Stop-motion animation is a way to commune with everyday objects.
♪ [ "Procession of the Nobles" by Rimsky-Korsakov] ♪
If this was a just world,
the name Jan Švankmajer would be spoken in the same breath as Chuck Jones, Walt Disney, and
Hayao Miyazaki as one of the greatest animators in history.
He probably *isn't* because...
...well...
He's...not exactly family-friendly.
Yes, it's one of THOSE episodes.
Švankmajers were making short films in the Czech Republic since 1964 and feature-length ones since 1988.
He's a Czech national treasure with multiple awards to his name, and I don't feel like I've talked about him nearly enough.
I talked about him once, though -- back in the distant past, where I praised his first feature film, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
I found it quite charming.
[flashback audio: repeated, comedic, over-exaggerated screams]
I was so thin back then.
The film we're focusing on today as a late-period Švankmajer by comparison,
sold in some places as "Greedyguts,"
but we'll just call it "Little Otik."
The film opens on close-ups of baby photos -- because the film's essentially about raising a child.
In a drab apartment complex in the Czech Republic, a married couple learn that they can never conceive,
which saddens them and their neighbor Alžbětka, a child who really, really wants a friend to play with.
By chance, the husband finds a log shaped like a baby...
So they decide to raise it as their own. The wife even decides to fake a full pregnancy,
complete with a staged childbirth in this almost sitcom-ish sort of preamble.
But once they get home, against all odds and without a blue fairy in sight...
[movie audio: suckling sounds]
...Nipple splinters.
The baby, dubbed "Otik" and not "Woody" like he should have been,
grows into a stop-motion horror demon who starts...
...eating.
[movie audio: Otik giggling, blood splattering, organs sloshing]
When the parents decide to keep Otik away from the outside world, Alžbětka finds him and befriends him,
but all three -- mom, dad, and child -- are faced with the terrible dilemma of living with something
they dearly love that requires... human... flesh... for nourishment.
So, they force themselves carry out the grim task of deciding
which of their acquaintances is most worthy of death, and...
Oh, wait a second.
[movie audio:] ♪ Feed me, Seymour ♪
[movie audio:] ♪ Feed me all night long ♪ [Kyle audio:] I knew that sounded familiar!
[movie audio:] "HA! That's right, boy!"
Though, in reality, the story predates Little Shop of Horrors. It even predates...
that *other* story about a wooden boy come to life.
The original tale? "Otesánek," first written down by Karel Jaromír Erben in the mid-nineteenth century.
In the fairy tale, Otosánek grows to eat not only his parents, but also his neighbors,
his neighbors' neighbors, nearly the entire countryside, before being split open by a farmer
after daring to eat her cabbages.
The film follows the story quite closely.
Heck, a character *in the film* follows the story quite closely.
So, the movie plays out with the inevitability of a fairy tale, something you've heard since childhood
and can never, ever change.
Of course, this is as much a fairy tale as it is a very adult black comedy slash horror film, with gore
and nudity and that terrifying central character.
But for Švankmajer, this is actually one of his most toned-down films.
No, really.
By that, I mean that this is one of his least aesthetically adventurous films.
His earlier films featured actors, as this film does.
They had 2D stop-motion, as this film does.
They had 3D stop-motion, as this film does.
But his previous works tended to blend all three.
Actors regularly had their identities reduced to stop-motion puppetry.
For example, when Alice shrinks in Wonderland, she shrinks to the size of a doll.
And actually becomes a doll.
But in "Otik," the humans stay human,
Otik is always constructed frame by frame,
save for the shots where there's another human by him,
and the 2D animation only exists within the pages of the girl's storybook.
It wouldn't be hard to imagine this movie with, say, a CGI Otik.
Of course, that would defeat Švankmajer's purpose.
An inherent component of computer-generated imagery is that you never think you're looking
at an object in a place, only light on a screen.
A Švankmajer animation, by contrast, is something you can touch.
In an interview, Švankmajer once said that while the eye can be deceived and harmed,
touch, of all the senses, was the most apathetic, apolitical, and pure.
All of his creations have a definite texture to them, an uncanny motion.
Even his actors move with the artificiality of puppets, a cherished art form in the Czech Republic.
Or perhaps they move with the stylized gestures found in Northern Mannerist art, another Czech specialty.
In an interview with The Guardian, Švankmajer said that he was an admirer of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II,
a sixteenth-century Habsburg monarch known as a mediocre emperor
but a world-class patron of the arts.
Here he is as portrayed by one of his commissioned artists, Aegidius Sadeler .
And here he is again as portrayed by one of Švankmajer's biggest influences,
Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo made his name doing portraits like this -- men as vegetables,
men as books, men as the seasons, men as the elements.
Arcimboldo's paintings taught Švankmajer to see strangeness in the everyday object,
to see their spirituality, how they can serve as a metaphor, to view the objects as an essential part of life.
Švankmajer is essentially a fetishist.
N-No, no, g-get that down. Nope. Nope. Stop.
I know the word "fetish" has come to mean something exclusively sexual,
but in its original meaning, it just meant the elevation or worship of an object into a...
...spiritual realm.
In Christianity, the cross or the food taken at communion are fetishes.
*Any* holy object used in a ritual is considered a fetish.
And for Švankmajer, his fetishism lies in surrealism,
in finding the dreamlike reality hidden in the everyday.
In his own words, "If I place daily objects in my movies or art pieces in unrealistic relation to one another,
it's because I want to evoke doubts in spectators about their everyday reality:
to disturb the common utilitarianism that steamrolls the civilization. In connection with this,
it's possible to speak of the slavery of utilitarianism.
Living objects are becoming ones that are *not* alive, with which we don't communicate, that we only employ
pragmatically.
Objects of daily use have ceased to be cult objects, and our activities have ceased to be rituals."
Švankmajer's mission in all of his films is essentially to...remake the fetish,
to recreate the ritual object, to repurpose the common into the symbolic.
That's probably why CGI needs to look so real, why animators go to such lengths to create pixels
that look like they can be held and cherished.
This CGI movie is a great example.
The animators added so many subtle details to make their blocks look like worn plastic,
with chips on the edges, broken parts, fingerprints -- all of that.
The animation style was even chopped up to emulate the jerky nature of stop-motion.
It gives the movie that joyous feeling you get when playing with your toys, and
in actual stop-motion, maybe it's the notion that these are characters who can be held, can be touched and felt
that they find their appeal, and it's because these are objects with real rough edges
real sharpness, real weight and depth, that they become frightening.
So, how does that inform Little Otik?
Švankmajer's been stylistically bolder in the past,
but the fairy tale he tells here is a distillation of his entire aesthetic.
It's *about* people who see life in an object.
[movie audio:] Otik: "Dada."
And because they *see* life, it is *given* life.
[movie audio:] Otik's father: "Son."
[movie audio: screaming, eating noises]
Aww. They grow up so fast.
[audio from "Ren and Stimpy":] ♪ It's log, log, It's big, it's heavy, it's wood ♪
♪ It's log, log, It's better than bad -- it's good! ♪
♪ Everyone wants a log ♪
♪ You're gonna love it -- log! ♪
♪ Come on and get your log... ♪