Where to begin with Czech animation

One of the first written words I committed to memory was ‘Konec’, or the Czech for ‘The End’, a by-product of Czechoslovak animated shorts forming a surprisingly staple part of 1970s BBC childrens’ programming. Popular cartoon characters like Krtek (aka The Little Mole) were loved worldwide by millions of people who had no idea of his nationality, while feature films such as Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction (1958), Jiří Trnka’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959), Jiří Barta’s The Pied Piper (1986) and Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (1988) provided regular evidence of the astonishing creative fecundity of what by then had been long established as one of the country’s great national art forms….

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