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.

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!

2018-20 animation credits

Martin Kublák working on Plot in 2018 (source: pro-miminka.cz)

As I' ve mentioned in a few other posts, a list of animators on the 2018-20 episodes would be useful for future reference, so here it is. These episodes all have the same group animator credits (with all the Czech and Chinese animators listed on every episode), which are annoying when you want to see which people worked on which episode exactly. The credit usually goes:

Animation: Jan Smrčka, Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly, Wang Peipei, Xiang Weiwei, Li Xiangyuan, Yu Huagong, Xiao Xieliang

Martin Kublák, seen above, appears in the credits on seven episodes from 2018, but worked on only one of them, Plot. The group credit means that it is impossible to discover anything purposeful about the styles of various animators in the Chinese Steamworks studio. When it comes to style, though, I can see Steamworks' animators mostly tried to copy Jan Smrčka's animation and presumably watched a lot of his Venkovĕ episodes. Steamworks did their jobs well enough that 'ordinary' viewers won't spot many differences between their and Czech works, but we are not ordinary viewers. So, I've produced a list of 'who animated what' on these episodes. Unfortunately, for Steamworks' animators, I can only write the name of the studio, not the animators involved. Of course, this is all guesswork (albeit educated, experienced guesswork based on many instances of watching the episodes), so please report any inaccuracies if you find them. I have already gone through this list with a reader of the blog (Buurman) and none were found, so I am not expecting any. For episodes with multiple known animators, screenshots are included. AMP is short for Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly. The animator credits have been added to my episode list. Thanks to Buurman for all of his help in making this post.

• Včely – Steamworks
• Sekačka – Steamworks
• Krtek – Jan Smrčka, Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly, Steamworks; Smrčka does the scenes in front of the fence, while Mensdorff does those on the houses set. Steamworks was given a 20-second sequence inside the workshop.

Smrčka

AMP

Steamworks

A je to: minutiae #1

In this series of posts, I will discuss minutiae from the ... a je to! series. One definition of the word minutiae reads as precise details; small or trifling matters and that is what this is all about. Small or not so small details you probably never even noticed or you didn't think about them. The TDK masters made me rewatch the entire series a couple of times, this time in a new light, and these are some interesting bits and pieces a person who has watched these episodes so many times thought it would be nice to share. The screenshots are all raw, as they are on the DVDs, without any editing.

Tapety

No, the title card for Tapety is not green, but grey! The titles on the TDK masters look unusual for the 1979, almost as if they were sourced from different materials than the rest of the films, especially on the next episode.

a bit of a scratch, as if somebody sprayed the frame with gulaš

Mat has so much junk in his kitchen. I wish some other episodes also showed their homes full of items which don't belong there. It doesn't sit well with me when their living spaces are tidy. Previously, I didn't notice how the iconic gulaš can (that is, two cans, but you'll have to wait for another edition of minutiae to see an explanation) has a dark blue, not black outline around the words.

I already mentioned how Mat's living room looks very drab at the beginning, as if the crew did not yet have a sense of how to light up the set and started with too much white light. They gradually dialed it back a bit and introduced warmer colors, even in the same episode.

on the contrary, this shot needs some more light!

gulaš and bread, classic. or is it a croissant?

A few words from Jan Klos

Readers of this blog should already be familiar with Czech animation legend Jan Klos and his work on the series in 1981-85. In one of my previous posts, I mentioned how I believe Klos' work on three episodes in 1984 and 1985 was credited with a pseudonym. In its conclusion, I stated: Jan Klos is still with us and, hopefully, somebody will ask him about this peculiarity someday, as there is probably more to this story. I am not one to sit around and wait, so already then I was trying to reach out to Jan myself. In the end, I was able to do so thanks to the great folks from Memory of Nations and the Post Bellum organization, for which Mr Klos had given an interview. I especially must thank A. Poláková, who gave me Klos' e-mail contact in the end.

There are couple of interviews with him online already (for instance, this one, where he talks for three hours), but they mostly concern his life before animation. In my e-mail to Mr Klos then, I presented my posts on the blog and asked him about several things: the altered titles, the way he animated the characters and so on. After about 15 days, responses started coming in.

Jan Klos about 20 days ago in a candid photo made by his son-in-law,
which he included in his e-mail

As you know, Jan Klos is 79 years old, so once again I must say: Thank you very much, sir, for taking the time to write to me! I know Jan will not read this, but in case members of his family do, give my best to Jan yet again. Jan stated that he cannot spend much time at the computer and has to "ram" his thoughts into it (he's, in his own words, a simple, old, too old man), so he provided answers to my questions in the form of chapters chronologically speaking about his work (of course, in Czech) and he didn't mind me sharing them on this blog. He really took the time and effort to write them over a period of a few weeks, so here I present them to you translated into English. You will notice that Jan openly discusses his life and work, often with self-biting irony As he noted: producing "humor and folk entertainment" is an ambition and an ideal profession for me. Unfortunately, it rarely succeeds.

Jan Klos:

CHAPTER 1

By profession a puppeteer, I became an employee of Krátký film Praha in 1973 by a combination of lucky coincidences and I began to animate in the Jiří Trnka Studio (puppet film) in director Břetislav Pojar’s staff. Those were my apprenticeship years in animation. DIFFICULT years - but BALANCED with a good feeling that I can be part of creation ON A CERTAIN LEVEL. The production process, dramaturgy, direction, collaboration with the experienced deaf-mute, ingenious animator Boris Masník, these were standard professional conditions - simply HAPPINESS (the studio's address then was Čiklova 13 A).

Břetislav Pojar in the studio's yard in 1974 (photo: Ivan Vít)

At the beginning of 1982, the management of Krátký film Praha banned Pojar from working (comrade director "was unable to fulfill the production plan") and Pojar's staff was scattered around. In order to be able to continue to animate puppets (it is the simplest and my favorite animation discipline), an average director, a skilful, hardworking man and also an employee of Kr. film Luboš Beneš offered me work on his films in a new four-member team. A space he discovered was adapted for shooting puppet films with cameraman Miler, animator Chocholín and one graphic artist. So I moved to the SECOND DIVISION, and there were five of us (address: Wenzigova 5). We called ourselves "Benešfilm". Here I worked on five or up to seven parts of PAT and MAT (I don't remember anymore), which belonged to the First series - it was 21 parts. Now I remember that the series was then called A JE TO.

Uncredited animation scenes in ... a je to!

As a follow-up to my post about Jan Klos and his uncredited animation work in three episodes (link here), here a few scenes from other ... a je to! episodes which were done by animators "dropping by" to episodes assigned to their colleagues.

Skokani
Credited animator: Jan Klos

Notice anything different? The first scene of the episode was in fact animated by Karel Chocholín or somebody using his puppets (from the credited crew, this could only be assistant animator David Fílcik). The first scene is followed by one with a butterfly Pat notices and then we cut back to the two characters, but the puppets have changed. The rest of the episode is all Jan Klos' work.

Jan Klos: seized credits?

As most readers of this blog have figured out by now, I love identifying animators and comparing their work on different Pat & Mat episodes. Each and every one of them brought their own interpretation of how the characters should move and act, sometimes probably unconsciously. In my previous post, I mentioned how Jan Klos is probably the best animator of them all when it comes to scenes where the character and personality is most important.

Jan Klos working in 1976 (photo: Ivan Vít)

This post, however, deals with strange animation credits on ... a je to! episodes from 1984 and 1985. Pat & Mat series usually had two animators handling most of the episodes; in the aiF era, those two were František Váša and Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly. In 1979, the two animators were Karel Chocholín and Xenie Vavrečková. In 1981-1983, it was Karel Chocholín again and Jan Klos. However, an unusal discrepancy in the credits happened in 1984 and 1985. Instead of Jan Klos, Ján Keks was credited for animation on Korčule and Hrnčiari, while Karel Klos was credited for Porucha. Interestingly, the Jan Klos credit was replaced with Ján Keks very noticeably ― you can literally see the smudges left by someone erasing L and O and replacing them with E and K.

1982

1984

1984

1985

Here also is the animation credit for Porucha, this time redone completely:

 

This is something that I always found strange. I've seen these episodes so many times and in the end arrived to the following conclusion: I believe that Keks and Karel Klos are in fact the same person - Jan Klos. Of course, my intuition is not enough to sell that statement. Here then are some other arguments for my case: 

Building character(s)

When reading articles about Pat & Mat, you will often find a sentence reading something like this: "It was in the first TV episode Tapety where they got their definitive look." On the face of it (pun intended), that's a mostly correct statement. However, I would say that the final important change to Pat and Mat's look is a subtle one which happened in 1982, specifically in the first of that year's episodes, Sťahovanie. That change would the last one to shape the characters into the ones we know and love today.

The handymen before and after 1982 were identical ― except for their faces. The faces were redesigned at that point; the eyes became thinner, their shape going from thick ovals to either an almost rectangular shape or a small circles, depending on the puppets used. The mouths were also changed. Before, different expressions were used to convey the two's emotions, with a circle representing shock or surprise and :( representing what it usually does, sadness and disappointment.

Mat going from sad...

... to confused in a matter of frames

the duo shocked at the end of Grill

Even though they were possibly made to conserve time, these changes brought about several fresh ways to handle the characters and imbued them with more comedic potential. When their eyes became smaller, Pat and Mat became less goofy, a bit more aware of what they were doing. This gave their DIY failures an even bigger punch as the "heroes" could be held even more responsible for their complete failures.

Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly: animator profile

Animators are one of the unsung heroes of Pat & Mat and probably every stop motion series. They are the ones who spend the most time actually creating the action we see on the screen, which makes their work vitally important.

While they have mostly stuck to similar principles throughout the years, each animator on this series has some quirks and differences which make their style unique. One of these animators, and definitely a legendary one, is Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly.

at work in 2019 (photo: ČT)

Biography

Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly was born on January 9, 1948 in České Budějovice. He is originally from a known aristocratic family whose roots are in Czechia, France and Austria. Actually, Alfons is a count, which makes him probably the only count to have worked on Pat & Mat. ČT produced a documentary about his family as part of their Blue Blood series. It can be viewed here, but only if you access it from Czechia.

He joined the Jiří Trnka studio in 1969 and started animating sometime in the 1970s, working on many important films, with different directors such as Stanislav Látal and Jiří Barta. When Lubomír Beneš opened his aiF Studio, Alfons followed him there and worked up to the 1997 Jája a Pája series. When aiF went to pieces in 1998, he joined Hafan Film, while also working on some episodes for Patmat. In the next decades he again worked on some feature films, most notably Toys in the Attic and Fimfárum 2.

Even though he is about to turn 72, Mensdorff-Pouilly is still working on Pat & Mat, animating some of the episodes of the new 39 episodes due for TV release 2018-2020. Along with puppet armature maker Ondřej Zika, he is the only member of the current production team who had some involvement on the original ...a je to! series.

Pat & Mat career

His Pat & Mat career spans four decades. After animating on the 1982 episode Mal'ovanie, he worked on the episodes made in aiF, three from 1992 and four from 1994. He handled the episodes which took place outside, while František Váša worked on the indoor sets. Interestingly, in one recent interview Váša stated that a mishap happened to one of his colleagues, presumably this animator, when during the replicating process a negative cutter severely damaged the negative on which a Pat & Mat episode had been filmed, which meant that the whole short had to be reshot from scratch. I wonder which episode was affeceted by that.

at work on ep. #45 in 1994 (photo by I. Vít)

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.