Jan Svankmajer: Animation Pioneer

Jan Svankmajer is a renowned surrealist film maker known for his unusual style of animating and uses of multi mediums in his films. Many of his animations depict bizarre mind goggling scenes where people and objects animate in a nightmarish and uneasy way. A lot of his early work was banned by the communist authorities in his country and he was actually band out right from making films for a short time. An example of one of his works is his 1971 film Jabberwocky which among other things featured children's dolls falling into a coffee grinder and then being ironed out, this violent imagery did not go down well with the authorities. Although violent, his films always have an air of comedy about them and the violence is shown in an almost slapstick way, particularly in the film 'The Male Game'. He's also famous for using exaggerated sound effects in his animation, people eating for example will be coupled with over the top sloppy sounds of someone chewing.

His films tend to use multi mediums, and quite often human subjects are shown moving into scene in real time, however at some point during his films they are portrayed in stop motion. He tends to mix animation techniques, having a combination of claymation, stop motion and stop motion involving cut out card imagery moving across a flat page. One such film that is a brilliant example of this, is his short
above, 'MUZNE HRY'( The Male Game), which depicts a man, drinking beer and watching a football match which becomes increasingly violent as the players begin to attack each other.

Here we see the three different mediums Svankamjer uses in this particular short.

The main Subject, is a man shown in live action, who sits around eating biscuits and drinking beer. 

The second medium uses cut out card images of the individual players who move across a flat pitch and interact with one another. 

And the final medium is claymation, which depicts the close ups of the players as the inflict various injuries on each other. 

Influences on other Animators: Terry Gilliam 

The Writer Director Terry Gilliam was greatly influenced by Svankmajer. You can see these influences throughout Gilliam's work, in particular in the work he did when in the Monty Python group. Gilliam worked on all the animation for the Pythons and his style draws many parallels with the work Svankmajer. Not only in its surreal subject and goofy slapstick comedy but visually as well. The cut out animation in the python films and sketch shows is very reminiscent of Svankmajers work coupled also with the exaggerated amusing sound effects, its easy to see Gilliam's reverence and respect for Svankmajer. Here is perhaps the most well known example of Gilliam's animation, The introduction to 'Monty Pythons Flying Circus'.