Jiri Trnka is one of the founders of world animation work. His quality is proved in the puppet film Old Czech Legends. The film is based on Alois Jirasek's Ancient Bohemian Legends, but is also inspired by the historical Cosmas Chronicle of Bohemia. Even today, the film captivates with its scenic breadth and directing and artistic concept. The film is characterized by a new artistic processing of puppet types.
Jiri Trnka was a world-class filmmaker, as evidenced by the many international and festival awards of this film. There is an obvious inspiration from the work of Josef Manes and Mikolas Ales, but at the same time Trnka remained his pictorial fantasy. He took the whole story very poetically. It may be a bit abbreviated, but it didn't distract my experience. At the same time, the film is free from excessive pathos, even though time and the conceived theme tempted to do so. As usual with Trnka, the image is very dynamic - the camera often changes angles of view, circles, floats in any direction, zooms in and Trnka does not avoid even mass scenes, which had to be very difficult to implement. As far as imagination is concerned, Trnka was perhaps only comparable to Karel Zeman or Bretislav Pojar, and in this context I ask myself: ‘When will we see DVD editions of his work?’ As until recently with Karel Zeman, our distributors are rather disinterested in it.
