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The Emperor’s Nightingale

Directed by Jiří Trnka, Miloš Makovec

Czechoslovakia • 1948 • 72 mins. • In Czech

Showtimes & Past Screenings

Trnka’s adaptation of a classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale is an enchanting animated jewel box. Framed by live action sequences—about a lonely boy shut away from fun and play—the story unfolds as a child’s dream vision, a tale of illusion versus reality in which a Chinese emperor is ensorcelled first by the song of a nightingale, then by its mechanical replica. Working in a rich red, green, and gold visual palette, Trnka conjures a hallucinatory storybook world of moonlit bamboo forests, softly glowing Chinese lanterns, and bursting fireworks displays all set to a gorgeous, rhapsodic score by his key collaborator, Václav Trojan.

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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.

Genres: Animation

Appears in: 2018 on Celluloid, The Puppet Master: The Films of Jiří Trnka

The Northwest Film Center recognizes and honors the Indigenous peoples of this region on whose ancestral lands the museum now stands. These include the Willamette Tumwater, Clackamas, Kathlemet, Molalla, Multnomah and Watlala Chinook Peoples and the Tualatin Kalapuya who today are part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and many other Native communities who made their homes along the Columbia River. We also want to recognize that Portland today is a community of many diverse Native peoples who continue to live and work here. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities—past, present, future—and are grateful for their ongoing and vibrant presence.