Although it may not always seem so, Czech animation is still alive. Christmas time is ideal for a small reminder of promising projects that are in the making and can be supported. A very ambitious project for a student film is First Snow (První sníh) by Lenka Ivančíková. Her crew, composed by a group of students from the Film Academy of Miroslav Ondříček in Písek, has tried crowd funding and thanks to 111 contributions they raised the needed amount. The puppet fairy-tale about a small hedgehog who unexpectedly awakens from hibernation should be about 13 minutes long and will amaze you with technical aspects of the depicted characters that remind of those from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Prague studio Hafan Film is now finishing the works on Jan Balej’s Little from the Fish Shop (Malá z rybárny) and an adventure of Josefka and Bertík which will take you into a world where the sky is always full of green needles... Deep in Moss (Až po uši v mechu) is a film by former students of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague Barbora Valecká and Filip Pošivač. They have also used crowd funding to successfully gather the required funds and started filming in August. The animated short has a natural feeling of films by Jan Balej (at least as far the graphic design is concerned) so it is full of distinctly stylized original puppets. The film is produced by Pavla Kubečková from Nutprodukce which has also produced Spider’s Anatomy (Anatomie Pavouka). The remarkable film by Vojtěch Kiss about a clerk’s life was created using stop-motion technology and has imposing 27 minutes.
Only inches before the finish line is the famous Czech director and graphic designer Kristýna Dufková. Her film Don’t Call me Panda, My Name is Fanda (Neříkej mi panda, jmenuji se Fanda) is a playful warning for children and parents drawing attention to speech impediments. Due to bad articulation, a little girl called Vanda experiences a series of misunderstandings. She doesn’t know that she hurts the letters which later have their revenge and teach her how to speak. After her puppet contribution to Fimfárum, the author returns to drawn animation.
The last but not least project in the making is Time Rodent (Jezdec času). The film is produced in an international co-production of the Czech Republic and France. The Czech co-producer is the company MAUR film, the French side is represented by Nicolas Schmerking from Autor de Minuit which is famous for their academy-award winning film Logorama (2009). The film is directed by Ondřej Švadlena. His dark films such as Sanitkasan (2007) and Mrdrchain (2010) use 3D computer animation to build artificial worlds and provoke the minds of the viewers. Time Rodent is apparently no different. It depicts the world five or ten or one hundred thousand years from now in an abstract parable, a civilisation comic anti-fairy-tale about a continuous decay of the world and another possible evolutionary change of its inhabitants. The main hero is the witness of this process – a half humanoid, half animal passing through the periods of the future of our earthly existence.
The Anifilm team wishes all the projects a happy ending and many amazed viewers.