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.

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

Closer look: Popcorn (2019)

Today, we'll take a look at what I believe to be the funniest episode from the 3-season, 39-episode batch produced by the Patmat film studio between 2018 and 2020 - Popcorn. I have not yet seen two episodes that still need to be released on the series' official channel, but I suspect they won't be as funny as this one (hopefully, I will be proven wrong!). When all episodes have been uploaded, I will write a post giving some of my views on the other 12. Popcorn is actually not my favorite episode from these seasons - that honor goes to Tube Post (which I will write about in the future), but I believe this one is best suited to the general public.

This episode was, like many others (around 2/3) from the three "seasons", animated in China. Before we take a look at the episode, let's see how this unusually large batch of episodes came to be. It seems it was, in fact, the Chinese who approached the parent studio, not the other way around. Director Marek Beneš was initially skeptical, but the production offer seemed too attractive to decline. It's all explained in this interview with him from aktualne.cz, where he promises that Pat & Mat will not end up like Krtek (The Mole), whose 3D adaptation The Mole and the Panda produced in China was unfavorably reviewed in Czechia.

Beneš was approached by a couple of Chinese studios that would like to make a new series about the two klutzes. Although the author is personally more against it, the company's sales department does not oppose any cooperation with China. "In Asia, whether it is in Korea or China, they want hundred episodes for the series. We shot 90 of them so far, but they were made in 40 years, "Beneš describes. The Chinese came up with an offer to shoot 39 parts in two years with significantly lower costs, of course. "Today, one episode costs us about three Škoda cars. The Chinese would be able to do it for about half of this amount," Beneš adds.

The main attraction is speed. Today, four people take part in filming: a director, an artist, a cameraman and an animator. They work on one episode for three months, eight hours a day, while a Chinese studio could arrange several such shoots at once. "I say that it will not work, that it is a typical Czech environment, that it has to be done by the creators, and it is, for me, untransferable with such a distance. We also had reservations about how the episodes were made in Zlín, and it was the Czechs who worked on those,“ Beneš describes. However, he admits that there is contact between the studios about the cooperation. "There has already been a suggestion that we remake the episodes with slanted [Monolid] eyes," Beneš says.

In another interview with Beneš, the negotiations were said to be "at an advanced stage", but that one was published only in November 2017. So, it seems production probably started by the beginning of 2018, while the first movie, Pat & Mat in Action Again, was in cinemas in June of that year already - all 13 episodes premiered on ČT by September. Interestingly, Krtek's Chinese series consisted of 52 episodes (standard practice; one episode per week), so an extra "season". Patmat film had already produced Pat & Mat in the Countryside, which explains while one "season" less was ordered. In the end, the parent studio provided the storyboards and received animation work daily.

Are the Chinese productions a success? I would say - yes. Average viewers won't suspect that the episodes were not animated outside of Czechia, let alone as far away as China. The Chinese animators copied the animation style of the series good enough for it to go unnoticed. The animation seems to have gone a bit downhill for Chinese episodes with a 2020 copyright date (presumably those were rushed), but that's a topic for my other post.

Closer look: Papírový servis (2011)

When I was first thinking about making a blog about the series, one of the ideas rolling around in my head was to review every episode produced up to that point. That would have been a monumental task and one that I'm glad I abandoned. However, from time to time, I will take a closer look at some of the episodes and those posts will function as kind of a review. That explains the title of the post and here is the episode I'm talking about today. This time, the YouTube video was uploaded by the studio themselves, Patmat film:

Produced in 2011, it is the third episode from the Pat a Mat na venkově (Pat & Mat in the Countryside) series, which I haven't covered much yet. Even though I cannot find any mention of it at the moment, I remember reading an article about this episode premiering on the Zlín Film Festival. It is my favorite episode from that 13-episode series made over six years, mostly because of its absurdist plot. The plot is divided into three parts: 1) Pat & Mat enjoying their meal, 2) the two trying out ways to produce paper plates and 3) the two producting paper plates infinitely. Even though this is a longer episode (8:30 in length), only the second part lags a bit, while I like the tempo of the other two parts. As is the custom with episodes from Patmat, the first shot shows the setting where the action takes place.

This rustic setting was replicated in the 2009 Pat & Mat computer game. I like the general atmosphere of this series, which undoubtedly purposefully harkens back to the 1982-85 episodes set in the countryside as well. The opening of the episode is somewhat an anti-opening for the series; in it, everything goes well and the two handymen show skill and imagination in coming up with different paper tableware. They enjoy sausages, the local Kremžska mustard and some foreign ketchup with a funny label - strašně hot (terribly hot).

The core team that made this episode consisted of only four people from the Patmat film studio, which is in actuality 60 square meters located in an apartment house's basement in Hostivice near Prague. From right to left, Marek Beneš wrote and directed the episode, Jan Bouzek built the sets and most of the props, Jan Chvojka was the cameraman and Jan Smrčka the animator. Here they are in 2010 working on the previous episode, Vodovod:

archive photo from the studio's website