Jiri Trnka

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Jiří Trnka (February 24, 1912 Plzeň – December 30, 1969 Prague) was Czech puppet maker, illustrator, motion-picture animator and film director, renowned for his puppet animations. He graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He created a puppet theater in 1936, which was dissolved at the outbreak of World War II. Trnka thus immersed himself into stage design and illustration of books for children. After the war ended, Trnka established an animation unit at the Prague film studio and soon became internationally recognized as the world's greatest puppet animator using the traditional Czech method, and he won several film festival awards. His award at the Cannes Festival in 1946 came merely one year after the entery into the world of motion picture. He was dubbed "the Walt Disney of the East", although what he essentially did was trading depth for shallowness and excellence for commercialism to . His films were mostly made for an adult audience. Beginning in 1948, the communist Czech government began to subsidize his work, although this did not seem to affect the message or style of his work. He also created animated cartoons. He wrote the scripts for most of his own films. He died of heart trouble in 1969.

Český výtvarník a režisér animovaných filmů, ilustrátor, malíř a sochař. Jiří Trnka je spolu s H. Týrlovou a K. Zemanem tvůrce českého animovaného filmu.

Life

The stop-motion puppet animator, graphic designer, illustrator, painter, sculptor, stage and theater designer, and toy designer Jiří Trnka is together with H. Týrlová and K. Zeman the founder of the Czech animated film. Universally accepted values laced with kind humor were a significant component of his works, which combine the traditional with the modern. As a private person he never said much; he weighed every word. Children, his and the others, were the love of his life. He was an excellent reader of the human character and knew how to attract famous people. His physique was almost remarkable - a robust, stocky man with a uniquely sculpted head.

Trnka came from a lineage of diversified artists. At the age of eleven, Trnka started studying drawing under puppeteer Josef Skupa in Pilsen (Plzeň) and started giving puppet performances. Between 1929 and 1935, he studied at the Prague-based Umělecko-průmyslová škola (now Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design), majoring in applied graphics. For almost a year he was running his own puppet show, Wooden Theater (Dřevěné divadlo), at the Rokoko theater in Prague.

In 1939 he grabbed the attention of the publishing world with his illustrations of the children's book Míša Kulička. In the same year, the National Theater in Prague (Národní divadlo) selected his bid for Smetana's opera Libuše, and he started collaboration with Osvobozené divadlo, where he likewise designed and produced stage props and costumes.

The early years of World War II Trnka spent working with director J. Frejka on the productions by Shakespeare, Plautus, and Klicpera. Along with Adolf Zábranský, he invented a new type of illustration for children, and it was around this period that he started illustrating books of novelist and children's writer František Hrubín. In the middle of the war years, he produced the painting Czech Bethlehem as an expression of beauty, calm and peace.

In 1945, along with other animators, he founded the animated film studio Bratři v triku, and the film became his creative medium for the next twenty years. In 1946 he founded the puppet film studio that was later renamed Studio Jiřího Trnky. In 1946 his animated film The Animals and the Robbers won an award at the Cannes Festival. Two years later, an offer came from the United States to teach film animation in university, but he declined with words: "I cannot make little cowboys; I know how to make Czech peasants, and nobody in America is interested in those. I am local." FOOTNOTE http://www.cojeco.cz/index.php?detail=1&s_lang=2&id_desc=99263&title=Trnka

From 1956 on, he illustrated numerous children's books. The last years of his life were devoted to painting, sculptures, and book illustrations. In 1967 he was appointed professor of his Alma Mater, but failing health made it difficult and, eventually, impossible to work. He died in Prague at the age of 57.

His films were frequently first recognized outside Czechoslovakia. Trnka attributed this to the fact that in Czechoslovakia, his poeticism and perhaps naiveté was a common fare, whereas the West was inundated by somewhat tougher production. Moreover, he never thought that the fame was only because of the puppets; what is being said is what matters, not just the motion and attractiveness of the puppets. FOOTNOTE http://www.radio.cz/cz/clanek/81813

Jan Werich was once visiting Trnka's studio and, without Trnka being aware of it, observed him painting the backdrop on glass planes. Werich thought he was dreaming, so he came over and asked, "Excuse me, are you painting with both hands?" Trnka responded, "Well, not always, but those morons are not around and we are running out of time [on the children's movie project]." FOOTNOTE (QUOTE) http://www.radio.cz/cz/clanek/82021


NOT A FOOTNOTE http://osobnosti.profitux.cz/?typ=galerie&od=t&os=179

NOT A FOOTNOTE http://osobnosti.unas.cz/#Ji%F8%ED%20Trnka

http://libri.cz/databaze/kdo20/search.php

http://literatura.kvalitne.cz/trnka.htm

http://osobnosti.unas.cz/#Ji%F8%ED%20Trnka

Walt Disney of the East

Trnka arrived to the first post-war Cannes Festival in 1946 with his three cartoons (his filmmaking career had only begun on May 29, 1945, when a group of young animators asked the famous book illustrator to become their boss). Although The Robbers and the Animals won the award, another film that was entered, The Present, was of more importance to Trnka's work. The Present was a cartoon for adults, a satire with Trnka's very own individual art design and a non-Disney way of storytelling. It was completely misunderstood until Stephen Bosustow congratulated Trnka on it three years later. It was a visible step that divided post-war animation into two groups: the productions of big studios (classics) and films that were modern expressions, created in form and content by strong, individual personalities. Trnka liberated the Czech and world animated and puppet films from American influences and brought in a complexity of animation and poetry. His long-term fellow artists Stanislav Látal, Václav Bedřich, Adolf Born, and Zdeněk Smetana continued in his footsteps.

After he saw Trnka's wide screen puppet feature film The Midsummer Night's Dream at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959, English journalist labeled Trnka the "Walt Disney Of The East". This is viewed by some as exaggeration, citing the differences between the two great artists, such as Disney's focus on the children or family audience, while most of Trnka's films targeted the adult audience.

In 1966, four years before his death, Newsday lauded him as "second to Chaplin as a film artist because his work inaugurated a new stage in a medium long dominated by Disney." FOOTNOTE http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/animateddogs/animation2.html

Puppets Come Alive

Trnka preferred puppets, whom he loved and elevated above all other kinds of art. The Czech Year (Spalicek), which refers to illustrated folk songbooks and also a piece of wood) is a very significant piece in Trnka's career. It was his first puppet feature film, and asked twenty years later which of his films he liked the most, he named this one. This was not an answer of a patriot, although the six-part cycle illustrates the old Czech folk customs around the year. When he started working on it in 1946, Christmas was drawing in, so he opened with "The Bethlehem" sequence, which was inspired by his own painting. The screening of this first portion of the film was so successful that the cycle expanded to six parts. The Czech Year was internationally acclaimed for the beautiful, brilliant animation of unpretentious and unembellished wooden puppets and music inspired by Czech folk songs.

The Hand was Trnka's last, and some say the greatest, film. An unforgiving political allegory, different in content and form, it strictly follows the story outline without developing lyrical detail. An artist, happy with his life, is making a pot for his favorite plant, when a giant hand appears and orders him to create a statue of a hand, not allowing him to make anything else. Resistance and disobedience take him to prison, where he is forced to give in, at the cost of his freedom and ultimately life. The same hand organizes the artist's state funeral, where all artists are honored. This darkly humorous allegory on totalitarianism, which won the top prize at the Annecy International Animation Festival, was banned in the Communist Czechoslovakia. When it was released, they dismissed it as a criticism of the personality cult (Stalin), but the general public recognized the alarming allegory of human existence in a totalitarian society.

This was the first time that Trnka openly expressed what he thought about his own inhuman totalitarian society. The Hand was one of the first films that helped usher in the Prague Spring. Oddly, it predicted Trnka's own death. When he died in November 1969, he had a state funeral with honours. Only four months later, The Hand was blacklisted, all copies were confiscated by the secret police, and there was no screening for the next twenty years. This was how much the Communist government felt intimidated by the seventeen-minute puppet film.

Trnka took on modern issues in the film Cybernetic Grandma.

Story of the Bass Cello is based on Chekhov's story about a bass player whose clothes are stolen while he is bathing in the river. When he spots a beautiful maiden in the same predicament, he hides her in the case of his large double-bass.

Merry Circus is neither a puppet film nor a cartoon; movement is simulated by paper cutouts.

A Drop Too Much is a tragic tale of a motorcyclist who, on his way to meet his fiancée, stops at a tavern with disastrous consequences. This was a warning against drink driving.

Song of the Prairie is a parody of the Wild West, where the pistol rules the roost, timidity has no place, and love blossoms at the first sight.

Emperor's Nightingale is a puppet animation classic based on the story by Andersen featuring a nightingale who sings a song to the Emperor, emboldening him to revolt against the rigid protocol of his glittering yet shallow world. The Washington Post described it as "a lost classic happily found again" and the Wired magazine found it to be "one of the most stunningly beautiful animated films ever released" and "a masterpiece of filmmaking and a production that elevates the art form to new heights." FOOTNOTE http://www.rembrandtfilms.com/jiritrnka.htm

Three short adaptations of Hašek's famous classic The Good Soldier Schweik have won the heart of all Czechs, but he was still looking for an internationally reknown classic story where he could address the entire world through his art. He was a Renaissance man born in the wrong time and the wrong place.

The wide screen puppet feature film The Midsummer Night's Dream, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, voicing Trnka's opinions and estheticism of the puppet film, failed both home and abroad. It was a universallly known story with a carefully prepared screenplay (co-writer J. Brdečka), brilliant puppet animation with little dialogue and sporadic narration. Trnka never allowed lip-synch; he thought it was barbaric for puppets, being works of art, to be treated in this manner. Music was always preferred to the spoken word. He often discussed his projects with the composer (V. Trojan) before he began working on the screenplay. When the musical score was composed ahead of the animation and he liked it, he would change the animation arrangement to fit the music.

The reception of The Midsummer Night's Dream was great disappointment for Trnka; he worked for years on it. Days and nights were spent shooting, with crew sleeping in the studio. It cost him his health. Animation historian Edgar Dutka ascribes the fiasco to the picturesque yet intricate story, which was lost on the critics as well as audience. Trnka was strongly criticized at home for creating l'art pour l'art (Art for Art's Sake) and thus losing touch with the working class. He shot the film with two parallel cameras because he did not believe in "compositions seen through a mailbox slot." [1]

Symbiosis with Communist Censorship

After the Communist takeover of the post-war Czechoslovakia on February 25, 1948, which gradually prompted many artists and prominent figures into exile, Trnka found himself for the most part not only unrestrained in his creative genius but also subsidized, for even the Communists enjoyed his work. They thought the puppet stories were for children; therefore, they did not see any harm, and they did not censor or blacklist almost any of them. Only two parts of the film Spring, featuring a Christian procession, and The Legend of St. Prokop were banned on grounds of religious propaganda until the late 1980s. When Trnka finished the national fairytale Bajaja in 1950, he was greatly honoured by the regime.

On the other hand, when he wanted to adapt Don Quijote in 1951, the government barred the project, having found it too cosmopolitan. There always existed two sides to the government's 'generous' hand. Instead of Don Quijote, he was pressed to create historic myths in The Old Czech Legends. Trnka did not want to. He would have rather quit working at the studio and gone back to illustrating children's books, but he gave the theme a second thought and what ensued was a film with strong and brilliant scenes, great character animation, and superb music, more in the way of Leos Janacek than Bedřich Smetana. This project proved Trnka's filmmaker skills; however, he was right: such a topic had a very limited audience. Even Czechs did not appreciate a filmed version of the history that they had to learn at school.

The Studio of Jiří Trnka

Along with fellow animators, Trnka in 1946 established a small puppet film studio (renamed The Studio of Jiří Trnka), where puppets would "move on the screen". Here "active dreaming" – blending of imagination and poetry with invention and realism, occurred, resulting in the classic animated puppet films, rarely shot elsewhere in the world. Not only puppet films but also commercials produced here were marked by superb animation techniques, wisdom, and ubiquotous moral values. The Czech puppet film remains the studio's focus. All technologies of animated film, including stop-motion puppet animation, semi-plastic film, flat-surface film, pixilation (animation of objects), and the plasticine method are used. http://www.kratkyfilm.com/catalogue/kf/studiojt.htm


Notes


Works

  • film The Present (in or before 1946)
  • The Robbers and the Animals (Zvířátka a petrovští) – 1946
  • Pérák a SS, 13 minutes – 1946
  • Bethlehem (Betlém), 10 minutes – 1947
  • The Legend of St. Prokop (Legenda o sv. Prokopu), 10 minutes – 1947
  • puppet film The Czech Year (Špalíček) – 1947
  • animated film The Emperor's Nightingale (Císařův slavík), 71 minutes – 1948
  • The Devil's Mill (Čertův mlýn) – 1949
  • animated film Story of the Bass Cello (Román s basou) – 1950
  • puppet film Bajaja – 1950
  • film Song of the Prairie (Árie prérie) – 1950
  • puppet film Merry Circus (Veselý cirkus) – 1951
  • puppet film The Old Czech Legends (Staré pověsti české), 91 minutes – 1952
  • puppet film Two Little Frosts (Dva Mrazíci) – 1954
  • A Drop Too Much (O skleničku víc) – 1954
  • puppet film of three parts The Good Soldier Schweik (Dobrý voják Švejk) – 1954
  • Cirkus Hurvínek – 1955
  • puppet film The Midsummer Night's Dream (Sen noci Svatojánské), 75 minutes – 1959
  • The Passion (Vášeň) – 1961
  • puppet film The Cybernetic Grandma (Kybernetická babička) – 1962
  • book The Garden (Zahrada) – 1962
  • puppet film The Archangel Gabriel and Lady Goose (Archanděl Gabriel a Paní Husa), 28 minutes – 1964
  • puppet film The Hand (Ruka), 18 minutes – 1965
  • film Spring (Jaro)
  • illustrations of books Broučci, České pohádky, stories of Hans Christian Andersen, and others

References and further reading


External links

Credits

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