Song of the Prairie

Jiří Trnka (24 February 1912, Plzeň – 30 December 1969, Prague) was a Czech puppet maker, illustrator, motion-picture animator and film director, renowned for his stop motion puppet animations.

He graduated from the Prague School of Arts and Crafts. He created a puppet theater in 1936. This group was dissolved when World War II began, and he instead designed stage sets and illustrated books for children throughout the war.

After the end of the war, Trnka established an animation unit at the Prague film studio. Trnka soon became internationally recognized as the world’s greatest puppet animator in the traditional Czech method, and he won several film festival awards. One animator called him “the Walt Disney of the East”.

He won an award at the Cannes Festival in 1946, just one year after he began working in film. His films were mostly made for an adult audience. Beginning in 1948, the communist Czech government began to subsidize his creations, although this did not seem to affect the message or style of his work. He also created animated cartoons. He wrote the scripts for most of his own films. In 1968, he won the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the most distinguished prize in children’s literature. He died of heart trouble in 1969. As of 2009 Trnka is one of only two directors who have won best film (now known as the Golden Leopard) at the Locarno International Film Festival.

Trnka was an extraordinarily talented and hard-working individual. He painted and wrote and was a woodcutter, a sculptor, and an illustrator. In all his films he was not only a writer and graphic artist but also an editor, a designer and builder of puppets, and a designer of puppet costumes. Often misunderstood and attacked by the critics, he never bent to any pressures.

The work he produced was well-rounded, full of human warmth, tenderness, wisdom, humor, and grace. He succeeded in bringing the puppet film out of the periphery and into mature prominence. He brought the masterworks of literature into the purview of the puppet film and expressed philosophical ideas and emotions with such urgency that his films have become not only a landmark but also a yardstick for puppet films yet to be made.

Truly a unique genius of Czech culture in the second half of the twentieth century, Trnka demonstrated by his work that the animated film can convey all the conditions of the human spirit. —Wikipedia