(1980)
Dir - Viktor Kubal
Overall: MEH
The last of three films directed by animator/cartoonist Viktor Kubal, Krvavá pani, (Bloody Lady), is a more fairytale-esque retelling of the legend of Lady of Čachtice/Erzsébet Báthory as opposed to a particularly horrific one. Besides some brief narration at the very beginning to set the scene, there is no dialog present and this makes some of the details going on a bit difficult to decipher. At only seventy-one minutes, it is more of a problem how painstakingly slow the film is though. There is very little bloodshed and no standard, vampiric components usually common with other cinematic interpretations of the same source material. While that is all fine, the elemental animation frequently pauses and with nothing besides sound effects and clashing music to help further guide the story, it struggles regularly to be engaging. The deliberately simple, largely unemotional style does benefit the material at times, but it still mostly makes it rather impenetrable.
(1986)
Dir - Jiří Barta
Overall: GOOD
A largely superb work of stop-motion animation, Jiří Barta's The Pied Piper, (Krysař), is a heavily German Expressionist-inspired adaptation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin folktale. Produced by Kratky Films, it took six months to research and a year to shoot. The handmade puppets by Barta are intricately designed to appear almost monstrous, mirroring their gluttonous, unflattering nature. It is no mistake then that the two characters who appear to have normal, more elegant features are a woman who ultimately suffers at the hands of the townsfolk and a small infant left behind which signifies their innocence. The music by Michael Kocáb plays a major role as the "dialog" is an intentional jumble of indistinguishable sounds spoken only by the grotesque inhabitants to further paint them as unnaturally villainous. It is mostly the visual design that steals the show though. Utilizing real life rats and some lovely two-dimensional paintings with the highly stylized stop-motion animation, the film plays off this juxtaposition while presenting a foreign world that is as fantastical as it is dark.
(1988)
Dir - Jan Švankmajer
Overall: GOOD
Possibly the most inventive of any Alice in Wonderland adaptation was by animator Jan Švankmajer, simply titled Alice, (or Něco z Alenky in its native Czech). Having made a hefty amount of shorts beforehand, Švankmajer chose the Lewis Carroll novel to interpret as his full-length debut. The surreal landscape of the famous source material makes for an ideal backdrop for strange stop-motion creations to rather ingeniously come to life. These are not limited to a gang of skeleton animals with sawdust for guts, possessed dollhouses, thick, fleshy frog tongues, and a comically repetitive tea party including a wooden puppet Mad Hatter getting buttered stopwatches attached to him. The film is structured not at all like a fairytale, but instead as an avant-garde series of vignettes, none of which follow any particular logic or narrative. It is further stylistically bizarre that there is no musical score and that all of the dialog, (no matter who authored it), is spoken by Alice who is systematically experiencing the story and reading it all at once. While Kristýna Kohoutová is the only human actor on screen, puppets, meat, clay, drawings, and live animals all intermingle and Švankmajer's design work overall gives it an earthy, oddly-lived in look that is frequently unnerving.
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