Mature Mastery: Late Jiří Trnka Shorts

This program of late-career Trnka works includes The Good Soldier Švejk Part 3 (1954), Passion (1962), Cybernetic Grandma (1962), and Archangel Gabriel and Mistress Goose (1965), and The Hand (1965).

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Jan Pinkava is creative director of Google Spotlight Stories and an Academy Award-winning director; his career in animation spans a quarter century, including thirteen years at Pixar, where he wrote and directed the short film Geri’s Game and was the original creator of Ratatouille.

Films in this Program

The Good Soldier Švejk, Part Three

Directed by Jiří Trnka

Adapted from the scathingly funny, hugely influential anti-war classic by anarchist writer Jaroslav Hašek, this satirical farce charts the exploits …

Passion (aka Obsession)

Directed by Jiří Trnka

A boy’s need for speed causes problems throughout his life in this triumph of modernist design, which blends puppet, stop …

Cybernetic Grandma

Directed by Jiří Trnka

Trnka took a turn into Space Age sci-fi surrealism with this dark, dystopian satire on automatization in which a child …

Archangel Gabriel and Mistress Goose

Directed by Jiří Trnka

Adapted from a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron, this irreverent, medieval-set lampoon of religious hypocrisy mixes Christian iconography with bawdy black …

The Hand

Directed by Jiří Trnka

Trnka’s last work is a powerful, deeply personal allegory about the plight of the artist toiling under the restrictions of …