authority and later even “teacher” was cameraman Vladimír Malík, while the higher-up folks like Břetislav Pojar or designer Miroslav Štěpánek were “gods” that he, as a beginner, did not reach much.
-Vít’s first involvement (for which he was not credited) was the disastrous C.K. Střelnice (The Shooting Gallery), the only directorial effort of the troublesome designer Štěpánek, the production of which he recalled “dragged on endlessly”. Of course, the final result does not seem at all like the kind of film that would have such a protracted production, to say the least, which probably goes a long way towards explaining Vít and the other younger Čiklovaci’s negative opinion of Štěpánek; indeed, Vít has even recalled to Marin that Pojar actually had to step in and finish the film so that it could even be screened.
-Intriguingly, Vít then recalled that his next involvement was Josef Kluge’s film Jak šlo vejce na vandr (How the Egg Went Wandering, “the poetics of which were close to the natural temperament of the director”; watch it here!), in spite of that film bearing a 1968 copyright date and featuring not only Helena Lebdušková as editor but also Pavel Procházka as the top-billed animator. C.K. Střelnice already featured Čiklovka’s new editor Jitka Walterová, and Vít even recalled that Procházka was among a number of talents at Čiklovka who had already emigrated by the time he arrived at the studio (Procházka’s wife Stanislava Procházková, the credited animator of C.K. Střelnice, appears to have stayed behind a little longer); additionally, as shown by Krátký Film’s awards page, Jak šlo vejce na vandr had already won an award in 1969, while C.K. Střelnice did not win awards until the following year, and records from the Czech National Film Archive indicate that information about Jak šlo vejce na vandr was already published in the official film magazine Filmový přehled before anything about C.K. Střelnice was.
At first, I thought that Vít was actually remembering Hra na maminku, the one sequel film I knew about, which he undoubtedly would have worked on given its 1970 date; however, Vít was already credited as early as Pojar’s Darwin Antidarwin aneb Co žížala netušila, which like C.K. Střelnice bears a 1969 date, and information on both Antidarwin and Václav Mergl’s 1970 film Laokoon was published before anything on Hra na maminku was, so it wouldn’t have made sense for Vít not to say either of those were his next works. I then wondered if Jak šlo vejce na vandr may have indeed been produced later than its copyright date would suggest: the credited assistants in Jak šlo vejce na vandr are noticeably the same as in C.K. Střelnice (Emil Přeček, Elemír Topicer, Vítězslav Šafránek, M. Žbánek), implying that the two films would have been produced during the same time period, and combined with animator Jan Klos’s recollection that a film’s copyright year may not actually correspond to its production year (with one possible reason being to rush a newly-completed film to festivals!), as well as the fact that Kluge suspiciously had no 1969 credits otherwise in all the filmographies of his career that I had seen, it was also possible that the production of Jak šlo vejce na vandr itself dragged on well into 1969 (it could have been affected by, say, Procházka’s departure), and that C.K. Střelnice continued to be tinkered with even after Vít stopped working on it, such that it was only “officially” completed and disseminated later that year.
But when I went to check the biography on composer Miloš Vacek’s Filmový přehled page again, I stumbled upon the real answer to this conundrum: it turned out that Kluge did in fact produce a film in 1969, Všude dobře, doma nejlépe (basically the Czech equivalent of the proverb East or West, Home Is Best), a film so obscure that the only other known traces of its existence are two records from the previously-linked NFA website. These records provided precisely what I needed: per the first record, it was indeed produced in 1969, with information about it being published *after* C.K. Střelnice but before Laokoon and Antidarwin, and per the second record, it was indeed another, hitherto-unknown sequel to Jak šlo vejce na vandr! (Bizarrely, the second record also claims that it was the third in a series of films about the egg, whereas Hra na maminku would have been the third, but I digress.) Thus, it seems safe to conclude that Vít was in fact thinking of Všude dobře, doma nejlépe when he recalled that Jak šlo vejce na vandr was his next involvement at Čiklovka.
-With regards to the Bears series, especially, Vít has always insisted that writer Ivan Urban, whom he describes as “inconspicuous”, played a much more important role that is normally appreciated (this comes not from his memoirs, but from a much more recent e-mail he sent to Marin after he finished reading this very article): “The form of his stories (screenplays and themes) is used without major revision for the technical screenplays [storyboards] for filming. It’s true that if they were probably not processed by Pojar, they wouldn’t be as perfect.”
-Some technological progress began taking place at Čiklovka during the production of the second Bears series: “These films were still shot with Cinebox (Šlechta) cameras, that is, a non-reflective technology completely unsuitable for animation, which was equipped mostly with specially-modified engines and other accessories. Only in the early 1970s did there come into the studio ERK cameras, which were removed from the Barrandov studio together with Cooke optics from the 1950s. These first reflective cameras still served faithfully somewhere until the end of the ‘film technology’ era. Meanwhile, though, there began to appear ‘machines’ from ‘Film Industry’, which was a factory for the production of film technology that was based at Barrandov. The first camera that arrived for us had the designation TK3 and was able to meet many requirements of animation production despite all the shortcomings. With great fanfare, we appreciated the acquisition of the first Angénieux transfocator, which then served us for years. Jiří Trnka brought a similar one from France, but it was only available in the studio at Bartolomějská. As for the film material, it was relatively good for the puppet film and the management at the time allowed filming on Kodak Eastmancolor rather quickly. I suspect that it was the ECN 5254 type back then.”
-Vít’s hobby of taking lovely, high-quality photographs depicting scenes from animated films, using the original puppets and sets, grew out of his realization that their artistic quality and craftsmanship could not normally be appreciated otherwise: “I soon began to realize that the beautiful images from the stages are preserved only during occasional screenings in cinemas. From the perspective of the artistic and gradational and color qualities of our studio’s films, television broadcasting could not be counted on, and what’s more, it was mostly black-and-white broadcasting back then. In the desire to preserve the uniqueness of their artistic values, I started taking photographs from films. However, I wanted to be a level higher, and I wanted them not just to be “photos” or “stills”, but works that can be presented separately in a large format. My interest in photography was further strengthened by studying at FAMU with professor Ján Šmok. To get a high-quality photograph realized on color material, however, wasn’t easy. Scenes like the Bears or Pojar’s Garden were shot very complicatedly on a vertical camera in many layers. With time, I could handle it, and I’m glad that I thus recorded at least a piece of history in picture quality that is perfect.”
-As Vít recalls, Čiklovka “was a frequent place for celebrations and parties for various occasions, and it was supposedly just the same here in pre-war sculpture, when artists and makers of Praguean sculptural decoration got together here.” Even figures who never actually worked at the studio, like cameraman Vladimír Novotný, artist Kamil Lhoták, writer-filmmaker Jiří Brdečka, and composer Václav Trojan, would visit purely as friends.
-The stop-motion animated sequences for Jindřich Polák’s Pan Tau series were indeed done at Čiklovka, with Vladimír Malík serving as cameraman on all of them. Stanislava Procházková animated the sequences for three of the earliest episodes (Pan Tau jde do školy, Pan Tau a samá voda, Pan Tau a Claudie), in what would be her very last works for Čiklovka before emigrating; the remainder of them, intriguingly, were by Stanislav Látal, who otherwise belonged to Trnka’s original studio at Bartolomějská.
-Jan Švankmajer prepared his 1980 film Zánik domu Usherů (The Fall of the House of Usher) at Čiklovka, though the actual production appears to have taken place at a different branch of the Trnka Studio. This is indeed borne out by the film’s credits, in which Miroslav Kuchař, Ivan Vít, Vladimír Nevosad, and Václav Pokorný are credited as assistants, even though the other key figures on the film (animator Bedřich Glaser and cameraman Miloslav Špála) were emphatically not Čiklovka staffers at the time.
-The biggest challenge after the second Bears series was The Garden, and Vít has some observations of his own on how the studio’s own beautiful gardens were similar: “It was a technological and animation masterpiece. We used animated rear projection, large mirrors showing the scene, the puppets were both semi-plastic and classic. We moved the camera from the vertical direction on a sled (slider) that ran above the scene, and thus allowed the camera to move. Director Pojar may have looked a little at the works of Yuri Norstein, which worked with layers and other camera tricks. However, this technically demanding film is truly reminiscent of Trnka’s Garden, regardless of the fact that it was similar beyond the studio door. The studio garden was originally a kind of exterior, outdoor sculpture exhibition, which presented the created works to customers in the maintained greenery. Going outside was a bath for the soul, because staying in the dark studio was tiring. All you really had to do was open the door or pull the curtain. The remnants of the overgrown sculptures that remained here completed the genius loci of this place.”
-There was already a rather primitive way of previewing how the final film would look as early as 1974: “The technology for filming only slowly improved, besides new cameras, there appeared around 1974 the first so-called video viewfinder, or rather a video camera transmitting a black-and-white image from the camera to the monitor. It was a hazy hint of reality in front of the lens, but it was progress. The video camera was about 40 cm long and stuck out from the side of the film viewfinder. But all these inventions came slowly and we only dreamed of the prospectuses of foreign companies.”
-About the actual filming process: “An experience in itself was the light park, it was classic spotlights with mostly 500 W filament bulbs. However, the stage often shone all day, and then the up-to-20 lamps were able to heat the studio.”
-Vít also recalls that an auxiliary TV image for previewing purposes may have already been employed as early as 1973’s The Appletree Maiden, “where the artist Štěpánek designed the stage as a perfect illusion of Gothic panel paintings. The image included tricks designed by Pojar with mirrors, double exposures and semi-transparent glass in front of the lens, and originally-created gelatin filters.” Of course, these are very much the kinds of interesting tricks that I suspected were used when I wrote about the film last year…
-The arrival of Lubomír Beneš, the director of the …a je to! series starring Pat & Mat, was considered a boon to Čiklovka: “His openness and social kindliness were then a refresher of the studio. Pat & Mat was a series that was criticized and rejected, and Beneš had many problems realizing it. However, time has shown that it has found its audience.”
-Vít greatly laments how it’s almost impossible to view most of these old, classic shorts in good-quality prints and copies: “What worries me is that what we were able to do before, we cannot present it today as it was originally intended, that is, with a high-quality film image that’s not only information for experts, but also a delight for the viewer. Most of the films were processed on quality materials and their masters (negatives) exist (perhaps) to this day. […] We should take such films out of the dark warehouses again and pay attention to them, save them, show them, brag about them and prove that we don’t just have hockey players. Who can help? Is the company interested in it at all?”
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What happened to Magda Sandersová? Her last work in Krátký Film Praha as editor was the 1990 film Kouzelná střelnice, directed by Milada Sukdoláková and Vladimír Merta. Sometime in 1993 she returned to work on the Večerníček series Balabánci and the next season of V chalúpke a za chalúpkou. Recently, I watched the new Večerníček series Kdopak by se čertů bál (2021) and I saw her there (together with a former animator from Čiklovka named Kristina Batystová who has been working at Via Lucis for years).
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Breaking news: The last film produced by Viktor Mayer in Ciklovka, Loutka pritel cloveka was already uploaded in YouTube:
Enjoy!
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In fact, Prilis mnoho nehy and O trech pismenkach both made by Adolf Born we’re animated in Jiri Trnka Studio.
As both Pospisilova and Vavreckova animated here, O trech pismenkach had four animators including male workers namely Mensdorff, Chocholin, Vins and Svatos. For some reason, the only film not Vavreckova working here is Faust House by Garik Seko and Svatohor by Ivan Renc (previously he assigned in O trech pismenkach and Loutka pritel cloveka).
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