Animator switch: Mal'ovanie

Mal'ovanie is one of the best episodes of this stop motion series. Although its plot is essentially a re-hash of Tapety, it combines good action and timing with probably the greatest slapstick humor of the series. This was aided by Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly, a great animator whose only outing on the original series was this episode. More on him will follow in the next post.

This post shows an interesting production detail which rarely shows up. Although the vast majority of the episode was animated by Mensdorff-Pouilly, the first few scenes were handled by Karel Chocholín, most likely to save time.  Update: These scenes were, in fact, animated by Jan Klos, for reasons explained here. They also take place on a different set (the kitchen).

Apart from the animators' different styles, the switch after the first three shots is easy to notice because the puppets are different as well. See the differences for yourself:

There were other episodes animated by two animators, for example, Tapety, Výlet or Parkety, but I don't believe that any had such an easily observed switch which happened at the beginning of the episode. I will cover some of these later on.