who says about Anifilm,“I wish all the best to the nicest festival in the Czech Republic. I hope it will be a joyous event for children and adults alike!”
The Lifetime Achievement Award for Animation is one of the awards presented at Anifilm and it always goes to an important animator for his or her contribution to animated film. This year, it will be awarded to Zdeněk Smetana, a screenwriter, animator and director. First an artist and popular animator of the films made by other directors (e.g. The Creation of the World), he quickly started directing his own films, successfully employing his extraordinary visual style, pushing forward the boundaries of animated films of that time. This was true especially for his series of psychological grotesques (Romanetto, The Bottle and the World, An Umbrella). A new important stage of his work came when Smetana started working with Edgar Dutka, dramaturge and screenwriter. Apart from a couple of Kubín’s fairy-tales for adults experimenting with animation materials (The Water of Freshness – without E. D., Bit-Of-All-Hair, The Tinker’s Tale), their co-operation resulted, for example, in making of The End of A Cube. But for most, Zdeněk Smetana became associated, above all, with his children series. His 36-part animation series Fairy Tales of Moss and Fern basically shaped the Czech TV programme Večerníček, every evening featuring a bed time story for kids. Two more series followed, Reedy and The Little Witch, and Zdeněk Smetana, an experienced observer of human faults, became known to the public as “the creator of bed time stories”.