Maľovanie: three animators, two studios

Maľovanie is one of the most unique episodes of the entire Pat & Mat cannon and also the single most unique episode of the ... a je to! series. It always piqued my interest and I've always felt it somehow didn't match up with all the episodes around it. It turns out there's a great story behind this particular episode.

It is no surprise that Maľovanie ended up being the topic of the first post on this blog which wasn't part of an array of introductory posts concerned with producing a detailed filmography of the series. That short post, which only served as an introduction to a much more comprehensive one about Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly, is here. I remember writing practically all of the short post and much of the larger one on my mobile phone on a snowy bus ride from Zagreb to Split in late December. That was more than half a year ago and in that time I've learned so much more about these bumbling handymen than I thought I ever would. For instance, I've learned that a key bit of information in that short post was - wrong.

Back to Maľovanie: This episode's main distinction is obvious: much of it is animated by Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly, who typically did not work on the series, using a pair of  puppets which were never reused in the series. Yet, there are even more differences to be found in the credits: for instance, this is the only post-1979 episode that lists Věra Henzlová as production manager.

In hindsight, a most telling inclusion...

I'm very grateful to have been able to contact some of the people who worked on this great series and, of course, no person more than animator Jan Klos, with whom I've been able to talk about many of the films he worked on, both inside and outside of the Pat & Mat world. One day, Jan remembered an anecdote about his work in animation and sat down to share it with me by "knocking" it into his keyboard. With his usual self-deprecation, he quipped that this was one of those to share "before becoming history". It went like this:

It happened at Pojar's in Čiklova 13A. I finished an ... a je to! episode for Beneš and after a while I was due to start another one. Around that time, I had injured my right hand and had it in plaster (immobilized in large casing). I don't know the name of the episode, but I remember that the hero comes into the picture and carries a chicken that he intends to bake in the oven. He pulls the baking tray out of the cupboard. He finds out that the baking pan is not suitable - it is too small, so he pulls out a larger baking pan that is again not suitable - it is also too small and so on and so on until he is satisfied with the size of the baking pan. I animated these scenes with my left hand.

the headline says ... football competitions

Naturally, every person reading this recognizes what Jan is describing as the beginning of this exact episode. That would not be unusual had Jan's name been present in the titles, but, as you have just seen, it is nowhere to be found - even though his task was quite arduous. To make it clear: the three opening shots in this episode were NOT animated by Karel Chocholín, but by an uncredited Jan Klos. I had never considered this possibility, but I was thinking with my mind instead of with my eyes. Even though he is (for the most obvious reasons - he could only rely on one hand!) a bit subdued, Klos' animation is still recognizably his - especially the way Mat exits the picture in his final frames. Even though his movements don't suffer much, we can see just how difficult it must have been for him to work in such conditions. The opening shots of the episode contain much more shooting errors than is usually the case, presumably because Klos had difficulties with operating the camera. It seems the exposure settings were constantly tinkered with, which meant that the final, continuous film is full of flickering and changes in hue. Notice how different these frames look:

Klos knew it couldn't continue this way. It was astonishing that he had even tried. As Mat excited the kitchen, so did Klos this assignment.

After that shot. I gave up...

... and Beneš took the decorations to the mother studio in Bartolomějská street. I don't know what happened next exactly, but Alfons Mensdorff finished the episode.

This is where things get (even more) interesting. Even though various iterations of P&M series were done in nominally the same studio, the Jiří Trnka Studio, from 1976 to 1990, they were, in fact, filmed in four different places. Originally, the series was done in Jiří Trnka's original studio, also known as Konvikt (due to the location originally housing some kind of an aristocratic boarding school). In 1981, production resumed in Čiklovka, named so after the Čiklova street, itself named after Orthodox clergyman Václav Čikl, a branch of the studio opened in 1959 and chiefly operated by Trnka's pupils Břetislav Pojar and Josef Kluge. The series didn't remain here for long, lasting only five episodes and three additional scenes, the ones above. It then moved to Wenzigovka, a branch operated exclusively by Beneš, also named after its location, Wenzigova 5, itself named after writer Josef Wenzig. Finally, the 1989-90 episodes were filmed in the newly built studio complex in Barrandov.

However, none of the episodes were themselves set to be filmed on multiple locations. Klos' injury necessitated a return to Bartolomějská after three years and an only outing for Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly. Mensdorff, being an extremely fast animator (by Klos' account, at least 2,5 times quicker than him) found time to take over this episode in the series' original filming location. This is why Věra Henzlová is listed as its production manager. The editor, interestingly, remained Čiklovka's Věra Benešová.

A. M-P takes over

Let's take a mini tour through Prague and see Beneš's path on that day in 1982. Recently, I obtained a nice book about Czech stop-motion animation, Zlatý věk české loutkové animace (The Golden Age of Czech Puppet Animation). It features a great photo of one of Čiklovka's entrances. That studio would require quite a lot of writing, so let's just say it stood right next to an art garden and leave it at that.

It would have taken him some 35 minutes by foot. He probably didn't go that way or even use one of the omnipresent Tatra trams, but went by car. Just today, I learnt that Beneš also had a Yugoslav Zastava 750 and it's quite possible that he could have put everything he needed in the "little giant", as the Fićo car is also called here.

He would have arrived here. This is the entrance to the original studio as seen in 2010. Today, part of it is still associated with film - it is home to NFA's Ponrepo cinema.

I've already written about Mensdorff's work in this episode, but I have to mention some more details. A mistake not dissimilar to ones I mentioned earlier appears not far into his scenes. One of the shots suddenly noticeably becomes quite darker and with much more contrast. There are many reasons for these kinds of mistakes, which, unfortunately, the studio's workers back then could not fix or redo. That would have meant disposing of used film. Wages were calculated by the amount of film used (yes, completely ridiculous), so redoing was usually prohibited. It all could have been caused by something as innocuous as a light bulb change. Also in the same shot, an unidentified white object appears in the lower right corner for just a frame.

A random small object also appears (just for a frame!) on the left in the scene where Pat is making a paper hat:

Similar mistakes can be found in probably every old episode. So, that's that, A je...

Wait a minute. Where is our forgotten man?! We still haven't talked about Karel Chocholín! Jan's revelation made me wonder whether Chocholín did any work on this episode at all. Well, he is credited, so he must have! I contemplated it a bit...

still thinking...

GOT IT!

Some of the scenes in this episode always seemed a bit "off" to me, but I never paid enough attention to them, just because I believed Chocholín did the opening scenes and I settled for that. I have zero doubt (or do I really? Check the comments!) that Mensdorff animated everything from Mat's entry into the living room to the air pump going off,  painting the room white. However, the scenes that follow were, I'm pretty certain, not his work, but Chocholín's.

Chocholín takes over

This is quite unusual as the puppets remain the same. I presume Mensdorff was busy with another project, likely Jiří Barta's The Vanished World of Gloves (Zaniklý svět rukavic). Just as I am writing this, Mensdorff is most probably working on Barta's Golem, so for them hardly anything has changed! In any case, the animation in the final scenes lacks the fluidity and finesse of Mensdorff's work too much to be his. Look at, for instance, how Mat zips across the room as if he was shot out of a gun - just a couple of frames with zero character movement. Mensdorff's Mat would have first taken a half-step back and exited the picture in double the amount of frames. This is Chocholín's work. The handshake is also quite different from AMP's 1990s variations.

The only scene I'm not really sure about is the one at the end. Even though it is most likely also Chocholín's, I'm not ruling out Mensdorff did it, just to be on the safe side. What I can tell you is that we have yet another appearance of a non-prop here: a screwdriver or something similar pops up in the lower left corner for a frame or two. For me, it's not unusual that undesired objects end up on the screen - it's the fact that the animators seem to realize their mistakes after just a frame - it's almost as if they shot these frames with intruding objects by mistake!

There's one thing that remains a bit of a mystery: where exactly did Chocholín animate his scenes? Maybe we will never find out, but to me it makes the most sense that they were also done at Bartolomějská, although Čiklovka is a possibility, especially in a story with as many twists as this one! All in all, the story behind Maľovanie's production only makes the episode more fascinating to me. We can now say, with a fair amount of confidence, that it was the only episode animated by three people in two different locations before 2018 came along. With all of that, it's still really, really good - in my opinion, one of the best of ...a je to! episodes.

By the time Jan Klos' hand healed up, he and the series had been shifted to Wenzigovka, where they would remain for some time. The move to Wenzigovka was not beneficial to the series' production - episodes had to be shipped out even faster from less desirable working conditions. The aforementioned Zaniklý svět rukavic was one of the two final films made at Bartolomějská - the second being Švankmajer's Možnosti dialogu. They were shot simultaneously and the studio was shut down after they were completed. As such, Maľovanie (or Malování in Czech) was, both for the series and for the studio, an end of an era.