Birthday: 1935-02-18 Born in: Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]
Known for
The Pied Piper
A darkly brilliant stop-motion adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin about a plague of rats that punish townsfolk corrupt with greed. One of Czechoslovakia's most ambitious animation projects of the 1980s, notable for its unusual dark art direction, innovative animation techniques and use of a fictitious language.
The first puppet kinescope in the world. It is based on the famous poetic comedy by William Shakespeare. Three worlds meet in this story: the noble world of three Athens couples, a common popular world of tradesmen amateur theatre and a fairy-tale happiness of magic creatures as elves and nymphs. The film is considered the most remarkable Jirí Trnka's work and a milestone in the history of the world animation.
The film contains three Jan Werich's fairy tales, each directed by one artist. The first story sets out to the Sumava mountains in Southern Bohemia to find out whether Ogres ever lived there. The middle tale The Hat and the Little Jay Feather concerns a king who sends his three sons to bring back a hat he left at a tavern when he was young. The third and longest fairy tale Reason and Luck is about the two virtues of the title try to prove their importance by changing the life of a pig herder named Louis. Written by
