Jiří Trnka – Puppet Master: The Czech Year (1947), Old Czech Legends (1953), The Hand (1965)

Animation – it’s not just for adults any more! If the most internationally famous Czech animator is still that macabre Surrealist Jan Švankmajer, then Second Run have been doing their best to present global audiences with a more rounded picture of the country’s animated output. They’ve reissued several films by Karel Zeman, whose anti-war sentiments are expressed in a mixture of collage animation and live-action. Despite their subtle political undertones, the resulting films have an anarchic glee that no child could resist. A similar trade-off emerges in Second Run’s new double-disc Blu-Ray of features and shorts by Jiří Trnka, wittily titled Puppet Master. The back cover features a quote from Jean Cocteau, describing Trnka’s work as “the sum of childhood and poetry”. He’s not wrong – but Cocteau’s own fairy-tale film Beauty and the Beast was something deeper and stranger than just a harmless child-pleaser, and the same is the case for Trnka’s work.

Chronologically the first film in the set, although placed on the second disc, Trnka’s debut feature was The Czech Year, a compilation of short films based on festivals and saints’ days in the Czech calendar. The final segment, a Christmas Nativity, was the first completed; its success prompted Trnka to go back and fill in the rest of the year. To my eyes, the Nativity is a disappointing end to the film, if only because it’s less specifically Czech than the other segments. The Czech Year begins as a musical, full of folk dancing and raucous singing. It ends somewhere less pagan and more pious, although there is a great transitional segment in the story of the Czech patron saint Prokop of Sázava. A tale of temptation resisted, its roots are half in the Biblical story of Jesus in the wilderness, and half in folk traditions of carving and hunting.

What emerges fully formed in The Czech Year is Trnka’s personal style of stop-motion animation and puppeteering. For all its child-friendliness, his work is resistant to cuteness. At the outset of his career, he was reluctant to even give his puppets mouths. He eased off on this self-imposed restriction later, but the principle behind it remained clear. When Trnka’s figures are expressive, or sympathetic, joyous or tragic – and they’re capable of all of these – it is because of the emotion expressed through their movement, rather than a smile or a frown. Frequently, in The Czech Year, the puppets have no moveable facial features at all, preserving on film a restriction of the Czech puppet theatres that so many of the country’s great animators served their apprenticeship at. The summer section of The Czech Year is a homage to these artists, which slips from a kind of animated documentary about summer fairs into the world of the puppets themselves. The magic moment here, where the puppets escape the control of their strings, will become thematically important later on.

Trnka returned to the anthology format six years later with Old Czech Legends. The vague aftertaste of paganism in The Czech Year is something close to the whole meal in Old Czech Legends, in a film that comes close to folk horror without slipping the bounds of its PG certificate. The mood is much heavier, thanks in no small part to the ominous score by the wonderfully-named Václav Trojan. (Those who enjoyed what Ludwig Göransson recently did with Odysseus’s bow in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will find Trojan’s score similarly full of primal, resonant twangs) There is still joy here, and not just in beholding the wonder of Trnka’s technique. As with The Czech Year, there’s a group dance scene early on, and you marvel again at Trnka’s ability to capture choreography that would be elaborate enough for trained, living dancers using nothing but puppets.

CLICK THE BOX ART AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN TO BUY TWO FILMS BY JIRI TRNKA

Trnka’s audacity here in attempting to capture things that should be impossible in a medium as concrete as stop-motion – gathering storm-clouds, flowing rivers – recalls early Karel Zeman shorts like Inspiration, and as it gets into its final act Old Czech Legends matches Trnka’s peer in anti-war sentiment. Like Zeman, Trnka gets away with it by using safely distant historical settings, but the political subtext becomes actual text in his final work, the 1965 short The Hand. The story of a tiny sculptor whose artistic freedom is threatened when a Godlike hand commissions him to make a monument, it can be read as an allegory for anything from religion and free will to the process of animation itself. The most obvious subtext, however, is state censorship, and it seems obtuse to read The Hand as anything other than a cry of frustration from an artist who had to deal with such commissars too frequently.

Trnka did, at least, retire before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia made life really difficult for that country’s directors. He seems to have been able to find ways around censorship easily enough. Old Czech Legends was part of a government drive to promote national unity through celebrating the work of its source author Alois Jirásek, but you couldn’t describe the resulting film as being weighed down by the strictures of propaganda: weighed down by being extremely heavy metal, yes, but not that. Jonathan Owen’s essay in the accompanying booklet notes that Trnka got away with cutting the most Stalinist-friendly material from his adaptation, and similarly you suspect The Hand passed the censors because it ends with the titular five-fingered despot doing an Elon Muskish salute that codes it as one of Communism’s historic enemies. But the result is a rousingly anti-totalitarian classic.

And yet even here there is the joy of creation. The Hand itself is an inspired visual gag, played as he is by a real human hand (Trnka’s own?) who is matched for vivacity and swiftness by Trnka’s puppet hero. There is slapstick and silliness in among the darker allegorical elements, and as with a lot of classic Czech animation Western audiences might find themselves becoming nostalgic for something they never actually experienced as a child. This is because Czechoslovak animations were more widely distributed around the world than even the best of that country’s live-action features; A Report on the Party and the Guests would never be shown on a Saturday morning, but some of the cartoons were. For global animators who despaired of Disney’s hegemony, they became a whole alternative tradition. When Rene Laloux found that France’s animation studios weren’t up to the task of realising his vision for Fantastic Planet, he turned to the Czechs. Rebecca Sugar has cited The Hand as a formative influence, and Anglophone viewers might find themselves reminded of Oliver Postgate and early Tim Burton as much as they are Jan Švankmajer. The Czech Year and Old Czech Legends are, from the title down, very nationally specific films. They are also universal ones.

As well as the three films listed above, the set also contains Badly Painted Hen, a fabulously bonkers short by Old Czech Legends co-writer Jiří Brdečka that had previously appeared on their release of The Cassandra Cat. The booklet contains two lengthy essays from Czechoslovak cinema’s two most learned Anglophone critics, Peter Hames and Jonathan Owen, and there are also a pair of informative short visual essays (one on each disc) from Evan Chester. The first concerns Trnka himself – also covered in a 25-minute 1955 documentary by Bruno Šefranka, The Puppets of Jiří Trnka – and the second is an overview of Czech animation in general, which should give any new converts inspired by this set a good sense of where to go next.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – TWO FILMS BY JRNI TRNKA