News: Pat a Mat na venkově continues

 

The new Patmat studio

Hello everybody, this will be just a brief post, as time permits. Fellow ajetologists have alerted me to this video, today's airing of the News show from Czech Television's Déčko channel for children. It confirms something only mentioned in brief so far, that the Countryside series is continuing.

My thoughts on aiF episodes

Firstly, some housekeeping. You will have noticed that the blog looks quite different. I have decided to discard the previous theme. Perhaps it was too colorful, even garish. In any case, I have gone with a darker variant this time. Nothing fancy, but it should be more appropriate for the content on the blog. Some minor layout changes have also been made. One of them is the inclusion of a new way to receive updates about the blog, through follow.it. Unfortunately, Google had decided to shut down FeedBurner, so I had to find an alternative. I have switched the 13 of my previous followers to this new platform, so tell me if everything went okay. I've also finally done something with the header. Actually, Rakso did the work from my ideas and layout as what he did in less than an hour I would do in less than a few days or so. Thanks to Rakso, as always. Finally, I have noticed that videos did not show up on mobile versions of the site for some time. I have figured out the problem (again a redundant change in programming!) and amended the latest posts.

Finally, the post. This blog has, almost by accident, been in an aiF-mode recently, so today, I will air my thoughts on the individual episodes from the studio. These comments actually originated a few days ago in an email I wrote to a friend who had not yet seen most of them and is/was preparing to do so. I had some of these discussions regarding aiF already, but why are they so interesting? Well, as I mentioned in my post on Parkety and Vrata, there is a definite amplitude in quality between individual episodes from aiF. While the 1989-90 episodes did not really reach the heights of previous episodes, they were still quite a concentrated and consistent bunch. When aiF came about, that consistency went out of the window and some episodes are noticeably lagging behind others.

What about this? Not so good? Eh, so I thought.

Presumably, Luboš Beneš paid a lot less attention to these episodes than those that came before. Before 1990, he was in a semi-comfortable position of a director at Krátký film's Barrandov studio. Then, along with the other directors, he was laid off and had to start his own studio. As he was really the lynchpin of aiF, he became manager, negotiator, employer and probably had much less time on his hands, meaning that his mantra of "don't mess with it too much, just make it fast", which Jan Klos called an unpleasant feature of Beneš, came into full force. He was running on autopilot at times. Given that the episodes also passed through fewer hands, the standards had to drop off and they did.

A Hand in Dlaždice

Rarely do I see frames from Pat & Mat episodes which I have no recollection of seeing. Yet this is exactly what happened a few days ago, when Rakso showed me this:

Yes, you're seeing it right, that's a hand occupying quite a portion of the screen in the 1992 episode Dlaždice. The screenshot comes from this master and is seen in motion on 1:06:

Parkety and Vrata: animation

Continuing from my interview with František Váša, today I will be discussing two episodes made in 1992, Parkety and Vrata, with focus on their animation.

The aiF Studio episodes are somewhat of a mixed bunch. I would say that overall, there is a significant drop-off in quality from the episodes which immediately precede them, those made in 1989-90, as they are more consistent. Still, I have noticed that this era is favorite to many fans of the show, especially those in Poland. I don’t know why exactly, but I would guess that the sort-of homemade feel which resonates from them, where you can sense that they come from a new, private studio slowly figuring out how to do certain things is a contributing factor. Broadcast history also must have played a part in this case.

I have never been a very big fan of the aiF era on the whole. This is also because I first saw these episodes only after I had seen the first 35 to death and although I was too young to articulate it, probably felt that they were not as good. However, maybe it is then easier for me to look at the individual episodes and see which I like the most. The episode Parkety has always been one of my favorites of the bunch. It is an episode which makes me laugh even though I’ve seen it many times. It’s got a fun story which keeps getting funnier as the episode progresses, which is why I feel it is definitely one of the best episodes of the fourteen.

Parkety and Vrata were the only two episodes from aiF co-animated by Marek Beneš. Leaving aside his work as a director and other functions on the series, Marek Beneš was, in my opinion, the weakest of the in-house animators on Pat & Mat, in-house referring to the three major studios which continually produced the series, aiF being the second of them. I would say his best work was also his first, Klíč. His animation’s main problem is that it lacks subtlety and fluency. Perhaps this is best seen by his walk cycles, which Pat and Mat can only undertake at a particular speed, performing extremely large steps. This can be funny at times, but when used all the time becomes a nuisance. His Pat and Mat are also very stiff, often jerkily moving from pose to pose, resulting in scenes which may look nice as individual poses (frames), but which do not look dynamic when seen in succession. A good example of his rigidness is the final handshake in this episode, where literally just the lower parts of the puppets’ hands move.

Váša, on the other hand, was the animator who used the most of the puppets’ body at aiF. His Pat and Mat are therefore the opposite to Beneš’s, often looking bubbly, getting even more energized as the years go on. Váša’s Pat and Mat were especially expressive with their hands – for instance, look at how Mat strokes his face at 1:09. This is where we come to the main topic of this post, the animation breakdowns.

František Váša interview (2020)

František Váša working on B. Pojar's Hiroshi

After a long pause, I'm today finally showing you something very interesting: my interview with František Váša!

What? How? When did this happen? Quite a long time from now, actually, August 21st, 2020. Some months before, I was able to reach Mr Váša by email (big thanks to Dan cz for help) and introduce him to the blog, which he very much enjoyed. He is often difficult to reach by email, though, so I was especially pleased to hear he would be visiting Split, my hometown! This was, in fact, nothing unusual. Dalmatia is often a summer destination for Czechs and his family is no exception. I had a chance to meet him and ask him what I wanted.

Our meeting took place almost in transit. Mr Váša had just arrived to Split and had a ferry to catch to the island of Vis, so we were able to talk only for less than an hour in Split’s center. Our exchanges were a bit comical; Mr Váša speaks little English – I understand Czech well but can only speak half-broken sentences with intrusive Croatian vocabulary. However, I came prepared with translated questions and they quickly set us off. I spent the next 50 or so minutes getting to talk about most of the stuff which went on in the aiF Studio with one of its leaders! In Czech, of course. It was, as you can imagine, an exhilarating experience, only compounded when I accompanied Mr Váša to the ferry, met his lovely wife (who speaks perfect English!) and then got to chat with an even bigger name in Czech stop motion animation, director Jiří Barta, who was also going to Vis! It was wonderful to meet all of them and, hopefully, this was just the first of our encounters. Very much a day to remember!

Still, the interview! I must apologize to my faithful readers for posting it very late, but the delay was caused by multiple factors, from troubles with faithfully translating certain remarks to lack of time, but also not being able to reach Mr Váša afterwards for months at a time. I should also mention that, per his request, I will not be sharing certain small portions of the interview. As you can imagine, aiF’s break-up was not the most idyllic of splits (on the contrary, lawsuits sprung up) and there is no point in possibly opening old wounds with certain people through my blog. I hope you can respect that, as I have. The majority of the story is still here, I can assure you.

Before continuing, I must again thank František Váša not only for agreeing to meet with me and answer my questions, but also for providing some images which have further enriched this post!

 

The interview

MP: How did you react when you first saw that there is a blog devoted to Pat and Mat?

FV: [laughs] Ha, I thought to myself, and forgive me, is it possible that somebody can show this much interest in Pat and Mat, is everything fine with that person? 

MP: Hahaha, well somebody must exist somewhere!

Jan Klos Animation Reel

Jan Klos is celebrating his 80th birthday today. For that occasion, I've created a compilation of some of his best animation (centered around a Pat and Mat episode he animated - under a pseudonym!) and I'm sharing it here. I think I've written everything important about the video in its description. (Czech readers can find a translation of that description in the comments of this post. Thanks to Dan for correcting it.)

Apart from being a retrospective to a great career in animation, the video is also a tribute to someone I am proud and honored to call a friend. If you are not that familiar with Jan's work, I hope the video will provide with you some more films to discover, including two of his own favorites from the 1990s, Kotlík or The Maiden and the Soldier (where he did not get to animate the ending as intended, though). Another film he did for Katarina Lillqvist at the time was The Country Doctor, which can be seen in breathtaking quality here. Hopefully, my video will give you a good overview of why Jan was just an exceptional puppet animator.