A darkly brilliant stop-motion adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin about a plague of rats that punish townsfolk corrupt with greed. One of Czechoslovakia's most ambitious animation projects of the 1980s, notable for its unusual dark art direction, innovative animation techniques and use of a fictitious language.
A bachelor named Faun with a Don Juan complex, seized with a hypochondriac's fear of the ineluctable approach of death, enters a race against time's passage. Faun's sexual love is imbued with the narcissistic vanity of a self-satisfied bacchant who even towards old age can't manage to forgo his lifelong pose as an irresistable seducer of women. He desperately searches for meaning in superficial, fleeting sex.
Mamluk is an unassuming, handsome young peasant who happens to have come along just in time to save the king from a fatal trap, and as a reward, the king offers him the amount of land he can mark off by walking around in one day but he must return to the starting point before sunset.
Sarcastic comedy about the Czechoslovakia of the seventies. A young gynaecologist can't figure out whether to get serious with a young nurse or to stay casual with his married lover. Things get complicated when both women don't want to play his game anymore.
The main characters left their original professions of waiter and taxi driver and rented a thriving disco Brooklyn. However, their peaceful life is disrupted by the con man Kadlec, who has not forgotten that it was they who put him behind bars two years ago. All this time, all he's been thinking about is revenge. The formerly petty crook, with the help of his accomplices, his son-in-law Buresh and fellow prisoner "The Engineer", joins the drug trade and begins his revenge. Michal is arrested for the rape of a girl he has never seen in his life, and it doesn't take much for Tomas to figure out that Kadlec is behind it all. What Tomas also doesn't realise for a long time is that the sympathetic Ivana, who has joined their business and with whom he has fallen in love, also works as a luxury prostitute and was put into the business by Kadlec.
From the behavior, discourse, and appearance of individual actors, Vachek composes, in the form of a mosaic, a broad and many-layered film-argument about Czechoslovak democracy in the period of its rebirth, all administered with the director’s inimitable point of view.
How it will end? Let's just tell you that on one side of the mountain, the stream that had run before it dries up, and on the other side of the mountain, the creek starts to breathe.
In stop-motion animation, a wardrobe moves through the countryside. It arrives in a house, a child's voice recites Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," and various objects, such as toys and dolls, move about, disintegrate, and play out archetypal scenes. Like Carroll's verse, the images are at once familiar and unfamiliar. A child's play suit, hanging in the wardrobe, becomes the adventure's protagonist.
A stop-motion Sisyphus is overwhelmed by the Czechoslovakian bureaucracy.
This distinctive documentary portrait of Prague extolls the beauty, significance and spirit of the ancient city adopting modern way of life. The form and content of the film share a common underlining principle. The author doesn't simply list out the sequence of events, but rather approaches them in a broader context of their historic implications and circumstances. The content of the film covers a large period from the pagan times to these days. The facts are grouped under several general headings (paganry, the spread of Christianity, renaissance, baroq and modern times) with allusions to the modern life of Prague and Praguers that has its roots in those times.
A story based on "The Mysterious Stranger" novel by Mark Twain.
