Czech Surrealist Animator, Jan Svankmajer

A handful of years ago, a former coworker of mine lent me a little Czech surrealist film. The film, Little Otik, not only blew my mind but also deeply disturbed it. In brief, a married couple desperately wants a child. Eventually, the husband gives his wife something to fill her empty heart and arms: a tree stump that is roughly the size of an infant. She dotes and preens this stump until it becomes the screaming, tantrum throwing infant she wished it had been. But as the little stump becomes a tree, trouble ensues.

As is true with Little Otik, Jan Svankmajer sees life in the inanimate, shapes in the amorphous and sense in the chaos. His other animated shorts and the music video he did for the Britpop band Pulp feature anthropomorphized steaks and newspaper eating skulls. Profound and prolific, Svankmajer explores such issues as love, loss and totalitarianism by weaving stop motion images and figures into realistic backdrops, successfully blurring the line between what is true and what we think is true. All in a day’s work.