All Slights Deserved

Jean Cocteau once said of the Czech animator Jiří Trnka that "the very name conjures up childhood & poetry". Sadly to most people the Trnka's name is only likely to draw a blank expression, but in animation circles his standards of excellence once drew comparisons with Disney. The son of a plumber, Trnka first achiewed renown as a painter and childrens' illustrator and didn't begin animating until the age of 33. His earliest shorts were cell-based, but it was with stop motion, or puppet animation, that he emerged as an original voice, adapting the distinctive style of his illustrated work to the three dimensional medium. With Czechoslovakia now under Communist rule in those post-war years, animation enjoyed state patronage and a degree of creative freedom not allowed to feature films with their wider audiences. Unlike the industrialised production methods of Disney et al, Trnka worked in a small studio, personally supervising the entire process. His work i...

Those of you of a certain age may recall The Singing Ringing Tree , a bizarre childrens' fairy tale that was serialised by the BBC and shown several times during the sixties and seventies and sometimes cited as one of the scariest things ever shown on television. I was born a little to late to catch these screenings and only became aware of it several years ago, my interest piqued by the many vivid recollections people had. It's certainly a very strange production and probably best avoided if you've a penchant for hallucinogenics. Before it had been split up into episodes for broadcast purposes, The Singing Ringing Tree had actually been a feature film produced in 1957 by the mighty East German state studio DEFA. Notwithstanding the folkloric traditions of central Europe, fairy tales were the ideal means for priming kids with wholesome communist values and DEFA churned them out at a fairly prodigious rate. The year after they followed The Singing Ringing Tree with an ...