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A darkly brilliant stop-motion adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin about a plague of rats that punish townsfolk corrupt with greed. One of Czechoslovakia's most ambitious animation projects of the 1980s, notable for its unusual dark art direction, innovative animation techniques and use of a fictitious language.
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A humorous modern fairy tale for adults about the life of devils. This is the story of a young couple in love: two devils named Artur and Blanka. Happiness for the young devil couple is disturbed and eventually destroyed by Artur's longing to keep up with others.
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While the humans are away, the shoes in a cobbler's workshop engage in a number of activities, including flirting, kidnapping and a gunfight.
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A short film based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "A Torture by Hope".
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Pieces of wood are captured by a crow and dance in celebration of spring in this animated short film.
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A three-part depiction of various forms of communication.
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Using an array of gloves in different styles and from different historical periods, the film is a short history of the cinema - from silent movies via pastiches of Buñuel and Fellini and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to a futurist junkyard where tin cans become animated police cars in a city of urban decay.
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In this animated version of Edgar Allan Poe's story, a traveller arrives at the Usher mansion to find that the sibling inhabitants are living under a mysterious family curse: The brother's senses have become painfully acute, while his sister has become nearly catatonic.
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A short film by Jiri Barta
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Directed by Lubomir Benes.
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A dead soldier comes for his fiancée from the grave.
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One of the film stories based on the old Prague legends. This one is about the old master clock maker Hanus who construed the Prague Old Town astronomical clock. Master Hanus' clock started working for the first time in 1490 but did not tell the time for too long. Soon the master, blinded by the perfidious town councilors, stopped it for more than 200 years.
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A film story based on the old Prague legends. It tells about a poor student lured by wealth, which he prefers to knowledge. In the end, he sells his soul to the evil powers. The Devil takes him to hell and since then there is a blackened hole on the ceiling of a Prague house.
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"The Castle of Otranto" is animation/short/mockumentary based on "The Castle of Otranto", a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole, the first Gothic novel. The novel takes place in Otranto in southern Italy. In Jan Svankmajer's mocumentary, the amateur archaeologist Dr Vozáb has set to prove that the supernatural ghost love story takes place not in Italy but in Otranto Castle near Nachod in Czechoslovakia.
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Animated drawings inspired by Leonardo da Vinci are intercut with seemingly unrelated (but in fact strangely similar) live-action scenes.
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In stop-motion animation, a wardrobe moves through the countryside. It arrives in a house, a child's voice recites Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," and various objects, such as toys and dolls, move about, disintegrate, and play out archetypal scenes. Like Carroll's verse, the images are at once familiar and unfamiliar. A child's play suit, hanging in the wardrobe, becomes the adventure's protagonist.
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A funny parody on comedies and horror films. A scientist tries to kidnap the beautiful wife of a dandy.
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A man, apparently on the run, takes shelter in a dilapidated house. Every day, he drills a hole through a wall and looks into one of the rooms, each time seeing a different surreal vision...
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The third episode of the series "Hey, Mister, let's play", in which the heroes are two bears, one foxy and the other naive. In this episode the big bear out-smarts the small one by convincing him that the fish he caught is a spellbound princess.
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A small, animated figure learns how to use a whip, a pair of wings and a house.
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Two puppets, Punch and Judy, do battle to the death over the custody of a live guinea pig.
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The second part of the six-part series “Hey, Mister, Let’s Play”. The bears try go to the water, and the big bear is good and makes himself a car for the little bear.
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Pilot of the series "Hey, Mister, Let's Play". The story of two bears, the older one is experienced and sly, the younger is naive and gullible. This is the story of how they met in the Czech town of Kolín.
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A little boy who is unable to count goes off to the crazy planet where arithmetic doesn’t exist. After many adventures, he goes back to school to learn.
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Hurvinek cannot go to a circus because he injured himself when sliding down the stair rail. He daydreams that he is an acrobat riding a scooter and an animal-trainer taming beasts. (MUBI)
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Two mischievous frost spirits make things chilly for a pair of travelers in this wintry comic folktale.
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How do you wake up a sleeping puppet? Made by Trnka in collaboration with actor and puppeteer Josef Pehr, this winsome mix of live action and puppet play is enchanting entertainment for the youngest of viewers.
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Folk art–like hand-drawn stills illustrate this sweetly simple pastoral fable, in which a peasant comes into possession of a small fortune—but realizes there are treasures greater than gold.
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A monumental piece of art bringing the heroes of the ancient Czech myths back to life. The picture consists of seven parts: Cech the Forefather, Bivoj, Libuse, Premysl, Girls War, Horymir, Lucka War.
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Bayaya, a young peasant, protected by the spirit of his dead mother, arrives at the castle of the King, where he entertains his three daughters. He soon realizes that the three princesses are nagged by evil spirits. The little peasant manages to rid them of them, fights a duel with a wicked lord who wanted to marry one of the three princesses. He finally wins the heart of the youngest sister while saving the soul of his mother who was in purgatory.
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A poor fisherman catches the golden fish that promises him to fulfil three wishes if he sets her free again. He does so and the fish fulfils two of his three wishes. However, she refuses to fulfil the third one, the last one in which the fisherman’s wife wants to be equal to God.
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Trnka brings to life a surrealist circus of tightrope-walking fish, musical monkeys, balancing bears, and high-flying acrobatics in this whimsical feat of cutout animation made in collaboration with leading Czech painters of the era.
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Adaptation of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, about an emperor who prefers the tinkling of a bejeweled mechanical bird to the song of a real nightingale. When the Emperor is near death, the nightingale's song restores his health.
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"Román s basou" is another short by master a stop-motion puppet-animator Jiri Trnka. The story is based on Anton Chekhovs story "Roman s Kontrabasom". Princess Bibulova decides to go fishing along the river while not far away a bass player leaves his two companions to go for a swim.
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A barrel organ grinder meets the devil on a mysterious moonlit night in this haunted-house fable, which showcases Trnka’s atmospheric use of sound to conjure a macabre mood.
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An animated singing western short in which a cowboy takes on the villain to save his beloved.
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The first full-length puppet film made by Jiri Trnka. Like the painter Ales who illustrated the national songs, Trnka depicts the traditional customs and tales of the Czech village in six separate sequences: Shrovetide, Spring, Legend About St. Prokop, The Fair, The Feast and Bethlehem." A Treasury of Fairy-tales" made Trnka famous all over the world and it is a masterpiece of Czech and world animation.
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The second cartoon by Jiri Trnka that was a sensation at the festival in Cannes in 1946 when it defeated the world animation elite of the time. It is a musical fairy-tale based on a famous folk story about animals that deterred thieves.
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Trnka reached new heights of modernist abstraction with this innovative, surrealist mini-masterwork, which critic Jean-Pierre Coursodon praised as the Citizen Kane of animation.
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A fairy-tale about a brave, self-sacrificial and faithful girl named Maryska who sets free an enchanted princess and her twelve maids from a mysterious castle.
