Meet the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe
▻http://www.messynessychic.com/2018/02/06/meet-the-walt-disney-of-eastern-europe
For those whose taste in fairytales favours a darker touch, we’re traveling to the far reaches of Eastern Europe, and into the enchanting world of animator Jiří Trnka. The late Czech animator (whose name is pronounced “Yershy Trinka”) created nearly two-dozen films over his lifetime, from folksy gems like Grandfather Planted a Beet (1945) to the gutsy anti-Stalin short, The Hand (1965).
Craftsmanship ran in Trnka’s blood. He was born in Bohemia in 1912, where his grandmother sold toys for a living and his mother worked as a seamstress. “Even as a child he was making puppets,” explained his daughter, Helena, to the Novy Domov journal in 2012, “He had access to fabrics and other such materials and he taught himself to sew. He was also a very skilled self-taught wood carver.”
Trnka (left).
After bouts as a pastry chef and locksmith, he finally began to pursue a full-time career in the arts, and graduated from Prague’s Academy of Art and International Design in 1935. Most of his early work consisted of illustrations for the children’s tales of Hans Christian Anderson and other fairytales, and after WWII, he co-founded the studio Bratři v triku (“Brothers in Tricks”) with animators Eduard Hofman and Jiří Brdečka, which is still in operation today.
His first puppets were made of wood, and incorporated simple materials like burlap, and found natural objects (i.e. acorn nut hats).
“[He was] the first rebel against Disney’s omnipotence,” explains biographer Jaroslav Bocek in Jiri Trnka: Artist and Puppet Master, “By painting the dreamlike aspects of reality, Trnka was doing the same as the surrealists…his roaming brush reflected a child’s roaming mind, with its inability to concentrate, its tendency to fantasy.” But it was Trnka’s adult-targeted puppetry that really took things to the next level.