Pat and Mat in the cinema – vintage edition!

On Sunday, October 23, I got to chance to see … a je to! live, in a movie theatre. Six episodes were shown as part of the 15th Central and Eastern European Film Festival, CinEast for short, in the city of Luxembourg, where I currently live. The venue was Cinémathèque Luxembourg, a vintage cinema in the centre of the city that hosts movie lovers of all ages.

There were two showings of this program (at 15.00 and at 16.30) and I got to see the later one, bringing along a friend. The event was kicked off with a short presentation of the series aimed at children. The humor in the series was linked to the silent comedies of Chaplin and Keaton.

It was amusing and flattering to a point to see that the people who made the presentation obviously found some pictures for it on this blog…

The six episodes shown were, in order, Gramofón, Maľovanie, Obraz, Sťahovanie, Dážď and Búdka. 53 minutes might seem short for an adult viewer, but it is probably just about the right time to keep the kids' attention. The episodes were presented as is, without any cuts, and with an applause after every ending credits sequence started to roll out.

I have never previously had a chance to see these episodes with an audience, if I don't count presenting them for my class in school when I was 10 or so a couple of times. Having seen the episodes hundreds of times and know them by heart, I instead focused on the reactions of the audience, which opened up avenues for looking at the shorts in a new light. There were about 50 people in the old theatre, most of them parents with their children. One thing could immediately be verified. Children love physical comedy. They enjoy Pat and Mat slipping and falling, their machines breaking down and the two klutzes doing outrageous moves. So, when the scene in Obraz in which the drill spins Mat around a wall and makes his head stuck in his shirt approached, I correctly predicted it would garner a big reaction. Here's a short clip of Gramofón. Sorry for the subpar quality – I was focused on the experience, but do keep an ear out for a child crying out "Oh, no!" just before the fall:

Obviously, with physical comedy, it is key not to overbear the young viewers with such scenes. Watching the episode that followed with an audience, Maľovanie, furthered my belief that it is one of the best ever made, precisely because the physical aspect of its routines is done in beautiful fashion, owing in part to Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly's solid animation. Here's a clip:

Some of the more precious moments are those where the adults' laugh is heard more than the kids'. A good example was the scene in Búdka where Pat impudently tries to don his straw hat again (after it was thrown off his head by Mat in a fit of rage), but then backs off and removes it. This got an audible chuckle from some of the parents, echoing animator Jan Klos' principle of "always trying to entertain the viewers". 

However, audiences also point out the misfires and faults. For the aforementioned Búdka, it was not exactly clear what was happening at the beginning with the bird flying off, as the sounds of the bird chirps get subdued in the crowd. Klos desperately wanted to include a bird character in those scenes, even bringing in a prop to the studio, but this was not accepted. His frustration at spectators not being able to see the bird and its interactions with the handymen is clearly vindicated on such a viewing. Another interesting case was Gramofón. This episode got a muted reaction (the ending especially) and not exactly because the children didn't know what a gramophone is – they were treated to an explanation in the presentation. Observing it from such a cinematic angle, you can really get bothered with its haphazard timing at certain points. Some of its gags appear to have been better in the script than in the actual execution. Donning my director's hat, I could catch myself thinking up remarks such as "if this gag was a second longer, it would have landed much better" or "this is too fast after what we have just seen". These ideas ferment rapidly when you know the action and observe the reaction, or lack thereof.

What was also clear is that these classics need an upgrade in their presentation. As you have probably noticed by now, we were shown old copies of these episodes, made in the 1980s for TV distribution. These are not really fit for cinema showings, even when the cinema operators thankfully keep the correct aspect ratio. To appreciate and understand them better, new copies of the classic episodes must be made from the best possible materials and I am certainly not going to miss an opportunity to state that again. It is amusing, however, that the classics continue to elevate their "status" with such showings, as they were originally made just for that – television. 

Overall, watching ... a je to! on the big screen was a memorable experience, both for this old-timer and the kids who are just getting introduced to the show. I hope we get to see many more of these events all over Europe. If the presentation was a bit scaled up and there was some more background information and promotion, a mobile marathon of these old classics might just be a success.

R.I.P. Vlasta Pospíšilová (1935–2022)

Vlasta Pospíšilová has died. She was 87.

Vlasta worked on Pat & Mat in two different periods. She animated the majority of the iconic first ... a je to! episode, Tapety, in 1979. More than 20 years later, she directed six episodes of the series Pat & Mat Return in 2003-04. These episodes, produced in the Anima studio, showed a certain youthful exuberance in Pat and Mat that has seldom been seen in this century. A prime example of this dynamism is Štíhlá linie, one of the best in the 28-episode bunch.

Pat and Mat are just small entries in Pospíšilová's large filmography. She was affectionately referred to as the First Lady of the Czech animated film, a befitting moniker for a legend of the scene. She started in animation back in the 1950s, working directly under Jiří Trnka on films such as The Cybernetic Grandma and the feature A Midsummer Night's Dream. She continued to work as an animator for practically every director who arrived to the main studio at Bartolomějská street, including Jan Švankmajer, whom she worked with just before the studio moved to Barrandov.

Gradually, she came to directing from the late 1970s onwards, although she continued working as an animator until the 1990s. Her most famous directorial work are the three Fimfárum films, especially the first installment, which features adaptions of Jan Werich's stories she directed in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Her career lasted 55 years and was crowned with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Anifilm festival in Třeboň in 2015. Vlasta Pospíšilová was one of the last representatives of the long line of Czech stop motion animators which started at the very beginnings and her loss will be dearly felt.

"Těch 50 let v animovaném filmu byla nádherná doba. Škoda, že to tak uteklo." – "Those fifty years in animation were a wonderful time. It's a pity that it ran away like that."

Fans of Pat and Mat send their condolences to her family and friends and the whole animation world.

News: Pat a Mat na venkově continues

 

The new Patmat studio

Hello everybody, this will be just a brief post, as time permits. Fellow ajetologists have alerted me to this video, today's airing of the News show from Czech Television's Déčko channel for children. It confirms something only mentioned in brief so far, that the Countryside series is continuing.

My thoughts on aiF episodes

Firstly, some housekeeping. You will have noticed that the blog looks quite different. I have decided to discard the previous theme. Perhaps it was too colorful, even garish. In any case, I have gone with a darker variant this time. Nothing fancy, but it should be more appropriate for the content on the blog. Some minor layout changes have also been made. One of them is the inclusion of a new way to receive updates about the blog, through follow.it. Unfortunately, Google had decided to shut down FeedBurner, so I had to find an alternative. I have switched the 13 of my previous followers to this new platform, so tell me if everything went okay. I've also finally done something with the header. Actually, Rakso did the work from my ideas and layout as what he did in less than an hour I would do in less than a few days or so. Thanks to Rakso, as always. Finally, I have noticed that videos did not show up on mobile versions of the site for some time. I have figured out the problem (again a redundant change in programming!) and amended the latest posts.

Finally, the post. This blog has, almost by accident, been in an aiF-mode recently, so today, I will air my thoughts on the individual episodes from the studio. These comments actually originated a few days ago in an email I wrote to a friend who had not yet seen most of them and is/was preparing to do so. I had some of these discussions regarding aiF already, but why are they so interesting? Well, as I mentioned in my post on Parkety and Vrata, there is a definite amplitude in quality between individual episodes from aiF. While the 1989-90 episodes did not really reach the heights of previous episodes, they were still quite a concentrated and consistent bunch. When aiF came about, that consistency went out of the window and some episodes are noticeably lagging behind others.

What about this? Not so good? Eh, so I thought.

Presumably, Luboš Beneš paid a lot less attention to these episodes than those that came before. Before 1990, he was in a semi-comfortable position of a director at Krátký film's Barrandov studio. Then, along with the other directors, he was laid off and had to start his own studio. As he was really the lynchpin of aiF, he became manager, negotiator, employer and probably had much less time on his hands, meaning that his mantra of "don't mess with it too much, just make it fast", which Jan Klos called an unpleasant feature of Beneš, came into full force. He was running on autopilot at times. Given that the episodes also passed through fewer hands, the standards had to drop off and they did.

A Hand in Dlaždice

Rarely do I see frames from Pat & Mat episodes which I have no recollection of seeing. Yet this is exactly what happened a few days ago, when Rakso showed me this:

Yes, you're seeing it right, that's a hand occupying quite a portion of the screen in the 1992 episode Dlaždice. The screenshot comes from this master and is seen in motion on 1:06:

Parkety and Vrata: animation

Continuing from my interview with František Váša, today I will be discussing two episodes made in 1992, Parkety and Vrata, with focus on their animation.

The aiF Studio episodes are somewhat of a mixed bunch. I would say that overall, there is a significant drop-off in quality from the episodes which immediately precede them, those made in 1989-90, as they are more consistent. Still, I have noticed that this era is favorite to many fans of the show, especially those in Poland. I don’t know why exactly, but I would guess that the sort-of homemade feel which resonates from them, where you can sense that they come from a new, private studio slowly figuring out how to do certain things is a contributing factor. Broadcast history also must have played a part in this case.

I have never been a very big fan of the aiF era on the whole. This is also because I first saw these episodes only after I had seen the first 35 to death and although I was too young to articulate it, probably felt that they were not as good. However, maybe it is then easier for me to look at the individual episodes and see which I like the most. The episode Parkety has always been one of my favorites of the bunch. It is an episode which makes me laugh even though I’ve seen it many times. It’s got a fun story which keeps getting funnier as the episode progresses, which is why I feel it is definitely one of the best episodes of the fourteen.

Parkety and Vrata were the only two episodes from aiF co-animated by Marek Beneš. Leaving aside his work as a director and other functions on the series, Marek Beneš was, in my opinion, the weakest of the in-house animators on Pat & Mat, in-house referring to the three major studios which continually produced the series, aiF being the second of them. I would say his best work was also his first, Klíč. His animation’s main problem is that it lacks subtlety and fluency. Perhaps this is best seen by his walk cycles, which Pat and Mat can only undertake at a particular speed, performing extremely large steps. This can be funny at times, but when used all the time becomes a nuisance. His Pat and Mat are also very stiff, often jerkily moving from pose to pose, resulting in scenes which may look nice as individual poses (frames), but which do not look dynamic when seen in succession. A good example of his rigidness is the final handshake in this episode, where literally just the lower parts of the puppets’ hands move.

Váša, on the other hand, was the animator who used the most of the puppets’ body at aiF. His Pat and Mat are therefore the opposite to Beneš’s, often looking bubbly, getting even more energized as the years go on. Váša’s Pat and Mat were especially expressive with their hands – for instance, look at how Mat strokes his face at 1:09. This is where we come to the main topic of this post, the animation breakdowns.