In Prague, one of the greatest of all talents in international animation was Jiri Trnka, an erstwhile puppeteer who began working on films after the second World War. One of Trnka's earliest films was done in harsh black-and-white line-drawings : The Springer and the SS (1946) told the story of a chimney-sweep who turns violent in his resistance of the Nazis. Trnka went on to make films that utilized puppets in the stop-frame principle, a common technique to all animated films to effect movement in his puppet characters. His talents for endowing his vast range of puppet characters with uncanny life began in the Forties with such films as the spoof Western Arie prerie (1949) and his traditional Czech subject The Czech Year (1947). Other notable graphic animators whose careers began at the same time as Trnka's were Jiffi Brdecka, Zdenek Miller and Eduard Hofman. At the end of the Forties another Czech, Karel Zeman, created a whole new class of puppetry using animated figures made of glass in films like Inspirace (The Inspiration,1949).
In Europe, as in North America, animation would undergo a widespread diversification during the 1940s. The most advanced forms of design moved in the direction of a simplicity of line that recalled the experiments of early animators like Emile Cohl in France and Winsor McCay in the USA, re-establishing the essentials of the art. The finest animators of the Forties believed that animation should remain a highly stylized graphic form that delighted in its own wit of subject and artifice of line. They were also concerned to reduce the complexity of the image so that the labor costs which had made Disney's overheads so enormous could be significantly reduced. Indeed a new era would commence for animation.
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| You gotta be Cohl to be kind, in the right measure. |
By the Fifties, it had become an established part of creative cinema, matching every mood from comic caricature to political satire, from folklore to your more serious drama from fantasy to the outer limits of mobile abstract art. In the following decades, animation was to become the most technologically advanced form of filmmaking in existence.