The Art of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

A peek into Jiří Trnka's craft.

A photo from the picture book for A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Happy Thursday! In this issue of Animation Obsessive, we’re looking at the art and design of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959) by Jiří Trnka.

As we wrote on Sunday, Trnka was the grandmaster of stop motion. His puppet films introduced new types of filmmaking and storytelling to animation — and drew admirers from well outside communist Czechoslovakia, his home country.

In the ‘50s, director Jean Cocteau wrote this about Trnka:

… his patience and that of his team appeared to steal from nature the secret of life.

There is something truly wonderful about these films in which Trnka discovers a real unreality, instead of the commonplace human animals of cartoons ... here we have a magician whose spells bring the dreams of childhood into existence.¹

Cocteau’s words appeared in May 1959, the same month that A Midsummer Night’s Dream screened at Cannes. It was Trnka’s last feature: a sprawling, ornate adaptation of Shakespeare, three years in the making. He’d loved the play throughout his life and had finally chosen to tackle it himself.²

At the time, though, the film was controversial. It reimagines the material — one critic complained that it uses “not a word of Shakespeare’s.” That was exactly Trnka’s goal. He had this exchange with a French magazine during Dream’s creation:

When asked what will remain of Shakespeare in his finished work, [Trnka] replies carefully, “Like in the adaptations of [Sergei] Yutkevich and Orson Welles. Nothing!”³

Thankfully, the anger toward his film waned over time. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a beautiful piece — modern viewers can accept it more easily. On his blog, Hans Bacher (the production designer of Mulan) called it Trnka’s “ultimate masterpiece.”

Alongside that comment, Bacher shared a few of the film’s gorgeous character designs. Trnka was a gifted artist — even his concept sketches are well worth studying. And so we spent years chasing the source of those designs from Bacher’s blog. Last month, we made a breakthrough. We’re bringing it to you today.

As it turned out, most of this art was printed in a tie-in to Dream: a short picture book released in 1960 by the publisher Artia, owned by the Czechoslovak state. The book is full of wonderful photos of Dream’s puppets and sets, and of Trnka’s color sketches for the characters — many more than Bacher posted.

Few people have seen this book. Artia closed 30 years ago, around the time that Czechoslovakia dissolved, and the book was long out of print by then. It’s a rarity now.

With that in mind, we’ve preserved the book on the Internet Archive, making it available again. You can check it out through the link below, or read on for standout images and a little more commentary.

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Three of Trnka’s puppet designs for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (courtesy of the book)