Prague, July 22 (CTK) – Animated film is the branch that represents Czech cinematography abroad the most impressively and most successfully of all, but Czech animated films are often made abroad, which is a pity, Michal Podhradsky, Czech Animated Film Association chairman, has told CTK.
Czechs often compete and win prizes at animated film festivals, he said.
As the latest biggest successes he mentioned last year’s nomination of Superbie, a Hungarian-Czech-Slovak coproduction project, to the Cannes festival competition, and this year’s Oscar nomination for Happy End, a Czech animated film by Jan Saska.
Cinema statistics show that Czech audience love animated films. Every fifth visitor goes to cinema to see an animated film.
Out of the latest production, Lichozrouti (The Oddsockeaters, 2016) has crossed the level of 300,000 visitors and it has become one of the best distributed Czech films abroad, screened in Poland, South Korea, China, the USA, the UAE and in Slovakia, Podhradsky said.
He said about 100 animated films are made in the Czech Republic a year, a crushing majority of which are student films, however.
The Czech Cinematography Fund has been trying to help the authors with both the film development and materialisation phases. This year, it has distributed 40 million crowns in support of animated film alone.
The subsidy went to works such as a long animated film by Michaela Pavlatova, made in Czech-French coproduction, Martin Duda’s Rosa and Dara, and Kristyna Dufkova’s puppet film Living Large, which deals with children’s obesity.
Podhradsky said foreign partners show interest in Czech animators and their business potential. He mentioned the sale of the copyright of the Little Mole cartoon series to China and Czech cooperation with Belgium and Russia on a film story of Spejbl and Hurvinek, a popular Czech puppet comedy duo.
These films could have been exclusively Czech projects if the domestic creative potential had been used in the production and business areas, Podhradsky said.
“The Czech Republic thus only invests in artists’ education, but the production with a high added value takes place elsewhere. This is because the Czech Republic lacks instruments for the audio vision branch similar to West European countries, South Korea and China,” Podhradsky said.
Czech TV broadcasters’ relative uninterest in animated films is also unfortunate.
In spite of all this, the Czech Republic is a spiritual centre of animation in Central and Eastern Europe, he said.
