Hermína Týrlová

She was introduced to animation by her then-husband Karel Dodal. She met him at the Urania Theatre in Holešovice, where he was drawing sets and promotional materials. Even then, however, he was attracted by a great novelty - the trick film. Among other things ,he also liked the American cartoon slapstick films that were shown in Czech cinemas. He also brought Hermína Týrlova to the Elekta-Journal studio in Vinohrady, where he joined. "Eight hours of work by one person could not be enough for so much work," Týrlová recalled in Film a doba magazine. "I tried to help him, but I didn't know how to do it. I had no choice but to let him teach me."

Although their marriage didn't last, the collaboration in their own studio continued for a while. Týrlová was profoundly influenced by the puppet film The New Gulliver. "I was so intrigued by this puppet film that I couldn't think of anything else but how to start a puppet film in our country." However, the first experiments with puppets came about at the request of customers when Dodal and Týrlová created a commercial for the shoe company Krása. 1938 marked the end of the studio, Dodal left for the United States. "For me, after the liquidation of this profitable enterprise, which exhausted my strength, killed my creative ideas and gave me no hope, the time of liberation had come."

Hermína Týrlová, meanwhile, drew serials for children's magazines, but never gave up her dream of making films. She rejected the idea of making a film about the Beetles because of its technical complexity. "The other thing I carried in my head was the memory of my father's nativity scene." But such a theme could hardly compete with American slapstick. In the end, she decided on Ferd the Ant, had his figure made to her own design and made a test film at home. She was unable to find entrepreneurs who would invest in the film. It was not until 1940 that the film critic Karel Smrž met with the producer of the Zlín studio, Ladislav Kolda, and suggested that instead of cartoons, he should make lot films - mentioning Hermína Týrlová. Kolda was interested in the offer.

In the spring of 1941, Týrlová came to Zlín. "The day came when they were waiting for my demonstration. Several people gathered in a small screening room to judge my work. (...) The picture grew dark, the flowers began to unfold and Ferd the Ant came out of the house. He yawned, stretched and began to cut wood.The sound of a real saw, which accompanied the cutting, was grotesque to the tiny figure of Ferdy, and this may have caused everyone to smile when the lights came on in the projection." At that moment, Hermína Týrlová became part of the history of Zlín studios.

The handwriting of her films was legible: they were comprehensible, child-friendly stories that had a clear moral overlay - lessons that both children and adults could take away. "Karel Höger once said of me, when he saw me in a screening laughing at something in a completely childlike way, that I was a child myself. And that doesn't change the years," Týrlová said in a Czechoslovak Radio recording made on the occasion of her 80th birthday. "Sometimes a person remains a child for a long time. And perhaps it's not so bad. I have verified that my children understand me when I wrote poems as a girl."

The legendary Revolt of the Toys was created in Zlín studios two years after the war. It was Hermina Týrlová's first film to combine puppet animation and a live actor. In it, an evil Nazi in an SS uniform becomes a victim of wooden toys. The toys first resist the German's cruelty, then take revenge and force him to flee. "Thevictory of the toys over the Gestapo has satisfied audiences young and old almost everywhere in the world," Týrlová wrote in Film and Time. The first successes came, and the film was awarded at the Venice and Brussels festivals, where Toy Riot won the Best Children's Film Award and the Best Puppet Film Award.

As Týrlová searched for other themes, she seemed to be searching for herself. For a while she devoted herself to fairy tales, but a more fundamental turn came with The Knot on the Handkerchief. In it, she breathes life into ordinary objects - towels, tea towels and, of course, the handkerchief. This film, too, garnered international acclaim. "Hermína Týrlová's cinematic world of animated cloths, woollen fibres and wooden toys shows the youngest viewers that any tiny object near them can contain a story that they can bring to life through play," Michaela Mertová, curator of the National Film Archive, wrote about her.

She also brought a piece of wool to life with her masterful animation in Woolen Fairy Tale. Zdeněk Liška, the genius of Czech film music (who also scored The Higher Principle, The Burning of the Dead and Sinful People of Prague), wrote the music for it. Liška's music is also heard in the fairy tales about Ferd Ant and Beetlejuice, which Týrlová rediscovered in the 1970s. In those films she worked with relief puppets, and in later films she experimented with traditional figures made from Vizovice pastry, for example.

"Hermína Týrlová's cinematic world of animated cloths, wool fibres and wooden toys shows the youngest viewers that in any tiny object near them there can be a hidden story that they can bring to life through play," Michaela Mertová, curator of the National Film Archive, wrote about her.According to her, Tyrlova's tales are imbued with kindness, criticizing evil and condemning bad qualities. It is Týrlová's sympathy with the world of the youngest viewers that has made her films among the world's best-known and award-winning animated films for children.

Her films have won over audiences and juries at the most important international festivals in Venice, Cannes, Locarno, Tehran, Brussels and Delhi. "Hermína Týrlová's work is surprisingly less appreciated in the Czech Republic. Our viewers, once they grow older, quickly forget how important these films were to them as children and what they gave them in life," concludes Mertová. "Hermína Týrlová's art is still able to awaken children's imagination and playfulness, to appeal to their imagination. And that is more important than just making them laugh."

In her lifetime, Hermína Týrlová managed to make 58 films, the very last of which - Fairy Tale on a String - she finished at the age of eighty-five.

■ Václav Bešt'ák