Paul Fierlinger was born March 15, 1936 in Japan to Czechoslovakian parents. His father was a Czech government official, and in 1939, after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the family moved to the United States. In America, Paul was cared for by several families and was away from his own family most of the time. When the war ended, his parents returned to Czechoslovakia where his father took his position as an important member of the Communist government. While his parents were returning home, Paul was entering a foreign land. In 1967, Paul escaped Czechoslovakia, and after working briefly as an animator in Holland, Paris, and Munich, settled in Philadelphia in the United States where he founded his company, AR&T Associates, an independent production company.

In 1979, a film he made for Learning Corporation of America, It's So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House , was nominated for an Academy Award. Many know his work from Teeny Little Superguy on Sesame Street. In 1988 he made The Quitter, a short film made to help smokers quit smoking, and in 1989 he made And Then I'll Stop...Does Any of This Sound Familiar?, a film about alcoholism. In 1995, Drawn from Memory, a fifty-six minute film about his own life, was shown on PBS' American Playhouse. Most recently, in 1998 he completed two short films, Marsh People and A Rabbit Story. He is currently working on another long film for PBS about his dog, Roosevelt, named after Franklin D. Roosevelt. His and his wife, Sandra's, film, Playtime, Collection One, placed second in the Sponsored Films category of this year's ASIFA-East Awards.

Paul with his parents during WWII; from Drawn from Memory. © Acme Filmworks.

Beginnings
"I did a flip book when I was twelve. I did it because it would free me from the rest of the world, and mostly from the dominance of my father. It was a political statement on my part. My father was out to hate everything American, and I was out to love everything American. Animation in the Forties, early Fifties, when Communism started in Czechoslovakia, was forbidden, was considered a bourgeois pastime for spoiled rich kids that had nothing to do with Socialist Realism of the working class. The animation companies were closed for a short time.

"In the meantime, Jiri Trnka had a few of his films making the film festival circuit out in the world and the results started trickling back. He was becoming famous and was creating a good name for Czechoslovakia. He made the country look good, as if, you know, 'It can't be such a bad place if such wonderful work comes out of there.' So they got second thoughts about animation and started producing again. It was a form of propaganda and we were all part of it. Anybody who was in that creative process knew that they were helping the country lie. At that point when it was forbidden, just to piss my father off, I decided to want to become an animator, because I could draw and when I was drawing it was the only time that grownups would leave me alone and wouldn't say, 'Why don't you rake the leaves?' or 'Read a book,' or 'Do something better than that.' I quickly learned to love it and that was it.

Freelancing in Communist Czechoslovakia
"In Czechoslovakia the state had a monopoly on everything. Believe it or not, in the Fifties you could not own a typewriter without a license because they were so afraid of disseminating propaganda. Every typewriter had to be registered with the police, with all the keystrokes and everything put on record, so that if you typed a leaflet and pasted it to a wall, they would be able to trace it to you. You couldn't make films, you couldn't write, you couldn't do anything without the permission of the state. And there was a monopoly for filmmaking. Nobody was allowed to make films except the state run company. But they were talking about 35mm. 16mm was considered amateur, and exempt from the state monopoly. Then television came along, and nobody changed the rules.

"I was allowed to have a 16mm camera. I was a professional artist, which means I had been admitted through this long process of passing tests. I had to be approved by all sorts of commissions that I am a true artist, and I was allowed to be a freelancer. I was allowed to work at home, and I produced on 16mm film, so I wasn't breaking the state monopoly law. I made films for television, and I was the first one to do that. I had been doing animation since I was twelve, and I could do it for money now that television showed up. Others followed me.