R.I.P. Vlasta Pospíšilová (1935–2022)

Vlasta Pospíšilová has died. She was 87.

Vlasta worked on Pat & Mat in two different periods. She animated the majority of the iconic first ... a je to! episode, Tapety, in 1979. More than 20 years later, she directed six episodes of the series Pat & Mat Return in 2003-04. These episodes, produced in the Anima studio, showed a certain youthful exuberance in Pat and Mat that has seldom been seen in this century. A prime example of this dynamism is Štíhlá linie, one of the best in the 28-episode bunch.

Pat and Mat are just small entries in Pospíšilová's large filmography. She was affectionately referred to as the First Lady of the Czech animated film, a befitting moniker for a legend of the scene. She started in animation back in the 1950s, working directly under Jiří Trnka on films such as The Cybernetic Grandma and the feature A Midsummer Night's Dream. She continued to work as an animator for practically every director who arrived to the main studio at Bartolomějská street, including Jan Švankmajer, whom she worked with just before the studio moved to Barrandov.

Gradually, she came to directing from the late 1970s onwards, although she continued working as an animator until the 1990s. Her most famous directorial work are the three Fimfárum films, especially the first installment, which features adaptions of Jan Werich's stories she directed in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Her career lasted 55 years and was crowned with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Anifilm festival in Třeboň in 2015. Vlasta Pospíšilová was one of the last representatives of the long line of Czech stop motion animators which started at the very beginnings and her loss will be dearly felt.

"Těch 50 let v animovaném filmu byla nádherná doba. Škoda, že to tak uteklo." – "Those fifty years in animation were a wonderful time. It's a pity that it ran away like that."

Fans of Pat and Mat send their condolences to her family and friends and the whole animation world.

Currency mismatch

5 lipa coin in my coin collection

Somebody from the Anima studio must have visited the Croatian coast and was left with a 5 lipa coin they couldn't use any more, or was thinking ahead enough to figure out it would be a good prop for the studio.

When Pat and Mat break open their piggy bank in the Wheels (Kolečka) episode, we can briefly see an authentic Croatian 5 lipa coin.

The coin was perfect for filming as it's very small, only 18 mm in diameter. Of course, that also makes it almost worthless, being worth just 1/20 of the Croatian kuna.

However, there's a saying that goes: one man's trash is another man's treasure. Can some of you perhaps identify any of the other coins?

 

The scene following that one features a subtle gag that's only understandable to Czech and Slovak audiences and one which I became aware of only when doing research for this post. If I am correct, what Pat pulls out is a 100 korun banknote, but one from Czechoslovakia, which was withdrawn in 1993, ten years before this episode was made. Almost as valuable as his 5 lipa coin, then.

Perhaps I should have gotten rid of these sooner...

DVNR disfigurement

"Where the hell is half of my hand?!"

The 2002-04 Pat & Mat episodes are a bit of a technological hybrid. They were the last episodes to be shot with analog cameras on 35mm film. Those films were then transferred digitally and (not counting the pilot, Puzzle) opening and closing titles were added on to the digital copies. The results were not satisfying. The first batch of episodes (especially those from the Patmat studio) have somewhat washed out colors and the transfers are full of dirt, which made the episodes look older than they were and they were, in fact, brand new. The results improved from episode #63 onward, but the digital processing team at Ateliéry Bonton Zlín, the producer of the series, obviously still had  reservations. They tried to fix the situation with a pretty bad solution: DVNR.

As Anime News Network writes, DVNR or Digial Video Noise Reduction is a digital filter that's applied to video to remove video noise, film dirt, and other undesirable artifacts from the image. DVNR mostly combines two methods: comparing each pixel to its neighbors to figure out if that pixel is a tiny speck that's standing out too much and comparing the same pixel location in neighboring frames to see if it disappears. DVNR can have beneficial effects on live-action films, but using it for animation is not recommended. In animation, many things move faster than they would in real life, leading the program to think that they are in fact dirt. The program then tries to remove those items as it believes they are obstructions to a clearer picture.

DVNR was applied to four episodes, #72-75. Those four episodes are: Fax, Jahody, Hrají golf and Někam to zapadlo. I first noticed something was wrong with the video while watching Jahody. There seemed to be something wobbly with the animation and I couldn't figure out why. A slower playback discovered that the episodes suffered from bad DVNR. Whenever there was rapid movement, the computer thought it was actually excessive dirt and tried to correct it, ruining many frames in the process. The most affected were Pat & Mat's hands, with parts of them obliterated when they moved in quick succession. See the results for yourselves:

Fax

Mat's kulich missing its top

 DVNR does not just take away, but also adds where it shouldn't.

Here Mat receives an extra limb: