Trnka established his reputation as a world-renowned master of puppet animation with his Venice prize-winning first feature, a kinetic visual symphony bursting with music and dance that celebrates the customs and folklore of the Czech people.

Trnka’s adaptation of a classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale—about a Chinese emperor ensorcelled by the song of a mechanical nightingale—is an enchanting animated jewel box awash in hallucinatory, storybook imagery. Screening with The Devil’s Mill.

A young peasant embarks on a quest to free his mother’s soul from purgatory and save three princesses from a host of hydra-headed dragons in this alternately lyrical and rousing medieval-set adventure based on Czech fairy tales. Screening with Song of the Prairie.

A treasure trove of Bohemian myths are brought to life by Trnka’s magical puppet work in this folkloric hymn to the Czech land, history, and people, which features a breathtaking climactic battle sequence worthy of Kurosawa.

This riotous anti-authoritarian satire—based on the scathingly funny, hugely influential anti-war classic of Czech literature—charts the exploits of a hapless World War I infantryman with biting, subversive wit. Screening with The Two Frosts.

This bewitching adaptation of Shakespeare’s romantic fairy tale is a masterpiece of balletic beauty that plays out amid a garlanded, pastel dreamscape.

Trnka proved himself to be a master animator from the very beginning, as evidenced by the formally inventive, wittily offbeat works in this program, which includes the filmmaker’s earliest experiments in the art form: hand-drawn cartoons that play like a distinctly Czech anti-Disney, a modernist tour de force of surrealist invention, and a rapturously beautiful puppet adaptation of Chekhov. The program also serves as a survey of animation techniques employed by the artist throughout his career.

Silly circuses, classic fairy tales, and toy trains come to life through magical stop-motion, puppet, and hand-drawn animation in these charming, family-friendly shorts that showcase Trnka’s fruitful collaborations with fellow artists, animators, and puppeteers.

In the 1960s, at the height of his artistic powers, Trnka turned to increasingly dark, surreal, satirical, and politically defiant subject matter. The result was a string of visually innovative, modernist masterpieces that encompass dystopian science fiction, religious parody, and, in his final crowning achievement, an impassioned protest against state censorship.

This relentless and hilarious musical send-up of the American Western written by Brdecka is one of the most popular works in Czech film history, following a soft drink–swigging gunfighter as he tries to steer the sinful residents of Arizona’s Stetson City away from alcohol and toward the health benefits offered in Kolaloka (a parody of Coca-Cola).

This program of nine animated shorts by Brdecka spans his entire directing career and showcases the wealth of collaborations with important Czech artists and animators, such as Jiri Trnka and Eva Svankmajerova.