Some of the finest stop motion is all but impossible to get ahold of in the US.....
My greatest inspiration comes from some of the masters of Eastern Europe. their names are all but unknown here, in fact difficult to pronounce; Jiri Trnka, Ladislas Starewitch, Jan Svankmajer, Karel Zeman------- Its even difficult in many cases to learn about them. Ive managed to gather SOME info on some of these animators, and even get hold of a few of their films, and I'll use this space to share whatever I can and help to spread the legacy of their all but lost artform. I will be updating this page from time to time as I learn more.
Trnka clips
Archangel
Gabriel
& Mrs Goose
Prince
Bajaja
Clip 1
Prince
Bajaja
Clip 2
Spejbl and
Hurvenik
Clip 1
Old Czech
Legends
clip 1
Old Czech
Legends
clip 2
Midsummer
Nights'
Dream 1
Midsummer
Nights'
Dream 2
Region-Free DVD!!!
Why is the world artificially divided up into 'regions'? Basically it's a marketing thing.... it's all about money and controlling properties. And it makes it incredibly difficult to see films from other countries! But it is possible to get a region free DVD player. Apparently they're pretty common in Europe, but in the states, your source is World-Import.They have a help section with lots of good information. And the really nice thing is, these players don't cost any more than a 'normal' DVD player! World Import also offers Tape Conversion Services from basically anything to anything.
Collecting:
Ok, you're set up with a region-free dvd player and ready to start getting your greedy little hands on some of this drool-inducing european stopmotion you've been dreaming about. Where do you find it? I have some listings below for various international websites where some videos can be found, but locating more is an ongoing process. I like to start by checking the various international branches of Amazon, which can be accessed from the bottom of the Amazon.com homepage. Some of them are in English, like Amazon UK, but for some you'll want to view them using an online translator like Alta-Vista's Babelfish
They have a window where you paste in or copy the address for a site and select the origin and target languages, and then you click translate. What you get is a bizarre, mangled string of almost incomprehensible sentences that are sometimes incredibly funny. It's really weird to see the common phrases in other languages translated literally by a machine.... a phrase like "the flesh is willing" can come across as "the meat wishes it so". With some experience, you'll learn how to wade through these confusing pages and find the important information. that's why I like to start with Amazon, because I already understand their ordering process.
Another thing I like about Amazon is the recommendations. Just find one film and put it in your shopping cart and they'll show you a page with a lot of similar items. This way you can stumble across things you had no idea existed.
It's a good idea to make sure you're actually looking at DVDs. I've found that, even if I set the search engine on DVD or video, sometimes Amazon Japan will show me books. one thing that helps is the little captions under the box cover. If it's a DVD, you can always see the DVD designation there (even in the untranslated page). You can also make it a habit to glance at the top of the page and make sure you're in the DVD section of the store. It's a good idea to check all your items before checking out to preclude any mistakes.
Here's a heartbreaker.... sometimes a person's name or the name of a video will be shown only in Japanese (or whatever language, but it tends to happen a lot in Japanese). in this case you have to rely pretty much on the box cover art... look really closely at it, and hopefully you can recognize something. Once you've determined that this is indeed the artist you're looking for, you can highlight the Japanese text for his name and paste it into the search window... it just might turn up more stuff! Also, if the name of the video is in Japanese (for instance, Svet Jiriho Trnky vol. 2) you can sometimes find a number in English (the 2) which might indicate that it is one in a series. Try pasting the name into the search window and deleting the number.
Here is an online currency convertor that will tell you how much money this is going to cost you: http://www.xe.com/ucc/
The Alta-Vista translator doesn't cover Czech... I haven't found any that do. Some offer the paid services of human translators if you want to go to that extreme. But I did find this dictionary site that will translate Czech words and phrases: http://www.slovnik.cz/
Starewitch clips
Le Lion
Devenu Vieux
clip 1
Le Lion
Devenu Vieux
clip 2
Fleur De
Fougère
clip 1
Sources:
Here are some of the stores where you can find this stuff: Amazon Japan This goes to their English page. SOME of the text is in english, much of it isn't. And it seems as soon as you do a search you're back to full-on Japanese. That's alright... you'll learn to navigate more by clicking on recommendations they list under "Similar items" and "People who bought these items also bought". And you can get some small relief by running the site through a translator like Babelfish or Google. Amazon also has stores in Germany, the UK etc... they're all listed at the very bottom of Amazon's main page.Bontonland Video superstore located in Prague (Praha as it's spelled in Czech)
HMV Japan This has become my favorite shopping source for all things Eastern European. The English version is entirely in English!!! Well, except for the titles of some of the videos. But hey, how easy does it need to get??? Best of all - here's their incredible International Stopmotion & Puppetfilm Bestsellers section! This site has just about every video listed on my site!
But to really start searching, click on one of the links listed under an animator's name to the right. Then you can navigate by clicking on recommendations.
Barta clips
Krysar
(Pied Piper)
clip 1
Krysar
(Pied Piper)
clip 2
Krysar
(pied Piper)
clip 3
The Golem
clip 1
The Golem
clip 2
Pospisilova clips
When the Leaves
Fall from
the Oak 1
When the Leaves
Fall from
the Oak 2
Klimt clips
Pád
(Ceska Animace)
clip 1
Pád
(Ceska Animace)
clip 2
Rare and hard-to-find stop motion...and how to get your grubby hands on it!
ORIGINS:European puppet animation springs from an ancient tradition of live puppet theater, best represented perhaps by punch and judy. While these shows are enjoyed by children, the themes are often quite adult... similar to the plays of Shakespeare which are rife with violence and sexual depravity but presented in an intelligent artistic fashion. One of the things that make these traditional puppet shows so fascinating is the old-world craftsmanship... techniques handed down generation after generation using handmade tools. The heads are carved from wood and carefully painted and costumes are elaborately crafted from multiple layers of rich embroidered fabrics and fine ornaments. It all serves to create a self-contained miniature world of strange haunting beauty. The puppets were the livelihood of their creators.... puppeteers would lovingly craft their own puppets and upkeep them, and travel with their wheeled carts from village to village putting on performances and hoping to make some money. The craft would be handed down through the family.Then with the dawn of the moving image came trikfilm techniques... the magical effects photography techniques of Melies and the Lumiere Brothers and others, which very shortly resulted in animation, both cartoons and stop motion. This is where our tale begins.....
JIRI TRNKA:
THE originator of the Czech style. He was a talented illustrator and cell animator when the communist regime decided to create a puppetfilm facility and Studio Jiriho Trnky was launched. Its been in operation ever since, though I understand it has recently downsized, and has been the training ground for many of the following generations of great animators, including Svankmajer and his protege Jiri Barta. He was known for using jointed wooden puppets resembling traditional european dolls or toys and imbuing them with an uncanny sense of life and personality. He was a very large imposing man with a disfiguring scar on his face, who felt uncomfortable in society, but through his puppets revealed the sensitive soul of an artist. there doesnt seem to be much on the web about him. probably the most info you will find is in the short documentary included on The Puppetfilms of Jiri Trnka. His work includes a strange mix of the cutesey with the powerfully surreal. And in his films you'll see the origins of the trademark styles of Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. videos: Svet Jiriho Trnka collection at HMV Japan Trnka Film Works collection at HMV Japan I found these links through a very useful feature at HMV where you can select International Animation, and further refine as Stop Motion and Puppet Animation links: An article at awn.com; The Walt Disney of the East. This includes short clips from three of his films. the Kratkyfilm catalogue gives descriptions and pictures from basically every animated film from the Czech Republic up to a certain date. they have a big selection of Trnkas work. JAN SVANKMAJER: Undoubtedly the most well-known among them is Jan Svankmajer. His feature films are available in wide distribution and recently Image Entertainment has made some of his earlier (and in my opinion far more interesting) short films available on glorious DVD in the 2-disc set The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer. The title is a little misleading though, since only about half of his shorts are represented. Basically this set is a distillation of the more accessible (to an english-speaking audience) films culled from the four-volume Kratky filmy (short films) collection, which was released only in europe, on pal videotape. I say accessible because theyre either without words, or originally filmed in english. apparently no-one thought it was worth it to go to the trouble of providing subtitles for the czech-language films, or even just presenting them in all their unintelligible glory for those of us who love the animation (and Svankmajers startling filmmaking style) enough to sit through them. A precious few of these 'lost' films (the ones not presented in the Image set) were once available on ntsc videotape stateside in two tapes formerly available through the awesome (and now sadly defunct) Whole Toon Catalog. One was called Alchemist of the Surreal... Ill try to find the name of the other one, in case anyone wants to try to track down some used copies on ebay or something.
videos Svankmajer page at Amazon.com Svankmajer page at HMV Japan. Or if this link fails to work, just go to HMV Japan and type or paste Svankmajer into the search window. Loads of goodies. Of course, most of his films are now available in the US, little reason to buy Japanese imports, except that I see a few DVDs not available here... in particular Don Juan (bottom of page). Not sure what's on some of the other collections, such as the Wonderland of Jan Svankmajer. Don Fan (must be Don Juan, a nice 30 minute feature not available here with carved wooden puppet heads that resurfaced in Faust. No stop motion, but very well done. Czech language only) Links A great online resource is the AWN Animation of Heaven and Hell Svankmajer page: There is a book about him called Dark Alchemy available through amazon. Kinoeye has done some great articles. Here is one , and at the bottom of the page they have links to others: I find this one especially fascinating... it consists of his diary entries while he was shooting Otesanek. Re-Animating the Lost Objects of Childhood and the Everyday THE BROTHERS QUAY: They're not truly European, but a pair of twins from Philadelphia who moved to London and undertook a career fuelled by inspiration from Svankmajer. They paid tribute to him in their film the Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, which depicts a wise teacher instructing a young fledgeling in various arcane arts, and at one point using a ponderous machine that must be some sort of antique movie camera. In many of their films they borrow, sometimes heavily, from his work and use much of the same strange music. their work is very bizarre and seems to take place in a dream landscape populated by broken dolls and decaying antique objects.
My personal favorite (and one of the most incredible films I've ever been priveleged to see) is Street of Crocodiles. In fact this is the one that made me decide I wanted to do european style puppetfilms. But this way lies much danger... I'm not the first to be influenced by the Quays, and god knows Ive seen some pretty embarrassing copycat stuff. A lot of amateur animators see their stuff and say "Wow, this doesn't look too hard, even I can do it!" but they fail to understand that the only reason the Quays can dispense with traditional narrative storytelling technique is because they are accomplished masters and they know how to deliver the goods. Before you can break the rules of filmmaking you have to learn them, and if you're not going to give the viewers an intelligible story, you've got to give them something utterly fascinating. Some of their films are less successful at this than others, and I find it hard to watch them for more than a short while. At their best (as in Street of Crocodiles and Epic of Gilgamesh) they provide an ultra-closeup vision of fragmented pieces of dream worlds that seem to shine a brilliant light into the unfathomable mysteries of the mind and the soul, playing on tricks of vision and memory. Where as Svankmajer relies mostly on found object animation; the environment is always a real place in the real world and the characters are actual size, the Quays use miniature sets and puppets. You get the sense that Svankmajer is always searching for the hidden realities behind the facade of the world we know, while the Quays tend toward a high degree of artifice. I've always found it hard to discuss the Quays without mentioning Svankmajer in the same breath. VIDEOS: This is a list of films they've done... The ones not available (as far as I know) in the US are marked with an asterix*
Videos: Brothers Quay page at Amazon.com. Very interesting item at the top of the page - available for pre-order, shipment expected April 24 2007 - Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers. This must be the Region 1 NTSC version of the Michael Brooker box set The Quay Brothers - The Short Films 1979-2003, including remastered and restored version of their short films, along with commentary by the quays on some of them (including Street of Crocodiles!). Links: An excellent article called Through a Glass Darkly. More good articles here. The Zeitgeist Films site, which handles the Quays movies. They carry the novels that inspired Street of Crocodiles and Institiute Benjamenta, plus Michael Atkinsons book Ghosts in the Machine containing an essay about the Quays. LADISLAS STAREWITCH:  Im using the spelling here that he used in all his correspondence.... there are actually a confusing number of alternate spellings owing to the fact that he moved between different countries so much. Originally, in his native Polish, it was Wladislas Starevicz, then when he went to Russia it became Ladislas Starevitch. Finally, a move to France and it became Ladislas Starewitch. To further confuse matters, sometimes youll find one of the above without the second 't'.
He is often credited with inventing stop motion animation as we know it, though so are several other people. It depends on what fits into your definition of stop motion. Certainly he was probably the first to actually make little figures and move them frame by frame in an attempt to duplicate lifelike movement of actual living things.... it was because he was filming beetles and found that the hot lights made them lethargic, so he made his own little beetles as realistically as possible and animated them instead. This gave birth to further projects with very lifelike but sometimes partially anthropomorphic (human-like) animals. I found this quote from his grand daughter concerning the mysterious method he used to make the faces: The emotion conveyed through the faces of the puppets is due to videos:A French website called Dorianne Films carries two excellent videos that arent available in America, including his masterpiece, the full-lengthLe Roman a Renard (Tale of the Fox): The dvd contains: *the original French version ...this is a definite masterpiece of world cinema, one of the most important animated films ever made, and a mesmerisingly beautiful film to watch. A must-have!! Le Monde Magique de Starewitch (the Magic World of Starewitch) which includes these films: *LE RAT DE VILLE ET LE RAT DES CHAMPS (TOWN RAT AND COUNTRY RAT) Both of these can be bought at the Doriane-Films website. Here is the real world contact information: DORIANE FILMS 11 avenue Dorian 75012 PARIS, France Tel: (00 33) 01 44 74 77 11 Fax: (00 33) 01 44 74 64 93 links: A great site with lots of info and pics. JIRI BARTA: A startling talent schooled under Svankmajer. I dont know much about him, and hardly anything has been published, since he is still a relative newcomer. Barta is currently trying to get funding for what looks to be his best film yet.... called The Golem. It's to be done entirely differently than any previous version of that idea, with the Golem representing apparently the amalgamation of memories that coalesce in the mind of an elderly Jewish man as he walks the streets of his now modernized village. Some startling visual effects highlight the trailer, which by incredible luck I have posted on my Video Clips page. Look in the margin along the left side of the page, under where all the links are located. I decided to start putting all that blank space to some good use! videos: Finally available in America, on Region 1 DVD!!!!!.... Labyrinth of Darkness It includes his acclaimed Krysar, plus several of his best shorts, 2 of which I haven't been able to find anywhere else (Vanished World of Gloves and The Last Theft). Almost all of his short films (that I'm aware of anyway) can be found on the Ceska Animace series available through HMV or Amazon Japan, except for The Vanished world of Gloves and The Last Theft The link above will show you vol 1. As I said about Trnka earlier, just put this in your shopping cart and theyll show you similar recommendations, which should lead you to vols 2-4. More of his films are on the Czech Animation, the New Generation series: Krysar is Bartas masterpiece... a full-length film made in a very artful style with forced perspectives. I have a few clips available on the Video Clips page (and just to the left there). Here is the Bonton Megastore, a huge center in the Czech Republic selling music and videos. They used to have an English version of the site available, but they dont seem to anymore. That could be because they recently renovated and things have changed. In their former incarnation (when there was an english page) I contacted their operator at this email: operator@bontonland.cz and she was extremely helpful and sent me a direct link to a page where I could order Krysar. I dont have that link anymore, but if youre interested, I would try emailing them and just asking. I tried searching using every variation of Krysar and Jiri Barta I could think of, but the search engine was unable to locate it. They didnt have a dvd of it when I checked, just a pal tape, so youd need to be able to get a conversion. Vlasta Pospisilova: 
Schooled under the master Trnka himself, Vlasta Pospisilova worked as an animator on many of his films, then went on to push puppets for Svankmajer as well, so she definitely learned her craft from some of the best! She became a director, doing I believe several children's films, and then came truly into her own working on the collaborative effort Fimfarum along with the other top new talent Aurel Klimt. If you're interested in the children's films she did, I believe you can find some information on the Kratke Filmy site. But I'm more interested in her adult work, such as the absolutely amazing When the Leaves have Fallen From the Oak, for Fimfarum. I have a clip on my Video Clips page, and also there is one, along with more information, at the Projekt Fimfarum site. Click on the VIDEO link once you get there.... Leaves is the second clip from the top. VIDEOS: Her only work on video as far as I know is available on the special edition DVD of Fimfarum available through Bonton. This is incredible folks... it's actually Czech stopmotion that has english subtitles! You'll have to click for the English site version when you get there and then input Fimfarum into the search engine. It's Region 2 of course. Vlasta is responsible for 3 of the 5 films, namely When the Leaves have Fallen from the Oak, Stingy Barka, and Splneny Sen (not too sure of the translation on that one!) Aurel Klimt: 
This guy seems to have sprung out of nowhere! The first time I encountered him was in the Nova Generace series, in the film Pad. It was obvious immediately that here was a new force to be reckoned with. Hard to believe he's so young, and yet demonstrates the talent he does! At the same time he seems to bring a shot of freshness to the old traditions of Czech stopmotion. Probably his best work so far is Fimfarum, the title piece of the aforementioned collection. I can watch that film over and over, and just soak in all the innovations and inventiveness. Since I've already listed the Fimfarum disc under Vlasta Pospisilova, I won't do it again, just look right over his mug to see the info. Check the Projekt Fimfarum site to see stills and production sketches from the various films, of which Klimt did Fimfarum and Frantisek Nebojsa. |