Top 20 Czech Animators, Pt. 1

Gene Deitch isn’t Czech, but the American animator has been living and working in Prague since 1959. Deitch was nominated for an Oscar for his 1958 short Sidney’s Family Tree, and his 1961 short Munro won the Award, but he’s most known for the Tom & Jerry shorts that he directed and produced in Prague in the early 1960s. Considered by ardent Tom & Jerry many fans to be a low point in the series (though 1962’s The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit is something of a classic), they were nonetheless largely successful and helped bring the cartoon duo back into the spotlight.

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Unlike most of the other names on this list, Vladimír Jiránek isn’t known especially for his animation. Instead, he’s most famous as an illustrator and political cartoonist: his work appears in Lidové noviny, Mladá fronta DNES, Hospodářské noviny, Reflex, and other media outlets. His style is indelibly Czech, and that has carried over to the various shorts he has animated (though not always working as a director), which have included the children’s programs Pat a Mat (for director Lubomír Beneš) and Bob a Bobek (for Václav Bedřich).

Berthold Bartosch was born in Bohemia and worked with German silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger in the 1920s before moving to Paris in 1930. There, he made L’Idee (The Idea), a landmark piece of animation using a unique paper cutout style that is considered to be one of the first serious animated films ever made. The Idea also incorporated the use of the Ondes Martenot, making it one of the oldest films to use an electronic soundtrack. Unfortunately, while Bartosch lived until 1968, The Idea was to be his last widely-seen work; an anti-war project he spent four years working on in Paris in the late 1930s was destroyed during Nazi occupation.

Lubomír Beneš is most famous for Pat and Mat, his dialogue-free stop-motion creation that has received international recognition and enduring popularity (Beneš died in 1995, but more recent episodes of Pat and Mat have been directed by his son, Marek). But while Pat and Mat is an indelible aspect of Czech culture (and, in my opinion, tops Krtek as the best Večerníček), Beneš directed hundreds of other stop-motion and puppet-animated films for Krátký Film Praha, Czechoslovak TV, and later his own studio, AIF. Beneš also starred in Ropáci, an early short from acclaimed director Jan Svěrák.

Part Bill Plympton and part Jan Švankmajer, Pavel Koutský’s short films are characterized by their unique style, which he terms “total animation”: the animation of each frame of the film separately. A favorite on the festival circuit, the director made a splash in 1987 with his short Curriculum Vitae, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival; he followed that over the next decade with four Silver Bears. Koutský’s short Média won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2000 Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

Director and animator Václav Bedřich might be the king of the Večerníček: among his creations are indelible Czech classics such as Maxipes Fik, Bob a Bobek, Říkání o víle Amálce, O makové panence, Štaflík a Špagetka, and many others, including the 1955 45-minute feature Čert a Káča. After studying under Jiří Trnka at Bratři v triku, Bedřich went on to make some 300+ Večerníček shorts in addition to that classic Večerníček intro for Czech TV, which is still used today, almost fifty years after its creation in 1965.

Zdeněk Miler will forever be tied to his most popular and enduring creation: Krtek, the Little Mole, who has even made a journey into outer space. But that’s no reason to overlook the other works of the director and animator, who passed away last year at the age of 90. Some of his other child-friendly creations included Štěňátko (The Puppy) and Cvrček (The Cricket). Two of his more important works were the unusually dark and evocative Romance Helgolandská (1977) and the anti-communist Rudá stopa (Red Stain, 1962), both of which I’ve been unable to locate (in full, at least) online.

Paul (Pavel) Fierlinger, the son of Czechoslovak diplomats, was born in Japan and raised in the US before embarking on a career as an illustrator and animator in Prague. You’re probably not familiar with his Czech-produced work, which he made for Krátký film Praha in the late 1950s and early 1960s (and I’ve not been able to locate any of it), but any North American child of the 70s or 80s will be intimately familiar with the award-winning animated shorts he produced for the children’s program Sesame Street after emigrating to the US in 1967. Most recently, Fierlinger made the terrific feature-length My Dog Tulip with his wife Sandra, based on J.R. Ackerley’s bestselling memoir.