Metrograph Presents The Weird and Wonderful World of Czech Animation
Eastern Europe used to have a reputation for arthouse, avant-garde animation. One of the chief producers in the region was Czechia (or Czechoslovakia as it was then). Post communism, the country has continued to produce animation. New York's Metrograph is hosting a season of The Weird and Wonderful World of Czech Animation, celebrating films from 1949 to 2025.
The season runs from April 5 until April 18. On the final day, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Daria Kashcheeva will be in attendance. Her 2020 film Daughter was nominated for an Academy Award, and her 2023 film Electra was awarded Best International Short Film at Toronto International Film Festival. Both films will be screened, alongside Daria's three picks for a Carte Blanche selection.
She'll also be giving a special introduction ahead of Jiří Barta's The Pied Piper (1986), which screens preceded by his 1982 short film The Vanished World of Gloves.
Also screening is Jan Švankmajer's Alice (1988), Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction and a Czechoslovak shorts program.
It is widely speculated that the particular Czech genius for stop-motion animation comes from a tradition of puppetry theatre that stretched back centuries. Whatever the reasons may be, there is an abundance of excellent stop-motion animation that has come out of a relatively small country, from the post-war golden age to the present day. In The Weird and Wonderful World of Czech Animation, The Metrograph explores this history, which includes Hermína Týrlová, “The Mother of Czech animation”, the fantastic world-building of Karel Zeman, the surreal and disturbing worlds of Jiří Barta and Jan Švankmajer, right up to the contemporary work of Daria Kashcheeva.
The shorts program features the following:
A program of short works from some of the finest creative minds in Czechoslovak animation. Includes Karel Zeman’s Inspiration, a dialogue-free film featuring glass figurines of characters drawn from commedia dell’arte; Jan Švankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue, which no less a personage than Terry Gilliam called one of the 10 best animated films of all time; Jiří Barta’s A Ballad about Green Wood, inspired by the Legend of Vesna, a well-known piece of Slavic folklore; Břetislav Pojar’s Romance, which combines puppet and rarely utilized “pin screen” animation (most familiar from the prologue to Orson Welles’s The Trial); Michaela Pavlatova’s Reci Reci Reci, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film; and Hermína Týrlová and František Sádek’s immediately postwar The Revolt of the Toys, in which the playthings of the title unite in pursuit of a Nazi soldier (!).
The season is in collaboration with the Czech Center New York. For more information and tickets see here.
