Quotes of the Day

A pair of gloves entwine in a passionate kiss. Toys come alive to attack an SS officer. Two hungry men eat their own clothes, the table and then each other. Welcome to the world of Czech animation: imaginative, innovative, darkly funny and usually very bizarre. The work of Czech artists has been Saturday morning TV filler for decades and its influence shows in film (Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas), television (Monty Python's Flying Circus), music videos and commercials. As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, London's National Film Theatre (in association with the Czech Centre) gave a respectful nod last month to Prague's contribution to animated culture with a season of the best it has to offer: everything from short line sketches to feature-length puppet films. All the favorites were present, while hidden gems were finally given the airing and the audience they deserve.

The theatre's half-century celebrations fittingly coincide with the fact that Czech animation only really came into its own in the 1950s. In an attempt to compete with Disney's massively popular Mickey Mouse, the communists financed the country's animation industry, but paid little attention to what they considered child's play. Artists and directors spent half their time making instructional cartoons and the other half making the films they wanted to make. The perfect example: two of the earliest films in the season are by master puppeteer Jiri Trnka. In 1946, he made both The Animals and the Brigands, a woodland story that bears a remarkable resemblance to early Disney cartoons, and The Springer and the SS, in which a black-clad, bouncing hero makes a fool of a cowardly Hitler. One is an artistically sound, generic cartoon; the other a wonderfully cheeky example of how to use the medium's perceived innocence to undermine authority.

Trnka is widely considered the grandfather of Czech animation. It was his feature-length A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959), the first ever puppet film, that introduced the country's blossoming art to the rest of the world. Played out by graceful, delicate puppets, the Shakespeare adaptation is sprinkled with glitter and shimmers the way fairy-tales should. For better or worse, it marked the Czech Republic as a land of puppeteers and stop-motion animators. Even now, the phrase "Czech animation" conjures up images of wooden figurines, paper cutouts, claymation and living inanimate objects.

By arranging the artists' films in chronological order, the season lets us watch as the creators experiment with different media and find their distinct styles. This treatment is given to all of the big names in Czech animation, including Karel Zeman (known as "The Czech Melies") and Bretislav Pojar. We watch as surrealist Jan Svankmajer — possibly the best known Eastern European animator to date — goes from the nightmarish puppet show Johannes Dr. Faust (1958) to the smugly satirical Food (1992).

Svankmajer rarely tells a story, preferring instead to comment on the human condition. The closest he comes to linear narrative is in Alice, a feature-length take on Lewis Carroll's work populated by freakish, grotesque characters. Introduced as a film "for children, perhaps", it couldn't be any further from the kid-friendly Disney movie. For one thing, Walt's version didn't show a slab of raw meat crawling across a counter-top.

A self-confessed Svankmajer fan, Jiri Barta represents some of the latest work in the season, with the bulk of his films made in the '80s. His spellbinding The Pied Piper is all dark colors, sharp angles and distorted perspectives, as beautiful as it is unsettling. Barta's shorts are mostly lessons in found objects, addressing social concerns like the blandness of mass housing or man's destruction of nature.

Grappling with big issues is one common thread weaving together most of the work shown. "Western animation is more commercial, playing with characters. It has a dynamic story and is made for a huge audience," says Barta. "A typical characteristic of Czech animation is the game of metaphor and symbols, aimed at a special audience, a special way of thinking, a special language." Using color, music and minimal dialogue, much of Czech animation is the cinematic equivalent of poetry. The symbolism in these films reaches the viewer on an instinctive level, so the moral (and there almost always is one) comes in loud and clear, even while the watcher is being enchanted and entertained.

This tradition seems likely to continue in future generations, but the retrospective only offers a taste of what's to come. Apart from two joyously lively shorts by Aurel Klimt and a handful of recent films by women animators like Vlasta Pospisilova and Michaela Pavlatova (the regretfully small collection of films by female creators includes some of the most vibrant and energetic work in the whole season), examples of new blood are glaring in their absence. The fall of communism is partly to blame, with the end of government subsidy creating a new problem of financing and distribution. Despite this, however, the organizers have pulled together a stellar sampling of films. With most of the screenings selling out, it's evident that London audiences are hungry for the experience. A good sign for when the season tours the rest of Britain (for more information, go to www.czechcentre.org.uk), pulling more people into its weird and wonderful world.

• JUMANA FAROUKY
• A new season of Czech animation at London's National Film Theatre