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.

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).