One of the revelations of the inaugural Cannes International Film Festival, in 1946, was the strong showing of animated films from Czechoslovakia. The festival presented several shorts from the newly founded Prague animation studio headed by artist Jiří Trnka. And Trnka’s second film as a director, The Animals and the Brigands, took home an award from Cannes. It was a brilliant start to an illustrious film career punctuated by many more awards and bringing Trnka international acclaim, from Cannes to Venice and beyond. His body of work as a director — 18 short and 6 feature-length animated films in total — was rivalled only by Walt Disney Studios in output.

By the 1940s, Trnka (1912–1969) was already known in Czechoslovakia as a prolific artist, author, and beloved book illustrator. He frequently designed theater and film productions, but the art form closest to his heart was puppet theater. Trnka possessed an incredible facility in all manners of artistic expression, thanks both to his great talent and to the immense number of puppets and drawings he produced from early childhood. Animated puppet film allowed him to create fantastic new worlds incorporating every art form in which he excelled. Building on the lively Czech puppet theater tradition, which dates back to the Baroque era, Trnka approached puppet film as a serious art form, adapting literary sources ranging from Czech legends to works by such literary giants as Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Hans Christian Andersen.

“Trnka—the name is the sum of childhood and poetry.”
Jean Cocteau

Trnka uniquely conveyed the drama and psychology of his characters through his figures’ body language, expressive lighting, and camera movement. Revered as a pioneer of the genre, he had an enormous impact on the development of Czech animation, and his work inspired filmmakers and animators around the globe.

The touring retrospective, titled The Complete Jiří Trnka, was produced by Comeback Company featuring films from the collection of the National Film Archive. It premiered April 20–25 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in New York, before setting out on a six-month North American tour. The essential series presents all 24 of the artist’s films, including 11 newly translated works and 2 new digital restorations: Trnka’s Venice Film Festival prize-winning first feature, The Czech Year, and Old Czech Legends, a breathtaking collection of Bohemian myths.

“Trnka was a genius illustrator, but by far an even better filmmaker.”
Petr Sís, H.C. Andersen Illustrator Award winner

The lineup also features the Shakespeare adaptation A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the subversive, absurdist, anti-authoritarian trilogy The Good Soldier Švejk; fairytales The Emperor’s Nightingale and Bayaya; and shorts programs featuring Trnka’s inimitable early work in hand-drawn cartoons (such as the prize-winning The Animals and the Brigands), his magical children’s films, and his later, more formally and politically defiant works, such as his final masterpiece, The Hand, about the plight of artists toiling under the restrictions of totalitarianism.