On the planet Ygam, the Draags, extremely technologically and spiritually advanced blue humanoids, consider the tiny Oms, human beings descendants of Terra's inhabitants, as ignorant animals. Those who live in slavery are treated as simple pets and used to entertain Draag children; those who live hidden in the hostile wilderness of the planet are periodically hunted and ruthlessly slaughtered as if they were vermin.
A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where.
A darkly brilliant stop-motion adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin about a plague of rats that punish townsfolk corrupt with greed. One of Czechoslovakia's most ambitious animation projects of the 1980s, notable for its unusual dark art direction, innovative animation techniques and use of a fictitious language.
A three-part depiction of various forms of communication.
A man sits down to watch a football match, which seems to consist of the players being violently mutilated in various inventive ways. The players then leave the football pitch and invade the spectator's flat...
Using an array of gloves in different styles and from different historical periods, the film is a short history of the cinema - from silent movies via pastiches of Buñuel and Fellini and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to a futurist junkyard where tin cans become animated police cars in a city of urban decay.
A short film based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "A Torture by Hope".
"The Castle of Otranto" is animation/short/mockumentary based on "The Castle of Otranto", a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole, the first Gothic novel. The novel takes place in Otranto in southern Italy. In Jan Svankmajer's mocumentary, the amateur archaeologist Dr Vozáb has set to prove that the supernatural ghost love story takes place not in Italy but in Otranto Castle near Nachod in Czechoslovakia.
The first professional animated film by Petr Sís, who later became the great children's author-illustrator Peter Sís after emigrating to America. Based on an odd satiric story by Miloš Macourek; purportedly banned in Czechoslovakia upon its release.
A film story based on the old Prague legends. It tells about a poor student lured by wealth, which he prefers to knowledge. In the end, he sells his soul to the evil powers. The Devil takes him to hell and since then there is a blackened hole on the ceiling of a Prague house.
Wealthy but alone, a king spends his days obsessively polishing shiny objects throughout his opulent castle. After a visit from a puckish forest wizard, the king earns a blessing – or curse – that turns anything he touches to gold.
On her fifteenth birthday the princess finds a diary written by her mother when she was young. The diary tells of the Queen's secret, early love. The Princess goes into the forest to meet her mother's former lover. When she looks into his eyes, she realizes why her mother had fallen in love...
A zoologist and a biochemist go out into an oilfield with a cameraman and filmmaker to observe and study the elusive oil gobblers.
Animated drawings inspired by Leonardo da Vinci are intercut with seemingly unrelated (but in fact strangely similar) live-action scenes.
An alarm clock wakes a man who washes his face, has breakfast, drives his car to work, spins records, returns home, and takes his pills. It's a world of circles - often seen from above: an espresso cup, a stairwell, the pills, and the records spinning. At the dance where the music plays, the rhythms evoke images of a butcher slicing head cheese, gears driving other wheels and levers, a combine churning out bales of hay, a butcher cutting chunks of meat for a stew, and boxers punching. The circle of music and life.
The picture, unlike the other film adaptations of the story, focuses much more on Crusoe’s life before and after his stay on the island. Following the principle of setting the novel right, it describes Crusoe’s experiences with delicate irony and understanding.
Short movie by Bretislav Pojar
A parable about a thwarted dream. A narrator tells us about a young woman who wants, more than anything, to be a ballerina. Thanks to animation, we see the problem: her legs make up about three-quarters of her height. She sees the impossibility of her dream and moves to a house on an isolated hill where she lives by herself, lonely, practicing her art, and then, in near despair, taking up knitting. Madness seems close at hand, but is there anything that can bring hope and pull her from her solitary, circumscribed life?
A behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Barta’s masterpiece.
