OK, so my best friend got me this little thing
as a birthday present. There's actually a whole, like,
series of them.
It's a tiny little pocket Midsummer Night's Dream.
See that? Isn't that just, like, adorable?
It's, just, like, one of my favorite birthday presents ever.
and um.... It's September now, isn't it?
Poop.
[Intro Music, "Procession of Nobles" by Rimsky-Korsakov]
Now this movie is the last request I've done this summer.
It's September, I know, but it's still summer.
It's technically still summer until the 21st,
so I'm technically still on time.
Right?
Right.
I am ashamed.
Anyway, all the requests were really strange to me,
but this one especially seemed a bit odd,
because I'm an American and
it's actually pretty difficult to find a legal copy of this movie in America.
As hard as it is for any Westerner to find anything
made by director... J.. Z... J... J
J.... Oh, that is just a car crash of consonants right there, uh.
Jirzi? I gotta look it up.
[Google Translate] Jiří Trnka
[Kyle] Jersey Turnpike! OK.
I've talked a bit about the Czech animation scene
before, specifically Jan Švankmajer, but Švankmajer
was the gritty reimagining of the worlds
that Jiří Trnka created.
Trnka worked in worlds of innocence,
taking the graces of traditional Czech puppetry
and setting them in motion.
His creations are charming, simple, nostalgic,
an aesthetic that earned him the moniker,
"The Walt Disney of the East".
Though Disney was a shrewd businessman
and marketer, Trnka was more like a character
that Disney would animate.
He'd been carving puppets from a young age,
and after gaining success as an illustrator
of children's books, he took his puppeteering skills
and gave them life.
He essentially was Gepetto.
In the mid-fifties, he became famous in Czechoslovakia
for telling Czech stories: Czech peasants,
Czech legends, a popular Czech novel.
But here he'd finally found international acclaim
by using an internationally renowned author.
[Bell chimes, a male narrator speaking Czech]
In the past, just as today,
the stars were shining in the sky.
It was in 1594,
and the poet William Shakespeare
was writing a comedy
about slumber on a summer night.
[Kyle] Hey!
By the way, the "Walt Disney of the East" moniker
was given to him in 1959 at the Cannes Film Festival
when this film premiered.
His adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
I finally get to talk about a non-porn version.
A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in one world
depicted through three worlds:
the Athenian nobility,
the amateur actors,
and the magical world of the fairies.
Through most of the play, they're fragmented.
None of the pieces all come together at once,
but rather they bumble and crash in the night,
which Trnka shows.
He animates the three factions wildly differently.
The Athenians move with grace.
The actors jerk and stumble.
And the fairies....
Wow.
His direction of gesture is masterful,
but surprisingly, he animated little himself,
leaving that to his crew.
Though Trnka did have complete control over the camera.
He moved it in surprising ways,
adding motion and depth to his scenes.
But his true signature was in the design
of the puppets themselves.
Watch the faces.
They never move.
The faces only change through lighting and positioning.
Everything you need to know about the character,
is in their body language.
Trnka never designed his puppets to allow for
changes in facial expression.
He hated lipsynch.
The closest he gets to it is... this.
[Puppet seems to sing]
Foreign distributors often slap narration on his films.
For example, this one got a voiceover by Richard Burton.
But normally?
Not a word.
He also worked closely with his composer Václav Trojan
often animating to synch with the music.
And the result of that attention to music
and lack of voice is less puppetry than...
ballet.
But of course, it's more than ballet.
He does things that one can only do in film,
using dissolves and overlays to turn these wooden
figures into gossamer.
But part of me wonders how beautiful it should be.
Hear me out.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays,
but also one of his structurally flimsiest.
And even Shakespeare seems a bit apologetic on this one.
After all, he ends the play by calling it a
"weak and idle theme",
humbly apologizing for any offense caused by the players.
And this is right after Shakespeare puts on one of the
most epically bad short plays designed to be epically bad.
So bad that Shakespeare basically invented
Mystery Science Theater 3000 centuries early.
[Kyle, awkwardly reads the text] This lanthorn doth the horned moon present,
Myself, the man i' the moon do seem to be.
[Kyle, as an audience member] This is the greatest error of all the rest: the man should be put into the lanthorn. How else is it 'the man i' the moon?
Now I'm going to share one of my favorite bits of intentionally bad writing:
Pyramus' death scene.
Hmmph.
Stage direction: "Stabs himself"
Pyramus: Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.
Now am I dead,
Now am I fled;
My soul is in the sky:
Tongue, lose thy light;
Moon take thy flight:
Now die, die, die, die, die.
Stage direction: "Dies"
You just know Shakespeare's throwing shade at, like, 50 other writers right there.
It's deliberately anticlimactic.
The play ends, the Athenians plead for them not to say
any more lines,
they have a dance party, and they all go to bed because
everyone just got married.
Then the fairies return to bless the beds,
and Puck apologizes for the play being crap,
yada yada yada, we all know how it oges.
But, Trnka lets the fairies intervene earlier.
Puck comes in,
and lets the mechanicals have their play end
with the poetry it deserves.
[Oberon] Listen, Puck
No more comedies.
It was a beautiful bonfire.
But we have to extinguish it well.
Tnrka even adds his own epilogue
about the power of dreaming.
[Epilogue] Some of our dreams guide us.
While some dreams never die and go on forever,
like, for example, the dreams of Shakespeare.
[Kyle] So Trnka certainly didn't think that it was a weak and idle theme.
Then again,
it's kind of hard to tell what Trnka thought at this time.
That is,
it was hard to tell when he was speaking as himself.
He, like many other artists behind the Iron Curtain,
was subject to heavy censorship by the Communist Party
who seized power only a few years after Tnka made his first films.
For the most part, Trnka held his head down,
up until the end,
when he made his final film, "The Hand".
When cinephilic circles talk about Trnka,
it's often for this film,
where a simple potter is caught by a menacing
human hand
who commands the potter to make images of itself.
He enjoyed plenty of financial freedom,
thanks to his state subsidies,
at the cost of his artistic freedom.
American animator Gene Deitch once said
that upon meeting Trnka,
Jiří exclaimed,
"I am a very famous man!"
Deitch soon learned
that he was being ironic.
What Trnka meant was
he was not a free man.
And as of writing this video,
a decent copy of this movie is still hard to find legally.
I haven't been able to glean much about who
owns the rights to this film.
There seems to be a conflict between
the Czech government and Trnka's family,
and I could only find a low quality laserdisc copy for
use in this video,
which is tragic.
Tnrka was an influence on Švankmajer
and the Brothers Quay.
He's such an important figure
in the history of global animation.
Stop-motion animation is already a very niche discipline,
but with only Laika really pioneering the form right now,
we need to keep that history alive.
So, yeah, Criterion, if you're watching
through some magic of the Internet:
if you're not already working on getting Jiří Trnka's films
widely distributed in an HD format,
Um...do that.
Because as lovely as this ripped laserdisc copy is,
I want to see it in its full beauty.
And finally, I want to conclude this year
with a film of my own choice.
It was also hard to find for a long time and it has recently been restored by the Criterion Collection.
So, that's exciting.
And hopefully I'll get it out before the summer...
technically ends.
[mouths "I'm sorry"]