What a lovely little film!
For some reason, some of the best stop motion animated short films ever made came out of Eastern Europe in the SIxties and Seventies.
I honestly don’t know why this was true, perhaps because of they applied their traditions of craftsmanship in making toys and dolls to creating the wondrously detailed miniature worlds they filmed, perhaps it was because there were so many talented men at work in the industry at the time, and perhaps, as often happens with a lot of artistic movements, it was the influence of a handful of pioneers and those that followed built upon their work to reach even greater heights.
Whatever the case, Jiri Trnka was one of the best of these animators, and Cybernetic Grandmother is a wondrous little film. It offers a heartwarming tale of a child and her grandmother — while at the same time giving us an epic vision of a fantastic world of the future.
A young girl, who is being raised by her grandmother, has to cross the crumbling ruins of the old world and make a long journey across the vast and dazzling new city which has taken its place, to her new home — and her new grandmother.
What we have here is a heartwarming little fantasy, but, curiously, one which eschews the more traditional fairy tale trappings it begins with, in favor of a surreal and ultramodern future. The design work is just amazing: I’ve seen some of the behind the scenes photos of Trnka’s work, and I know that some of his models in this story must have been huge. His characters look deceptively simple and yet they are capable of expressing a lot of emotion.
And his future manages to be surreal, beautiful and yet deeply inhuman, all at the same time.
I’m also impressed by how he tells his story, as we learn a lot about the girl and her situation along the way, without a huge data dump, or Trnka ever feeling the need to give us a big intro to let us in on the facts. Instead, he takes the time to focus on his characters and the relationships between them.
I wonder how many directors in our age could sum so much up while saying so little?
At half an hour, it’s longer than most of his films, but it’s amazing how much he packed into something which appears so simple.
Fortunately, it’s available from Youtube. I doubt if it would make much sense without the subtitles, but at least the version I found had them, even if they were in Spanish.
After all, auto-translate really makes a mess of Czechoslovakian.
But it does quite well on Spanish.
So take a few minutes and enjoy something very strange — and yet at the same time comforting and familiar…
rivets on the poster 