Jan Svankmajer

'Homunculus figure in Jan Svankmajer's treatment of Faust (1994). Svankmajer achieves haunting effects in his films with his mixtures of live action and animation.'

The passage i'm analysing is extracted from 'Cracking Animation, the Aardman Book of Animation'. The focal point of the article is the works of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, who is renowned for his bizarre and corrupt animations. Also the article looks into Jan Svankmajer's unique approach to animation through the mutipul techniques he adopted . By reviewing this piece i will gain further knowledge concerning independent animators and their use of different art forms. Svankmajer was considered ahead of his time, in his film Alice (1987), he experiements with animal skulls and doll's eyes.

From his first film, The Last Trick (1964), Svankmajer brought to the cinema the theatrical skills of masks and puppets, combining them with film animation techniques using clay, models, cut-outs and inanimate objects conjured into life with a sharply focused surreal imagination that is endlessly startling.

Svankmajer's films play on universal phobias and the subject matter flies in the face of social taboos, linking food, death, sex pain and pleasure in shocking, unforgettable imagery.

Svankmajer's broad use of mediums and techniques is facinating, I will now consider a wider range of materials and techniques when storyboarding animations in the future. Although Svankmajer uses multipul amounts of mediums, his work relays the right message when completed, which also means that when choosing a technique or material I must make sure it is relevant to the narraive and the sub-text.

The passage then proceeds to comment on Jan Svankmajer's apparent inspirations. Svankmajer's The Pit and the Pendulum (1983) reveals two major influences-Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe-and reflect his fascination with dream states: those uncertain regions where reality and unreality are excitingly, and ofter frighteningly, blurred.

After reading this article I'm not suprised that animators such as Brothers Quay and Tim Burton, find Svankmajer's work to be inspirational. Jan Svankmajer's use of multiple mediums is present in The Brothers Quay's Street of Crocodiles (1986).