Jiří Trnka

A satire of the Great American Way, with Lemonade Joe a "clean living" gunfighter who drinks only Kola-Loca Lemonade and convinces everyone else in town (with his gun skills) that all "real men" drink ONLY lemonade!

An animated singing western short in which a cowboy takes on the villain to save his beloved.

A happy little potter is approached by a huge hand which wants him to sculpt its statue. The potter refuses, wanting nothing more than to be left alone with his only friend, a potted plant. As the hand's request gives way to bribery, demands, and threats, the potter becomes more desperate to escape its clutch, leading to tragedy.

Two mischievous frost spirits make things chilly for a pair of travelers in this wintry comic folktale.

The Emperor's mismanagement of his country is provoking some in his court to plot to overthrow him. He feels successful, at least, when he discovers the legendary Golem, which he believes can protect him and even cure his imaginary illnesses but, when he disappears while on a bender, his kindly baker, who looks just like him, is mistaken for him, and begins to put things in order. However, the conspirators, not to be outdone, determine to bring the Golem back to life to do their bidding.

Trnka’s sci-fi vision of the future in which machines and robots try to substitute themselves into the most beautiful human relationships. A cybernetic robot is supposed to substitute for the loving grandmother of a little girl. The wise grandmother, however, comes back and the girl finds the warmth of her grandmother’s loving arms again. Trnka’s artistic ideas in this film can be described as both poetically fragile and dramatically cautionary.

A selfish self-centered widowed ruler, barely tolerated by his subjects and called appropriately enough, 'King Myself, First' asks his three daughters to name the measure of their love for him. When one of them says, "more than salt", he banishes her from the kingdom. Not understanding what she meant the King assumes love can only be measured by precious metals or one's own talent, the 'correct' answers from his other two daughters. The arrogance of the King leads him to gather all the salt in the kingdom and destroy it. Of course, this backfires as he slowly learns the universal value of the substance, and of course, the essence of his daughter's reply. With the help of the wise and magical old 'herb woman', the King also learns what it means to be a true and wise ruler.

Hurvinek cannot go to a circus because he injured himself when sliding down the stair rail. He daydreams that he is an acrobat riding a scooter and an animal-trainer taming beasts. (MUBI)

Adapting Jaroslav Hasek's raucous satirical novel, and also bringing Josef Lada's equally famous illustrations to garrulous puppet life, posed Trnka one of his biggest creative challenges. Trnka himself felt that the final episode was the most artistically successful, but there's much to enjoy in all three, not least the way that the lackadaisical layabout Svejk's own self-serving anecdotes are realized through cut-out animation.

Taken from Boccaccio's Decameron, this lovely puppet film tells the bawdy story of the beautiful young Venetian lady who confesses her sinful passion for the Archangel Gabriel to a lustful monk, who promptly impersonates him in her bedroom with predictable results. Amidst the film's ribaldry, the hypocrisy and false piety of the monk are mercilessly mocked.

The first puppet film shot in CinemaScope. It is based on the famous poetic comedy by William Shakespeare. Three worlds meet in this story: the noble world of three Athens couples, a common popular world of tradesmen amateur theatre and a fairy-tale happiness of magic creatures as elves and nymphs. The film is considered the most remarkable Jiří Trnka's work and a milestone in the history of the world animation.

A monumental piece of art bringing the heroes of the ancient Czech myths back to life. The picture consists of seven parts: Cech the Forefather, Bivoj, Libuse, Premysl, Girls War, Horymir, Lucka War.

"Román s basou" is another short by master a stop-motion puppet-animator Jiri Trnka. The story is based on Anton Chekhovs story "Roman s Kontrabasom". Princess Bibulova decides to go fishing along the river while not far away a bass player leaves his two companions to go for a swim.

The cartoon film sets out to justify the existence of UNESCO as an instrument for world peace.

A barrel organ grinder meets the devil on a mysterious moonlit night in this haunted-house fable, which showcases Trnka’s atmospheric use of sound to conjure a macabre mood.

The first animated picture made by Jiří Trnka for adults. It is a comic story of a legendary chimney-cleaner who, with the help of a spring from an old lounge-chair, became the terror of the Prague-occupying SS troops in World War II.

This melancholy piece about the metamorphoses of love and the eternal dissatisfaction of human beings with what they have was inspired by the lyrics of the French song "Plaisir d'amour."

A careful motorcyclist stops by a cozy pub on his way home to his sweetheart.

The Czech stop-motion puppet animation master Jiri Trnka directed some of the most acclaimed animated films ever made. 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." Trnka continues to astound audiences to this day, particularly those discovering this amazing animation for the first time. This collection includes five of the master's shorts and his feature-length classic "The Emperor's Nightingale" based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale and narrated by Boris Karloff. Includes: The Emperor's Nightingale (1951, 67 min.), The Hand (18 min.), The Story of the Bass Cello (13 min.), A Merry Circus (11 min.), A Drop Too Much (14 min.), The Song of the Prairie (21 min.), Jiri Trnka: Puppet Animation Master documentary (12 min.).

The first part of the "Hussite Revolutionary Trilogy", completed with Jan Žižka (1955) and Proti všem (Against All Odds, 1957). The film captures the period from May 1412 to the summer of 1415, a turbulent time in the Czech Kingdom, during which there were protests in Prague against the sale of "omnipotent indulgences" whose sale throughout the kingdom was announced by Pope John XXIII. The ideological leader of this movement is the preacher Master Jan Hus, whose words, calling for the elimination of church abuses, are listened to in the Bethlehem Chapel by thousands of ordinary Praguers, Czech lords and Queen Sophie, wife of the Czech King Wenceslas IV.

After the battle of Sudoměř the Hussite teaching spreads through the whole country and people start leaving their homes to help build the fortification of Tábor. Prague citizens request help against the army of Zikmund. The Hussite army with Jan Žižka in the lead make their way towards Prague. They fortify themselves on the mountain Vítkov and engage in a bloody battle with Zikmund’s huge army.

Adaptation of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, about an emperor who prefers the tinkling of a bejeweled mechanical bird to the song of a real nightingale. When the Emperor is near death, the nightingale's song restores his health.

Látal's nine-part puppet series completes Trnka's thirty-year-old work on Švejk. He thus completed the adaptation of Jaroslav Hašek's most famous literary work, a tragicomic satire about the wartime adventures of the eccentric Josef Švejk, in a puppet version based on Lada's artistic style.