An excerpt from Gene Deitch's book, How To Succeed In Animation (Don't Let A Little Thing Like Failure Stop You!).

After signing me up and explaining how to obtain a passport, Snyder once again took off for Prague. I had accepted this weird offer only as a chance of getting my two pet projects produced, that was all. My plan was to do the absolute minimum of messing with these people's films, get my own projects into production, and then get safely home, the sooner the better.

A Rocky Start
When Snyder arrived in Prague, he hastened to convey his "good news" to studio production manager Zdenka Najmanova. "Darling," he said, placing a reassuring hand on her sturdy little shoulder, "I am bringing you the best animation director in America to show you how to improve these films."

Zdenka was so thrilled with this news, she promptly resolved not to speak to me. I can only imagine the torrent of nasty Czech words that must have cascaded through her head. The thought of some smart-assed American hotshot hobnailing over her finished movies created in her a generous serving of advance hostility.

During those first days, I screened some of my UPA films for the staff. I needed to show them that I was really a professional, and that my advice was worth listening to. After that, I seemed to get increased respect, and was no longer viewed as a troublemaking interloper. That made things a lot easier.

The great moment came when I was finally able to get my own two film projects started. When explaining the storyboard to the staff, I tried to act it out, as I usually did to my own UPA, Terrytoons or GDA staff. What was hilarious in this case was that it all had to be translated. I would enthusiastically act out the scenario, and each time I came to a gag point, there had to be a pause for translation. Then, everyone would laugh at the gag. It was like seeing a movie that was 20 seconds out of synch! It was talk-pause-laugh, talk-pause-laugh, talk-pause-laugh, throughout the entire demonstration!

I was delighted that they liked my projects, which were so culturally different from their own. I had brought with me the dialogue soundtracks for my two new films, which I had recorded in New York, and I was ready to give the individual scenes to the animators that Zdenka had recommended. So we were all into a working relationship.

Wait! How Do You Do This?
The unexpected difficulty was that the Czechs had a totally different system of animation notation and camera instructions. The Czech artists who set up the animation studio just after World War II certainly had a passion for this art, but they did not really know how to go about it.

All they had to learn from were bootleg black & white prints the Germans had duplicated from a couple of Disney features. They figured out basically how these films were made by running them on what they called a "Kinox" machine, a gadget made out of old projector parts that allowed a film to be run frame-by-frame and viewed on a plate of frosted glass, more or less like an American-style "Moviola." Working "backwards" in this way, they more or less figured out how the animation drawings and backgrounds should be organized.

They completely ignored -- and didn't even know about -- the general world standard of using exposure sheets on which ruled lines represented the frames of film! The studio was tightly gripped by an old guard clique whose pride did not allow them to accept the thought that there might be a better, easier, or more logical way to organize the work. It was a mindset I was to struggle against for at least 20 years, with success coming slowly and partially. I used to kid them about the way their animation drawings looked. All around the edges of the photographed area were numbers. There was the production number, the sequence and scene number, and then a list of the numbers of all the film frames onto which that particular drawing would be exposed.