Interview: Marek Berger

The visual identity of this year’s Anifilm was created by animator, artist, storyboarder and comic book author Marek Berger, who has made a name for himself with his animated short film The Shadow over Prague, the series Old Prague Legends, and the comic Octobriana. What draws him to old stories, such as The Rapid Arrows, in what ways does comics differ from other art forms, and what are his favourite works of science fiction? You’ll find out in the following interview!

Interview by Natálie Kozáková, translation Lukáš Wicha.

Do you remember when you first fell in love with comics?

MB: Definitely sometime in my early childhood. Thanks to my older brothers, we had issues of The Rapid Arrows at home, and at my cousin’s cottage, we also had several issues of the Kometa magazine, which published Soviet-style science fiction series, such as The Secrets of Enna and others. They had this fascinating retro vibe, which I enjoyed greatly as a kid without really knowing what I was feeling. And I remember, of course, Saudek’s comics with their typical irony and, above all, dynamic artwork, which I later started trying to emulate. Apart from that, from an early age, I was also greatly influenced by Zdeněk Burian and his illustrations in Josef Augusta’s books on prehistory, which I devoured before I could even read. As a result, drawing dinosaurs became an obsession for me, and I was also fascinated by Burian’s hyperrealism. I felt as if I were leafing through an album of colour photos from prehistoric times. This realism actually influenced me much more than, say, the Čtyřlístek comic book series, which never really inspired me artistically even though I did enjoy the stories.

What do you find most appealing about the comics as a medium?

MB: The ability to tell a story with just images, without having to use text bubbles. Or, on the contrary, the ability to give the text much more meaning and space or even to put it in conflict with the accompanying images, which creates interesting, disturbing situations in the story. I recently tried working with text and language in this more elaborate way in my latest comic short story Karel Hynek Wáchal: Mage, which was published this year in the Aargh! comic magazine.

At the same time, I have been deeply influenced by movies since I was a kid. My parents used to buy us the Cinema magazine, which was done very well in the 1990s, and already as a kid in elementary school I would go to the cinema a lot. When I started studying illustration at the Secondary School of Art and Design in Brno, I dreamed of directing films, but I also knew that it would be tough to get money for sci-fi or fantasy projects in the Czech Republic. So I started writing down film concepts and scripts with the idea that I might at least turn them into comics. This seems to be the fate of Octobriana, which was initially also a movie script. We’ll see if it will ultimately remain her fate...

What do you find different about working on a comic book, a storyboard, and an animated film? I suppose some things will be the same, but could you elaborate on what’s specific to each of the three disciplines?

MB: The fundamental thing is that you have to be able to draw and think a bit cinematically. I was inspired to make comics primarily by movies, it wasn’t the other way around, and I think it’s the same with many authors. On paper, we may “freeze” all the movement as a single frame, but in our heads, we still see it as a dynamic part of the unfolding story. With comics, I believe it’s absolutely crucial at what point in the story the reader turns the page and what appears on the left and right pages. If something surprising happens at the end of a double-page spread, I have to take into account that the reader will unavoidably glance at it before actually reading their way to it. Therefore, the surprise should ideally occur right upon turning the page. When I’m drafting the panel layout for a comic story, I always work with double-page spreads laid out flat as soon as I start making rough sketches. When storyboarding, the difference is that I work chronologically, and I don’t have to deal with panel timelines and sizes at all; all the images are flat and it’s all a bit more boring. I much more enjoy working on film concept art and backgrounds now, because there’s more room for creativity.

You mentioned The Rapid Arrows, which have been sort of accompanying you throughout your artistic work. What makes them fascinating to you? And is there anything that you don’t really like about them?

MB: Since I was a member of the Scouts for many years and because I read books by Jaroslav Foglar, I was naturally drawn to The Rapid Arrows. But even then, I found their style a bit dated and made fun of the way the boys talked and how didactic some of the plots were. When I was about twelve, my brother and I went through a bit of a loutish period. We would write and draw all sorts of crude stuff in old dog-eared copies of The Rapid Arrows, which of course we felt we had to keep from our parents, so they would always soon end up in waste paper. However, a few years later, my mom gave me a beautiful collected edition printed on glossy paper, and by then, I already had some sense and restraint. But the reason I’m saying this is to show that I certainly didn’t always treat The Rapid Arrows with respect, let alone reverence. Nevertheless, their obsolescence and a kind of naivety can also be capitalized on in wonderful ways ­– great examples would be Tomáš Vorel’s silent slapstick The Rapid Arrows Start a Club or various shows by the Sklep Theatre, which I like very much. The beauty of The Rapid Arrows lies in the fact that we can mock their naivety and obsolescence, but at the same time, they transport us back to carefree times and reveal the originally virtuous messages of the author.

Does this have anything to do with how you decided to transform them in your contribution to the comic anthology The Rapid Arrows and Their Amazing New Adventures?

MB: To some extent, yes. When I was developing my own version of The Rapid Arrows, I decided to situate the story it in an environment, in which I had spent my childhood, i.e., a small-town housing estate in the 1990s. It was surrounded by nature, but there was still a certain griminess to it. It may sound controversial, but when I saw how picturesque and even charming the Stínadla quarter (The Shades) as depicted by illustrator Pavel Čech were, I didn’t get the sense of the danger that was supposed to be lurking there. So I decided to have my Rapid Arrows live in an ugly, unsuitable environment with writers instead of Vonts, skateboarders instead of Black Riders, etc. I’ve also always disliked a bit that the Arrows were regarded as role models, almost celebrities, and that boys and girls would start reading clubs and even ask them for autographs in the comic books. Such fame would surely go to their heads, right? So I figured that if the Arrows were outliers or nerds instead, they’d stick together all the more, and their vulnerability would be a greater source of tension and new plots. They’d have to stand up to the antagonist Dlouhé bidlo (“Stilts”), who is really dangerous in my version, unlike in the original, where the Brotherhood of the Cat’s Paw is more of a laughing stock or even something to be loathed. But I’ve also added in some subtle details suggesting that my Stilts is more of a tragic self-destructive figure who needs help.

Do the original stories of the five Foglar’s heroes have the potential to appeal to the current teenage generation?

MB: If kids get to read them at a relatively innocent age, then sure – before they start consuming online content, e.g., on YouTube or Tiktok, and their attention becomes fragmented. I think that The Rapid Arrows are comparable to Tintin in this regard. They present a functional fictional world – provided that the period setting of the comics is emphasized as illustrator Jiří Grus has been doing in recent years, for example.

Do you think it would be worth to make a feature-length animated film about them?

MB: Sure. If I were to make it, I would probably treat it as a sequel of sorts and would not bother with a faithful adaptation of the original. I’d be interested to see what these characters would be like once they hit puberty or adolescence, i.e., after the time of their greatest glory. The potential plot presents itself – they would have to face their club breaking up, finding a job, meeting girls, or maybe going to war. I’d make it into a coming-of-age story that would allow their fans to grow up with their heroes, as is the case with Harry Potter, for example.

In your work, you mix universally popular or even cult stories with action typical of comics and fantastic elements and set them in urban environments – actually, the city becomes to some extent one of the protagonists of the story. Can we think of it as a sort of urban fantasy?

MB: Maybe it’s because I come from a small town, and when I moved to Brno when I was fifteen, it felt like I was suddenly in some sort of megalopolis. I could go to the cinema at any time and enjoy my cinephile love for fantasy films to the fullest. Before, I would spend my time reading Foglar’s books, hiking, and camping, but the city introduced me to a completely different kind of romance. At a certain age, as you return from your first parties, you start to get the feel of the city at night. Later on, I moved to Zlín and again started discovering a completely different kind of urbanism, which inspired my short film Nocturne. And finally, after moving to Prague, I experienced yet another kind of urban romance, which inspired me to create the Czech superhero Pérák (“the Spring Man”).

But Pérák already existed…

MB: Sure, he first appeared as an urban legend during the Protectorate and was later turned into a popular cartoon character by Jiří Trnka in his film Springman and the SS. He had this cartoonish, bobbing look typical of characters in old-time black-and-white American slapstick cartoons, and that’s how he has featured most prominently in our collective memory. But I was very intrigued by the unfinished torso of a comic book by Petr Krejzek and Adolf Lachman, in which Pérák was depicted as a superhero in a very detailed steampunkish and realistic style. I was very sorry that the comic was never finished, so I decided to create an animated film with a realistic comic-book style similar to Nocturne. In retrospect, I can see that The Shadow over Prague has many flaws, both in terms of its story and style, because I took a plot structure intended for a feature and used it to make a thirteen-minute film­ – and it definitely shows. It would have been better if I had made an action-packed five-minute short with just Pérák, the Golem, and the Nazis, rather than trying to cram other characters and motifs into the film at all costs. But I think I have mined this character well enough, because I followed up the film with a comic called Yellow is Our Colour published in the Aargh! magazine. In it, we follow an aged Pérák, who no longer has legs, and his sidekick Široko, as they rescue long-haired youths from the bullying national police in Žižkov, the neighbourhood bordering the Stínadla quarter.

We have already mentioned that you co-authored the comic Octobriana (with Ondřej Kavalír). In your article published in Deník N, you explained why you chose this cult character as the main protagonist. A brainchild of Petr Sadecký created as a mystification and shaped by a stereotypical, sexist perception of superheroines. Can you describe the process of creating the comic and what were your individual roles in it?

MB: This brings us back to Zdeněk Burian and the Aargh! Magazine, which I first discovered in our school library in Brno. What caught my eye then was the cover of the magazine with Miroslav Schönberg’s Octobriana, and inside the issue, there was an article about Octobriana with surprisingly lascivious pictures by the otherwise always respectable Burian. Much later, when I was thinking about making a film sequel to The Shadow over Prague, it occurred to me that this Soviet superheroine Octobriana would be a great antagonist to Pérák. But the producer Dagmar Sedláčková pointed out to me that she might actually be a more interesting character. And she was right, because Octobriana has, among other things, potential for a greater global appeal. At first, I thought about making an animated series but soon realized that would be very expensive. Still, I sent my designs to Tomáš Prokůpek, the editor-in-chief of Aargh!, who was thrilled with them and suggested that I publish a graphic short story in the magazine, which I eventually did in 2019. The scriptwriter Ondřej Kavalír noticed it and offered me the opportunity to publish a longer comic under the Labyrint publishing house. Together, we then reworked the original, more cinematic structure of the story, with Ondřej acting as a script editor. Collaborating with Ondřej on this "feature-length comic" worked very well for me, because it was much easier to refine ideas and the final comic is more polished than if I worked on it all alone.

For those who haven’t read the comic, could you at least briefly explain how you and Ondřej tried to update the character?

MB: I guess in a similar way as in the case of The Rapid Arrows – we tried to embrace that the original material has aged and maybe even exaggerate this fact, but not to the point of making it seem like goofy pulpy sexism. We wanted to acknowledge and exploit the fact that Octobriana was originally created to please the eyes of aging white heterosexual men, meaning that, aside from her animality and Soviet origins, her entire characterization was based on her physical attributes. I decided to use this fact for the main plot – to point out that everyone wants to use her body above all else, whether as a weapon or as a eugenic tool to improve the human race, but no one really cares about her opinion on anything that’s going on. I didn’t want to make a simple variation of, for example, a typical Bond movie and just replace the hero with a heroine and say: “Look, this was sexist and we shouldn’t do it anymore.” When I was reimagining Octobriana, I was well aware that even though we live in a time of culture wars, controversy can be a great thing. What also worked in my favour is that Czech comics are not weighed down by the rules of mainstream or commercial comics, because the industry simply doesn’t make much money in this country. It’s possible that today’s twenty-something readers will criticize me for the cover of Octobriana being sexist, and I get that. But at the same time, I’d recommend they at least read the bit of text on the back and take a look inside, and maybe they’ll change their minds.

You’re the author of the visual identity of this year’s Anifilm, whose theme is science fiction. What do you appreciate most about this genre?

MB: Like many other kids in the 1990s, I was also struck by the phenomenon of Star Wars, and unlike today, when anyone can watch almost anything whenever they want, back then I only saw it once on VHS, and it was a very special and precious experience for me. But I was also deeply influenced by Czech science fiction, especially films by Karel Zeman. The world of the fantastic felt completely natural to me back then. I think almost everyone appreciates the escapism of the sci-fi genre, but what seems just as important to me is that science fiction is essentially a sort of meta-genre that can absorb and blend with many other genres. Czech sci-fi comedy, for example, is a genre of its own – The Mystery of the Carpathian Castle, I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen, You Are a Widow, Sir... These and other films have allowed me to appreciate the charm of analogue, imperfect sci-fi films, which are all the more fascinating thanks to their sound design and inventiveness. For me, watching them has always been a rich audiovisual experience.

What was the first thing that came to your mind when you got to creating the visual identity?

MB: Given how inspiring the entire history of science fiction is, I decided to approach it as a sort of evolutionary arc of the genre – from techno-optimism to techno-pessimism – while referencing several specific works that are important to me. And with the underlying message that colonizing space might not be such a great idea. When Pavel Horáček called me with the offer to create the visual identity, my first question was: "So you're going to screen Fantastic Planet?" As soon as he said yes, I knew I’d enjoy working on it, because that film is very close to my heart and the motif of a blue giant holding a tiny human in its hand was something I knew would work really well. I decided to pay tribute to Fantastic Planet also because even though it’s stylistically a very French film, whose style was shaped by director René Laloux, writer and illustrator Roland Topor, and composer Alain Goraguer, it was animated in Czechoslovakia, and the film itself is highly acclaimed internationally and has great sound design. That sound design also plays a very important role in our trailer, and I think that together with its sound designer, Jiří Saska, we were able to reference other well-known works as well. Other elements of the visual identity reference perhaps my greatest cinematic love – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, although not so much the black-and-white original, but rather the restored colorized 1980s version with music by Giorgio Moroder. In general, it seems to me that science-fiction cinema leans heavily on references to earlier works and authors, and I wanted to tap into that. So you’ll also find nods to Meliés's Verne-inspired A Trip to the Moon and many others.

Of the more recent films, there’s an obvious reference to the robot Eve from WALL-E, which should give you a clue as to what the symbol on the robot’s chest might mean. And I’ll leave the rest to the viewers to discover for themselves.

What animated sci-fi films do you think animation fans shouldn’t miss, aside from the ones already mentioned?

MB: Definitely Gandahar by René Laloux, which was made a decade after Fantastic Planet and is quite different in its atmosphere, Philippe Caza’s art style, cooler colour palette, and synth soundtrack. Furthermore, I can’t forget to mention Mamoru Oshii’s dystopian cyberpunk classic Ghost in The Shell or Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, which is a complete rarity among sci-fi films for kids. In some ways it resembles E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but it enriches the touching bromance with darker themes of the Cold War, American militarism, and the pervasive paranoia of the 1950s. At the same time, it’s also a pleasing blend of traditional hand-drawn animation and 3D models. And perhaps a bit unexpectedly, I’d also recommend Hurricane, a brilliant short film by my friend Jan Saska, which is admittedly not sci-fi (despite the pig-headed main character), but it does wittily reference classic and cult films of the genre. I’m sure fans will spot them.