In the last post I wrote about Kveta Pacovska – a czech illustrator. Czech republic has a pretty amazing record in the world of art, design and cinema. I could fill this page with all of the incredible artists to have come out of that small country, with a midas for all things creative.

When I was a student at a university in California, one of my courses covered experimental animation. The teacher whose name I must admit I no longer recall invited us to a screening  in San Francisco, where the animator would be present.

This was the day I met Michaela Pavlátová. She was living between Prague and San Francisco at the time, and as she handed me her business card with a simple, yet elegant drawing, I had no idea I was meeting a rather known figure in animation world, with many awards to her name.

Her films were sensitive, insightful, and dug into human nature with precision of a surgeon, yet were always full of hope. I was 21 at the time, impressionable, learning animation – and admittedly bad at it, and these films in my eyes were pure beauty.

For those of you who do not work with animation, these films were not done digitally with all the automation tools now on hand, but the traditional way. The traditional cell animation process goes like this: create a drawing, create another with a small alteration in the direction of the motion, and so on until you have hundreds of drawings just to illustrate a short movement of an arm, face, background etc. To get this movement just right 1min of animation can take months to create.

Understanding movement, how to tell a story through this movement is an acquired skill, but it is also a talent. To combine this skill and talent with being able to tell a true story that touches something real, is beyond talent.
And these were Michaela’s films.

Here I share with you two of her films – one Řeči, řeči, řeči – translated as Words, words, words.. but knowing a Slavic language it’s more like talks. It does not matter however, just watch and all will be clear.

and second one called ‘Repete’

** videos are property of the artist