Zvírátka a petrovstí

I noticed that I'm the first one reviewing Jiří Trnka's "Zvířátka a Petrovští" ("Animals and Robbers") on IMDb. Trnka's not the most famous director, so that's no surprise. But you should find out about him and watch his movies. This is only the second of his movies that I've seen. It's based on the Grimm brothers' "Town Musicians of Bremen", in which a couple of aging animals suspect that their owners will want to get rid of them, so they decide to move to Bremen to seek a new fortune. In the process, they foil the plans of some robbers.

Trnka's adaptation is a more flowery take on the story, with ballet music as the background sound. The cartoon got shown at the Cannes Film Festival right after its release in Czechoslovakia, proving to movie-goers that Eastern Europe could make impressive cartoons too. He used traditional animation as well as stop-motion. To this day, Trnka is known as the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe, and there's no doubt that he influenced Jan Švankmajer.

I saw the cartoon on YouTube. It has no subtitles, but the action makes the plot clear.

It is always interesting seeing stop motion/puppet animation and especially the older stuff. It can be old-fashioned but very charmingly so, have more often than not found it lovely to watch and at its best magical. Mostly avoiding being too crude or trying to do too much. What has been seen of one of the pioneers of it Jiri Trnka's work is really quite impressive and he and his feature and short films are deserving of a lot more credit and international exposure than they get presently.

A musical take on the 'Town Musicians of Bremen' story, this is definitely worth seeing for animation fans and if you want to see everything of Trnka. Or all the versions of the story available. It is not one of my favourite Trnka works though, if anything for me it's one of his weakest and perhaps the weakest of the ones seen. That doesn't mean it's bad, it is a long way from that and it is quite impressive actually for such an early effort of his. Just prefer the work of his that has more ambition and visual beauty, as well as the ones that appeal to me in terms of story.

There is a lot to like here. It looks great, Trnka's visual style did become more refined and ambitious later but for so early on there is some very impressive work going on here. Especially the designs for the characters and the angles. The music plays a major role here and while it is a bit of a cliche to cite something as being like a character of its own, the dynamic and beautifully orchestrated music here is a joy to listen to.

Furthermore, a lot of charm can be seen here as well as never being too juvenile or heavy. The story moves at a good clip and the characters, while quite one-dimensional, are very engaging and easy to root for.

However, it is slightly too cutesy at times and quite flowery.

Did think too that it could have afforded to have been longer, it's only under 10 minutes and 12-15 minutes would have been better. 'Town Musicians of Bremen' is a slight story but not that much, with a longer length some of the story could have had a little more time to breathe as it did feel for my tastes slightly rushed towards the end.

Concluding, nice. 7/10.