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.

A je to on Croatian television, 1985

I just love thinking of new places to look for hidden gems and immediately striking gold, that is finding something new in my different researches. I was browsing the digital archive of Split’s paper Slobodna Dalmacija (Free Dalmatia, once an important and respected newspaper, today an also-ran) for something unrelated when it struck me – in the many years of its circulation, Pat and Mat were surely featured at some time, right? So, I set off on my search. But, the search function of the site is very clunky and completely useless for multi-word entries. What to do? Of course, search for BENEŠ. After various references about Czechoslovak president Edvard and Croatian boxer Marijan, I found mention of a certain L(j)ubomir Beneš on a page of the December 6, 1985 edition:

Here’s the article enlarged:

Translated, it reads: 

“It’s how it is"

On Sundays, at 19 o’clock, in the animated shorts slate on Channel 1, among others, we watch a puppet series whose original title is “It’s how it is”. The series was made by the television in Bratislava, and is directed by Lubomir Beneš, who also wrote many of the episodes, together with Jiri Kubiček. Two heroes, two neighbors, try to convince us that there are no unsolvable problems, although the way in which they do that seems to tell us otherwise.

The somewhat misguided translation of the original is amusing. The correct Croatian translation would be “(i) to je to” (i.e. “(and) that’s it”), which is even occasionally used nowadays. But, the real reason I am dedicating a post to the article is the publicity shot from Zahrádka. It’s – quite strange!

Everyone who has watched the episode (and I recently went through it in my minutiae series – on halt at the moment) knows we seem to have two Pats, which does not make much sense. Is it from an alternate universe where the episode is extended? After making a huge garden gnome, do Pat and Mat decide to make plaster replicas of their own selves and are not trapped as we are led to believe?

Pat is positioned quite suspiciously. Maybe that’s actually Pat’s evil twin (who can, of course, only be named Rat) who has escaped from prison to trap his brother in plaster and take over his free, peaceful cottage life along with fellow felony Tat. Maybe (I’d say, probably) the picture is cropped, so we won’t know the rest of it until we discover the original in another unexpected place. Slobodna is also missing many publication years on its archive for the time being. It’s how it is…

Plug: Toadette on B. Pojar's "Bears" series

It is a coincidence that the first film outside of the Pat & Mat series that was discussed at greater length was Narkoblues, but it's not much of a coincidence that it was a film directed by Břetislav Pojar. Pojar was one of the best and most famous Czech stop-motion directors of all time and many would say he was second only to Jiří Trnka, his mentor. Pojar, however, lived much longer (1923-2012) and so was part of almost the whole history of the art form in Czechia, which is why he cannot be skipped in any story about Czech animation. He even had direct involvement in one Pat & Mat episode, writing 2003's Natírají podlahu.

Pojar's most famous directorial work, both home and abroad, is the Pojďte pane, budeme si hrát (Hey Mister, Let's Play!) series of shorts about two teddy bears. If you haven't seen these films before, well, what are you waiting for?!

If you aren't familiar with this series, here is a brief comparison with Pat & Mat. Both feature two main characters, but here our heroes are younger and also different from each other, much of the humor coming from their interaction, penned by Ivan Urban. They encounter other animals throughout in their forest-like worlds. An important difference is that the two bears speak, which, I presume, is one of the reasons why this series didn't receive that much international success. However, that won't be a distraction to you (see why down below).

One year of the blog

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you are spending your holidays in the best possible way.

A year has passed (December 22nd) since I posted the first entry to this blog, a filmography of the series, the first iteration of which I compiled on my long-since discarded PC about nine years ago. I kept that post offline for most of the time until January 3rd, making small changes on the way, so maybe that should be seen as the true birthday for the blog. However, let's keep the blog's inception out of 2020, it was bad enough already!

Although 2020 really was nasty (and we still have six more days) on the whole, when it comes to Pat and Mat, for me it was truly extraordinary. I got to open up this blog and connect with fans of the series around the world, but also got the chance to communicate with (and even meet some) people whose work on the series I've long admired. As such, I can only wish more of the same in the next year. I have some things in the locker for all of you as well and hopefully, some will come out soon.

Let's take a look at a couple of stats for the blog. Here is the overall view count... currently at 44K and still going!

Pat and Mat are popular all over the world, so it's only natural that the blog will also have visitors from different cities, areas, countries, even continents. Which country has the worst handymen in the world? Poland. I'm kidding, of course. The fandom in Poland makes up for almost half of the pageviews alone. This is an expected result of different factors: a huge fanbase for the series, Poland being a large country, but also being home to some dedicated readers and friends of the blog. Next up is Czechia, the home of the series, then the Netherlands (another huge fanbase) and then the US. I presume Croatia's position is somewhat skewed as the blog often unintentionally counts my own views and I've also sent links to the blog to several friends. The only surprise is Portugal, where I seem to have a super fan as well. The list is continued by Saudi Arabia, Germany, Slovenia...

Back when I could still see all pageviews in a day (another feature Blogger has degraded), there were some real peculiar and exciting countries to prop up from time to time, like Brazil and Argentina, India, China (is it someone from Steamworks?!), Zimbabwe and the United Arab Emirates. It's a real honor to be able to reach so many different people. I hope you have liked what you have seen so far and let's all hope for many happy returns!

Scenes from Narkoblues (1997)

Things have been going slowly on this blog. Unfortunately, I don't have that much time to devote to it at the moment, so posts will appear less frequently. Some things are on the way, but I don't know when I will get them out. I'd like to say that I'm feeling fine and hope you are too in these unpredictable circumstances.

Recently, thanks to a friend, I got to see Narco Blues (or Narkoblues, the title in Czech) for the first time. This film was made in aiF Studio in 1997 as, I believe, aiF's only completed one-shot puppet short film, not tied to character series. Directed by famed director Břetislav Pojar together with cameraman Ivan Vít, it was part of Rights from the Heart series, which highlighted different problems children face when their rights are violated. This film dealt with drugs - here is a synopsis from the NFB of Canada, which co-produced the film with aiF and Czech Television:

On summer vacation a young teenager finds himself hanging out alone on the streets of his neighbourhood, all his friends having gone to the country with their parents. Near his home he meets a disturbing character, a drug pusher looking for clients, who introduces him to an artificial paradise. The teenager discovers a seductive and terrifying world that frequently draws him back to his neighbour. To buy the drug, he empties his piggybank, pawns his favourite possessions and finally goes into his mother's purse where he finds her wallet empty. The pusher is unscrupulous. Unable to pay, the young teenager lets himself be persuaded into committing a theft. The duo is surprised by the police, but the boy manages to escape. The incident leads to a bad trip, which ultimately has a salutary effect on him. An animated film without words for twelve to seventeen year olds.

title card

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