Jiří Trnka

The Czech animation director Jiri Trnka (1912-69) is best remembered for his puppet movies, although he used also traditional drawing and cutout animation in his films. Even before making his first movies in the middle of 1940s, Trnka was a respected graphic artist and marionette theatre director, focusing especially on children's culture.

Animation was nevertheless where he made his greatest successes. In 1945, he and his colleagues founded the studio Bratri v triku, where he directed practically all of his works. Trnka made both short and feature animations. He made movies for children as well as for adults. He moved old fairytales and literary classics onto the big screen, including Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Chekhov and Hasek.

The artistic highpoint of his career is the long animation A Midsummer Night's Dream finished in 1959, while The Hand (1965), his last direction, could be regarded as his spiritual legacy.

Trnka himself described the basis of his work followingly: "I had a passion to conquer film, an area where everything is possible, with three-dimensional characters that do not function only on a single plane like drawn characters do, but in space... Puppet movies truly have endless possibilities: their power of expression is limitless whereas the realistic expression of normal movies faces insurmountable difficulties. The most successful puppet movies have been on one hand satirical, on the other hand lyrical and also ones where the themes are expressed with extreme magniloquence."

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