An Almost Subversive Freedom
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Velvet Revolution
14 min read
The article specifically mentions the 1989 'Velvet Revolution' as the peaceful uprising that overthrew Czechoslovakia's dictatorship. Understanding this pivotal moment provides crucial context for why Czech animation evolved as it did under communist rule and what changed after liberation.
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Jan Švankmajer
12 min read
The article mentions Švankmajer's 'nightmare visions' as part of Czechoslovakia's rich animation tradition. He's a surrealist animator whose dark, tactile stop-motion work influenced filmmakers worldwide, yet remains lesser-known to general audiences compared to Disney or Pixar animators.
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Jiří Trnka
15 min read
Referenced in the article as having significant 'career and impact,' Trnka was the father of Czech puppet animation who created deeply humanistic films under communist censorship. His work demonstrates how artists used animation to express subversive ideas within authoritarian systems.
Welcome! It’s time for a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Glad you could join us.
Before we start, a quick note of thanks. Sunday’s issue about Toy Story and film stock was the most popular thing we’ve published here. Much of its traffic came from Hacker News, where it held the number-one spot for hours and passed 1,000 points within a day. Really grateful to everyone for the kind responses.
Now, though, we’re looking elsewhere in the animation world — to the country of Czechoslovakia, which no longer exists.
Czechoslovak animation is a large topic that’s appeared many times in the newsletter. You may know our pieces on the wool films of Hermína Týrlová, the cinematic trickery of Karel Zeman and the career and impact of Jiří Trnka. Yet there’s a lot we’ve mentioned only in passing, if at all.
What about Pat and Mat, Mach and Šebestová and the chaotic, joyful Hey Mister, Let’s Play? What about Little Mole and The Vanished World of Gloves — and the nightmare visions of Jan Švankmajer? Even those are just the beginning.
Czechoslovakia built one of the world’s richest, hardest-to-summarize animation scenes. Artists worked in all styles, with all materials: drawings, but also glass and wood and pastry dough. It was wonderful stuff. And, in 1991, an exhibition tried to map its history.
The country was changing at the time. In ‘89, the dictatorship got overthrown by a mass, peaceful uprising (the “Velvet Revolution”), and the Iron Curtain came down. Czechoslovakia itself dissolved, again peacefully, around three years later.
Between those two events, this exhibition opened at a museum in New Jersey. On display were puppets, sets, films and more; the New York Times found it all “utterly charming.”1 It was billed as an attempt to “widen [America’s] perception of this often underappreciated art form” through the magic of animated films from Czechoslovakia.
The show’s title was Krátký Film: The Art of Czechoslovak Animation. Accompanying it was a catalog — with photos, stills and English essays about the whole sweep of the country’s animation. It’s a great intro to the scene, and a source we’ve valued for years. We’ve decided to preserve that catalog on the Internet Archive.
You can view it online below. For a
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