Czech animation

Based on Wikipedia: Czech animation

In 1965, an aging Czech puppeteer named Jiří Trnka created his final film. It was called The Hand, and it told the story of a potter who wants nothing more than to make flower pots in peace. But a giant hand—representing authoritarian power—keeps appearing, demanding that the potter sculpt hands instead. The potter resists. The hand destroys his work, imprisons him in a gilded cage, and eventually kills him. At his funeral, the hand places a medal on his chest.

The film was banned almost immediately by Czechoslovakia's communist censors.

What makes this story remarkable isn't just its bravery. It's that Trnka told it using puppets—wooden figures with painted faces, manipulated frame by frame in a technique that requires photographing perhaps twenty-four separate images just to create one second of movement. He chose the slowest, most painstaking medium imaginable to deliver his message, and it worked. Critics would later rank The Hand as the fifth greatest animated film ever made.

This is Czech animation: subversive, handcrafted, and stubbornly uncommercial. For over a century, a small country in the heart of Europe has produced some of the world's most inventive animated films, influencing everyone from Tim Burton to the creators of Coraline. Yet most people outside animation circles have never heard of it.

The Puppet Masters

Czech animation didn't begin with political allegories. It started, as most film industries do, with advertisements.

In 1920, a filmmaker named Bohuslav Šula attempted to adapt Broučci, a beloved children's book about glowing firefly creatures. The film was never finished—an inauspicious start that would prove unrepresentative of what followed. By 1927, an animator named Karel Dodal was producing commercials featuring Felix the Cat, the same character who was delighting American audiences. Dodal made these Felix shorts primarily for savings banks, which tells you something about the entrepreneurial spirit of interwar Czechoslovakia.

But it was puppets that would define Czech animation's identity.

There's a reason for this. The Czech lands had a centuries-old tradition of puppet theater, with traveling puppeteers carrying their marionettes from village to village. These weren't simple hand puppets. Czech marionettes were elaborate constructions with carved wooden heads, multiple strings, and a distinctive style that balanced caricature with expressiveness. When cinema arrived, it was natural that Czech artists would wonder: what if we could make the puppets move on film?

In 1931, audiences saw Spejblovo filmové opojení, a satirical puppet film running thirty-two minutes—extraordinarily long for animation at the time. The film featured Spejbl, a puppet character so famous in Czechoslovakia that he was practically a national mascot. Imagine if Americans made a feature film starring the Muppets in 1931, and you get a sense of the ambition involved.

The Golden Age Begins

Everything changed in 1945.

That year, as World War II ended and Czechoslovakia rebuilt itself from Nazi occupation, two men founded a studio that would transform world animation. Eduard Hofman, a puppet theater operator, partnered with Jiří Trnka, an illustrator and puppeteer who had worked in the resistance. They called their studio Bratři v triku—"Brothers in T-shirts"—a charmingly informal name for what would become one of the most influential animation houses in history.

Their first production was Zasadil dědek řepu—"Grandfather Planted a Turnip"—a ten-minute adaptation of a Czech folk tale about a turnip so large that grandfather, grandmother, granddaughter, dog, cat, and mouse all have to work together to pull it from the ground. It was a simple story, beautifully told. In the same year, Karel Zeman released a reconstruction of Vánoční sen ("A Christmas Dream"), a pioneering mixed live-action puppet film whose original had been destroyed in a laboratory fire the previous year.

Both films screened at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946. Both won awards.

The timing wasn't coincidental. The communist government that took power in 1948 nationalized the film industry, which—paradoxically—proved beneficial for animation. Suddenly studios had guaranteed funding, equipment, and time. They didn't need to chase commercial success. Animators could spend years on a single film, experimenting with techniques that would have bankrupted a private studio.

Trnka seized this opportunity. In 1947, he directed Špalíček ("The Czech Year"), the first feature-length Czech puppet animation film. Over the next decade, he would make six features and twelve shorts, establishing himself as one of the most productive animators in the world. International critics dubbed him "the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe"—a comparison he would probably have rejected, given how different their approaches were.

Trnka Versus Disney

Understanding why Czech animation matters requires understanding how it differs from its American counterpart.

Walt Disney's studio, founded in 1923, pioneered techniques that still dominate mainstream animation: fluid movement, realistic physics, characters whose emotions read clearly from any seat in the theater. Disney films are engineered for maximum accessibility. They're designed to make you forget you're watching drawings or computer models and lose yourself in the story.

Trnka wanted the opposite. His puppets move stiffly, with visible joints and painted eyes that can't blink. Their movements are deliberate, almost ceremonial. You never forget you're watching objects being manipulated. And that's the point. Trnka believed that the artificiality of puppets gave them a kind of dignity that drawn characters lacked. A puppet playing Hamlet wasn't trying to convince you it was human—it was offering a stylized interpretation that could access emotional truths differently than a live actor could.

His 1959 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream demonstrates this philosophy perfectly. The puppet fairies are unmistakably wooden, yet somehow more magical than any special effect could achieve. Their unreality becomes their power.

The Zlín School

While Trnka worked in Prague, a second center of Czech animation flourished in Zlín, an industrial city in Moravia best known as the headquarters of the Bata shoe company.

The Zlín studio's two pillars were Karel Zeman and Hermína Týrlová. Týrlová specialized in children's films, most famously Vzpoura hraček ("Revolt of the Toys") from 1947, about toys that come to life to help a little girl. Her work was gentler than Trnka's, designed to enchant rather than provoke.

Zeman went in a completely different direction. He became obsessed with combining live actors with animation—not the way Disney had done in Mary Poppins, where animation clearly occupied a separate fantasy realm, but in a seamless blend where you couldn't quite tell what was real and what wasn't.

His masterpiece was Vynález zkázy ("Invention for Destruction," also known as "The Fabulous World of Jules Verne") from 1958. Adapting several Verne novels, Zeman created a visual style that mimicked 19th-century engravings—the kind of illustrations that originally accompanied Verne's stories. Live actors moved through sets that looked like they'd stepped out of a Victorian book, interacting with animated submarines, sea monsters, and fantastic machines. The film was designed to look like the past's vision of the future, and the effect remains hypnotic.

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne became the most successful Czech film ever made in international distribution. It influenced countless filmmakers, from Terry Gilliam to Wes Anderson. When you see a movie that deliberately makes its effects look handmade or antique—that uses visible artifice as an aesthetic choice rather than a limitation—you're seeing Zeman's legacy.

The Second Generation

By the mid-1960s, a new cohort of animators was emerging, and they pushed Czech animation into stranger territory.

The most important was Jan Švankmajer.

If Trnka was the poet of Czech puppet animation, Švankmajer was its nightmare. Trained as a surrealist—he was a formal member of the Prague Surrealist Group—Švankmajer made films in which objects come to life in disturbing ways. Meat writhes. Clay faces devour each other. Everyday items enact bizarre rituals of violence and consumption.

His 1983 short Možnosti dialogu ("Dimensions of Dialogue") consists of three sequences showing different types of human communication, all presented through stop-motion animation. In one, two heads made of food grind against each other until they're both reduced to mush. In another, two clay figures appear to be making love until they start producing weapons that attack each other. The film is funny, disturbing, and impossible to forget.

Švankmajer's 1988 feature Něco z Alenky ("Alice") adapted Lewis Carroll's story through his trademark unsettling lens. The White Rabbit is a taxidermied specimen that leaks sawdust. Alice herself is played by a live actress, but she exists in a world of decaying puppets, suspicious meats, and inexplicable metamorphoses. Tim Burton has cited it as a major influence on his own Alice in Wonderland.

Other second-generation animators developed their own distinctive styles. Jiří Barta created Krysař ("The Pied Piper") in 1986, a dark retelling of the legend using carved wooden figures with faces inspired by Expressionist painting. Lubomír Beneš created Pat a Mat, a long-running series about two handymen whose repair projects inevitably go hilariously wrong—physical comedy told entirely without dialogue. The show has been broadcast in dozens of countries.

The Price of State Funding

There was a catch to all this creative flourishing: censorship.

The communist government that funded Czech animation also controlled it. Many projects were rejected before they could begin. Others were altered or suppressed after completion. Trnka's The Hand was banned outright—its allegory about authoritarian control was too obvious to ignore.

Animators developed strategies for smuggling subversive content past the censors. Some set their films in fantasy worlds or historical periods that seemed safely removed from contemporary politics. Others embedded their critiques so deeply in symbolism that only sophisticated viewers would catch them. Švankmajer, who could scarcely help making disturbing art, had several films banned and was forbidden from working in cinema for years at a time.

The irony is bitter: the same system that gave Czech animators the resources to make uncompromising art also prevented them from making the art they most wanted to create.

After the Revolution

When communism collapsed in 1989, Czech animation faced a different challenge: the market.

The newly privatized film industry had no interest in funding labor-intensive puppet films that might take years to complete and earn modest returns. 3D computer animation—the kind pioneered by Pixar in America—required expensive equipment and training that Czech studios lacked. Many animators who had spent decades perfecting handcraft techniques found themselves obsolete.

Production dropped dramatically. The "Golden Age" was definitively over.

Yet Czech animation didn't die. Švankmajer continued making features, including Faust (1994), a characteristically unnerving adaptation of the legend. A new generation of animators emerged, many trained at the Film and Television School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, commonly known by its Czech acronym FAMU.

Michaela Pavlátová became internationally recognized for her hand-drawn work, earning an Academy Award nomination for her 1991 short Řeči, řeči, řeči ("Words, Words, Words") and a Golden Globe nomination for her 2021 feature My Sunny Maad, about a Czech woman who moves to Afghanistan after marrying an Afghan man she meets in Prague. Her work proves that Czech animation's tradition of taking on serious themes for adult audiences continues.

In 2020, Dcera ("Daughter"), directed by Daria Kashcheeva, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film. The film uses stop-motion puppets to tell a story about a father and daughter struggling to communicate—proof that the Czech puppet tradition, updated for contemporary emotional storytelling, still resonates.

The First Czech CGI Feature

It wasn't until 2008 that the Czech Republic produced its first feature-length computer-animated film: Kozí příběh ("Goat Story"), directed by Jan Tománek. The film's existence represented both progress—Czech animators could now work in the dominant global medium—and a kind of loss. The handmade quality that distinguished Czech animation for decades was, by definition, absent from computer-generated imagery.

The challenge facing Czech animation today is whether its distinctive identity can survive in a global market dominated by American studios with hundred-million-dollar budgets. The answer may lie not in competing with Pixar and DreamWorks directly, but in continuing to do what Czech animators have always done: make strange, personal, uncommercial work that no one else would attempt.

The Festivals

Two annual events keep the Czech animation tradition visible.

Anifest, established in 2002, became one of the world's significant animation festivals, attracting more than twenty thousand guests per year at its height. It was explicitly designed to build on Czech animation's heritage while showcasing contemporary work from around the world. The festival included not just screenings but exhibitions, concerts, and discussions—a full cultural event rather than merely a film competition.

Anifilm, founded in 2010 and held in Liberec (it was previously in Třeboň), focuses on the full spectrum of animation, with awards for student work, television design, and commissioned projects alongside feature competition. Together, these festivals ensure that animation professionals, students, and enthusiasts have regular opportunities to engage with both Czech animation history and international contemporary work.

Why It Matters

Czech animation matters for reasons that extend beyond film history.

First, it demonstrates that meaningful animation can exist outside the commercial mainstream. At a time when global animation is dominated by family-friendly CGI features designed to sell merchandise, Czech animation reminds us that the medium can also produce subversive political allegory, unsettling surrealist nightmare, and personal art-house experimentation.

Second, it shows what becomes possible when artists have time. The communist-era funding system was repressive and often absurd, but it allowed animators to spend years on single projects—an unimaginable luxury in market-driven systems. The masterpieces that resulted suggest that some kinds of art simply cannot be made quickly or cheaply.

Third, it proves that small countries can punch above their weight in culture. Czechoslovakia at its largest had perhaps fifteen million people. Yet its animators influenced artists worldwide, earned international prizes, and developed techniques that remain distinctive decades later. Cultural impact doesn't require Hollywood budgets.

Finally, Czech animation reminds us that puppets and stop-motion and handcrafted techniques are not obsolete—they're alternatives. In an age of photorealistic CGI, there's something powerful about watching wooden figures move jerkily across meticulously constructed sets. The visible labor, the obvious artifice, creates a different relationship between viewer and image. You're not being fooled. You're being invited to imagine.

That invitation remains open.