Stop-motion: Ji?í Trnka – A Midsummer Night's Dream

Ji?í Trnka shares with Norman McLaren the rare gift of being the source of a national school. Indeed, few animation filmmakers have been able to produce a progressive filmography that was both vigorous and coherent, generating the arrival of disciples and the emergence of critics.

In Prague, immediately after the war, a veritable school of puppet animation was taking shape under the driving force of Trnka, within the studio that now bears his name. Its inspiration came from traditional puppet theatre, as Trnka had learnt from one of the last members of this activity, Josef Škupa, to whom he partly owed his finely crafted wooden dolls and extremely creative sets. Also thanks to the delicate hand of B?etislav Pojar, his collaborator from The Czech Year (1947), Trnka's work became the standard that other puppet films had to live up to.

To honour him, we have chosen to show his feature film A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959) that does justice to the exceptional choreographic value of his work, since this film is an amazing ballet that testifies to the Czech animators' great mastery.