Barta’s Pied Piper is a stop-motion tour-de-force.

Green Wood involved filmmakers from the Jiri Trnka studio, which later lent its resources to Barta’s ambitious feature The Pied Piper (1985). Barta was most interested in the film’s crooked setting and depraved townspeople, who get a deserved comeuppance from the fearsome Pied Piper, all placed in the trappings of a medieval morality play. Barta is now developing a feature version of the Golem story, and screened a seven-minute promotional reel in London last year.

“I studied at the College of Applied Arts, in the Department of Film and Television Graphics. If I look at the work of my colleagues, they are partly art designers and partly animators. Animated cinema is a collection of many individualities, and I think nobody wants to follow anybody else. Everyone has their own way. I met Jiri Trnka at the very beginning of my time in animation. He taught at our art school in illustration and graphics, because he said animation is very complicated and he didn’t want to do it! Trnka belongs to the older generation (he died in 1969) and is a legend.

“I don’t think the problem of Czech animation is a problem of money, it’s more distribution. If you have no cinemas or TV channels to show animated films, then there’s no one to finance them. You can ask from the grant system, which might give you 50% of a budget but I am speaking about very small budgets. We look for collaboration with other countries; sometimes we’re successful, sometimes not. I’ve worked in Cardiff, Wales [on the 13-minute short The Tyrant and the Child, co-produced with S4C], but I seldom have such opportunities.

“Animation festivals are very important, not only to show our work but to see the work of other animators. It’s very important for us to see the situation in the world. In particular, we can see many computer-animated films now, and mixes of computer and hand animation. I don’t think computer animation is better than hand animation, but you can choose one way or another. At the beginning, I was against computers because I thought the animation was a little bit cold, showing a very scientific world, but, after several years, I’ve changed my feelings. My students work on computers and I know their commercial possibilities, so they are important.

“My feature film The Pied Piper was made in 1985 between West Germany and Kratky Film Praha, with the money coming from both sides. It was a huge and complicated project for us, taking about two and a half years to make. I was lucky because I could ask my friends and colleagues to help me. There were about 30 people working on the project in all. The film used several different techniques, including 3D puppets and the illusion of 3D space created by light on a series of glass sheets. All the film’s sets were made in a special perspective, so that the backgrounds seemed very distant, but they were only painted and sculpted that way.

“Animated film for Czech animators is about stylization and art design. If I talk about the Czech animated ‘school’ [the name given to the strand of Czech animation influenced by Trnka, Zeman, their predecessor Hermina Tyrlova and their successor Jan Svankmajer], that doesn’t mean one style, but many individualities, many different styles. The Pied Piper started from the idea that this was an old German legend, so it needed to be expressionist, medieval. Czech animation can be both grotesque and funny. Nothing is absolutely serious, but there are greater or lesser degrees of humor.

Jan Svankmajer was a successor of Trnka.

“I didn’t make a script for this film, only storyboards. A script had been developed before I came on board, but it was hard to get it to feature length, so I was invited to make the film. I liked the story, the ideas, the atmosphere and thought I could get something. I was most interested in the mood, and I made the film according to my feelings. Pied Piper is a film about character, setting a city of evil against a few bright characters, like the lady Agnes, who’s an island in the middle of darkness. Then there’s the extraordinary figure of the Pied Piper, who’s like Destiny, Death or Time, with further symbols of time in the film like the town clock on the tower. I gave the story a different ending [in which the Piper turns the townspeople into rats] because there are many kinds of expression.

“I like The Ballad of Green Water, my short film, because I needed to imagine all the possible situations when we were animating, up in mountains and caves. Filming it was a big adventure and sometimes very funny. We would find a place and try to shoot, but it was so complicated, because the weather could change in a few minutes. You might be able to animate for an hour before having to cancel and start again next day. We had to set up so many shots and choose from them. We had three times as many shots as in the actual film. The shooting took from winter till summer. Seven or eight months, for 10 minutes of animation!

“With my current feature The Golem, I suppose I’m in a parallel situation to Yuri Norstein making The Overcoat. (I like Norstein’s work, he has a very nice mood and stylization, absolutely distinct.) I am preparing many storyboards and trying to approach producers. Some people in Japan promised to help me with the film, but they were cautious because they said the story was dark, it had a little bit of a deep mood. They said it wasn’t for Japanese people. It’s strange, because at the outset, they said yes to everything, but now they’re silent. I’m also putting the film to Czech TV, and looking around in many different directions.”

Andrew Osmond is a freelance writer specializing in fantasy media and animation.