Jiří Barta: Labyrinth of Darkness

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 the most ambitious Czech animation projects of the 1980s, notable for its unusual dark art direction, innovative animation techniques and use of a fictitious language.

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 portrait of the ordinary life, passing time, routine and the contacts between characters.

Six animated shorts eschew traditional animation by featuring supernatural elements and darker themes, such as alien snatchings, life among mannequins and a spiritual rebirth. Among the films are "Ape," which features a couple fighting over a cooked monkey every night; "The Story of the Cat and the Moon," which is a tale of unrequited love; and "Gentle Spirit," which is based on a Fyodor Dostoyevsky story.

A man breaks into a large, seemingly abandoned old house to plunder the gold received. But the house is really abandoned?

Laid-off old mannequins spend their cracked and broken lives in an old, abandoned warehouse. New mannequins are brought to the warehouse. They are old as well, but from a younger generation. The two groups must live together, but it's not easy at all.

Eleven disparate adolescents, gathered for a skiing camp at an isolated winter resort, find themselves preyed upon and set against one another by their three mysterious instructors.

In an attic full of discarded junk, a pretty doll called Buttercup lives in an old trunk together with her friends, the marionette Sir Handsome, the lovable Teddy Bear, a Mechanical Mouse and the plasticine creature, Laurent. When Buttercup is snatched and taken off to the Land of Evil, her pals set out on a wondrous and daring adventure to rescue her from the all-powerful Head of State.

An animated film compiled by David Ehrlich consisting of 27 animators from different countries all explaining themselves through their animation.

Pieces of wood are captured by a crow and dance in celebration of spring in this animated short film.

Animators and urban planners both create worlds, but Czech stop motion specialist Jiří Barta's ingenious paper cut-out short punctures the stifling architecture of communist housing. Skilled hands blueprint an apartment tower standardized specifications. Envelopes contain the elements of each home. Family dwellings, bachelor pads, scholarly studies and artist studios: different social configurations are permitted but restrained to the same uniform box. A dystopian revision of the REAR WINDOW scenario, THE DESIGN's darkly comic social critique still has teeth.

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.

In Jiří Barta’s imaginative debut, a magic book poses three riddles to an anteater-like creature. His reward for answering, a wrapped piece of candy, proves elusive. Barta's animation revels in the possibilities of transformation and symbolic logic.

The story is set in communist Prague of 1950s, a banal coincidence sends a math student Adam on a quest to find the famous Prague Golem and bring it back to life. In an old anatomy book, he finds an old photograph, which shows a group of people standing with a tall dark figure in the back. He also meets mysterious Mr. Moller, who pretends to know the secret of bringing Golem to life. In the ruins of an old hotel, he finds an enormous figure, but the Golem that awakes is not the obedient servant of Rabbi Löwe – it is an ever-growing shapeless figure of clay can even defeat human ingenuity. Adam has to stand up against the person behind and stop the hidden machine of the hotel.

Deep in the mountains a little Japanese boy called Minokitchi witnesses a tragic event.

Seven animated films and the 1987 live-action short “The Last Theft” comprise this collection spotlighting the prodigious talents and distinctive cinematic vision of Czech animator Jiri Barta.