An Invisible Spirit

An Invisible Spirit

Plus: news.

Welcome! It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate:

• 1. On The Blue Apron.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. Estrangement

Stop motion sits right on the border of our world. A drawn or CG film can create its own reality; the illusion is easy enough to accept. But stop motion is full of evidence of our reality. We recognize textures, shapes, light. And yet nothing works quite as we know it to work.

Bringing tactile objects to life has a “dream quality,” as Ray Harryhausen put it. Something odd is obviously happening. For Aardman’s Peter Lord, the stop-motion animator becomes “an invisible spirit transforming the puppet into a living being,” never clearly seen but still “ever-present, everywhere in the shot.”¹

This is the special tension and power of stop motion. And few have played with its implications like Hermína Týrlová.

She was the first stop-motion great from Czechoslovakia, predating Jiří Trnka but continuing to work long after his death. And her best films star undisguised objects. “My goal is the ‘resuscitation’ of inanimate things,” she said. Often, these were “insignificant items” like toys or measuring tape or strands of wool.²

Týrlová favored them for a reason. If we see a handkerchief alive on the screen, she said, it becomes “alive for me even in my own pocket.”³ She and her animators, acting as invisible spirits, put a strangeness back into everyday materials that most take for granted.

One of her most beautiful films, The Blue Apron (1965), is that type of thing. It’s a surreal fantasy set in collage landscapes, where a white paper bird and a blue cloth apron fly together. There are no words or people or even traditional puppets. But Týrlová’s inanimate objects are mysteriously alive.

Once, animator Nick Park spoke about Eastern European stop motion “where there are often characters that don’t have a face, but they have a soul.”⁴ This is what you find in The Blue Apron and Týrlová’s work generally. Per one historian:

… unconstrained by convention and by the dogmatism of senseless restrictions ... [Týrlová] abandoned standard puppets and fairy-tale themes and focused on animating objects, puppet-toys and various materials which she anthropomorphized not by forcing features on them, but by their action alone.⁵

Týrlová’s blue apron jitters with energy and bumps along innocently. The paper bird, a sort of parent to the apron, moves with more grace. Coming against them is a trail of swirling, slithering black smoke from an industrial city. In both movement and material, each is distinct and makes its identity known.

Like usual for Týrlová, The Blue Apron is an art film. That’s heard in the score by Zdeněk Liška (a Jan Švankmajer collaborator) and seen in the modernist images. One shot with the apron on a clothesline so closely resembles Frida Kahlo’s piece My Dress Hangs There, it’s hard not to believe that art director Jan Dudešek knew it.

But it’s also a children’s film. In her prime, Týrlová always described herself as a director for young children, the official target audience of The Blue Apron. “I will never again leave children — I would force myself into something that is not my nature; I would pander to adults,” she said in the late ‘60s. “I see the world through children’s eyes.”⁶

Even before The Blue Apron, Týrlová was open about her childlike style. In her films, she took from children’s “games and the world of their toys, with which they are in daily contact and with which they themselves can often express very serious thoughts.”⁷

As that made clear, saccharine sweetness wasn’t Týrlová’s goal. In fact, there’s a sense of threat in nearly all of her films. The Blue Apron ends when the apron sacrifices itself to defeat the smoke, stitching its own body into the sky.⁸ With the project underway, Týrlová wrote:

The whole plot is built on it, on a mere apron, on her longing to take off to the heights... She longs for this so much that nothing can stop her. Not even a wicked black cloud that chases her and threatens her with lightning. It hits and destroys her companion, a white swallow that had helped her take flight and protected her from the lightning, but it always misses the apron. The last and greatest bolt flies right by her and breaks through the celestial vault. … The blue apron at the critical moment saves Earth — merging with the blue sky and healing the crack in it.

All of my films are aimed to please children, so that a brief experience of fear ultimately brings them great delight, as someone does something good to save others. It gives satisfaction to me as well. I want to feel this way and I want to transmit it to others; it is my expression, my creed. In The Blue Apron I have another opportunity to bring children a bit of joy. May I succeed…⁹

Týrlová, born in 1900, had lived through both world wars. The animation studio near Zlín, where she spent most of her career, was hit during the second one. Her breakout film The Revolt of the Toys (1947) follows an uprising of children’s toys against a Nazi officer, a figure familiar to anyone from occupied Czechoslovakia. The surreal, dangerous world of The Blue Apron exists right on the border of ours.

There isn’t a shot in this film without some visual trick: the forced perspectives, the competing styles of design and movement. At the same time, Týrlová and her team didn’t conceal the physicality of their objects. The backgrounds’ heavy texture announces them as paintings; the apron is an apron. Using this grounding in our world, she built a real-but-unreal film that might, she hoped, change the viewer’s vision after the end.

The Blue Apron was one of Czechoslovakia’s really standout stop-motion shorts (it was even considered for an Oscar).¹⁰ It’s up there with Týrlová masterpieces like A Wooly Tale and The Star of Bethlehem, and might rank a little higher.

All of those films share a goal, though — the one Týrlová pursued from the ‘50s onward. Writing about her gem The Little Train (1959), done with animated toys, František Tenčík argued that it showed:

… how objects can “lead,” what kind of acting they are capable of, what complex characters and plots they can represent. It also inspired the search for and discovery of new acting possibilities for the toy, which has only a set and unchanging form and limited function in the jaded, tired view of an adult, in his uninventive imagination. However, if the toy is touched by fantasy … [it becomes] a magical “character” of magical events.

Whatever everyday object Týrlová used for a film, she always aimed to suggest that the jaded view was incomplete. Cloth, paper and wool may not breathe, but seeing them as dead, inert matter is just one option. Through the fundamental strangeness of stop motion, she revealed something about our world, too.

2. Newsbits

• Jason Tammemägi of Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon argues that the industry used to invest in artists and develop projects. Now “every new animation property must arrive fully formed, already popular, with its own audience and clear metrics.”

• One from America: producer Jinko Gotoh (Klaus) became the new head of WIA.

• The American director Ron Clements has a memoir out: Making Disney Magic.

• Guillermo del Toro signed on to produce The Ballad of the Phoenix, the next feature by Mexico’s Cinema Fantasma (Frankelda).

• The American film Wildwood opened to $11.2 million domestic and $3 million abroad.

• In America, an award ceremony for concept artists was held at Lightbox Expo. It led to discussions about the problems hurting concept artists, from GenAI to “corporate stuff,” as companies treat artists’ work as expendable.

• Composer Joe Hisaishi has become the composer-in-residence for the LA Philharmonic in America.

• Península Films, in Mexico, is now on board Sofía Carrillo’s stop-motion feature Insectario. The project isn’t yet in production but has been picking up a lot of speed lately.

• The Canadian animator Aaron Long released a fun and funny promo skit for his adult indie series Sublo and Tangy Mustard.

• Finally, we wrote about the beginning of China’s Flash animation craze at the turn of the millennium.

3. Last word

Thanks for reading today’s issue! We’re wrapping up with personal thoughts from the two of us:

Jules: I’ve known Gustave Doré as a respected illustrator since I was young, but I’d never looked into his story (sometimes I like to let art stand on its own). So, it was interesting to learn recently about Doré’s immense fame during his lifetime and about his influence on the beginning of film — he was reportedly an inspiration for filmmakers as early as Georges Méliès. In 1930, the cinematographer Lewis Physioc wrote, “[I]f there is one man’s work that can be taken as a cinematographer’s text, it is that of Doré’s.” Ray Harryhausen and his mentor Willis O’Brien both loved Doré’s work, and he impacted the films of Karel Zeman, Terry Gilliam, Jean Cocteau and Disney. Recently, he was a key reference for I Am Frankelda. Doré’s illustrations faced opposition from some critics of his time, but the work endured.

John: Something Jules and I discuss a lot, and have for years, is the shortage of art that captures the feeling of the 2020s and really portrays our time. It kind of makes sense: pinning down this chaotic, incoherent era isn’t easy. But I think it’s important to try. We recently got talking along these lines again after watching Lifewasters, an indescribable film by Victoria Vincent (vewn), one of our favorite current animators. She can put the 2020s on screen like nobody else — her Snooze Quest floored us last year. Jonni Pepper-GoLions has the touch as well. When animators use topics and creative languages specific to our moment, it tends to clear the fog for me; I can see a little better. Like with cubism and dadaism a hundred-plus years ago, it reflects the new world while also giving it shape.

Until next time!

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