The Fall of a Prince

On one of Jiří Trnka's greatest achievements.

Neklan in Old Czech Legends (1953)

Happy Thursday! This issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter looks at one of the most renowned stop-motion scenes ever created: the terror of Neklan.

It dates to 1953, to the feature-length Old Czech Legends by Jiří Trnka. The film’s title makes it sound like a loose anthology, but that’s not the case. Old Czech Legends is a sweeping, boundary-pushing epic. Trnka had joined animation in the mid-1940s, and this film, made in communist Prague, was a turning point for him. As he said:

Until now […] everything in our puppet films was played out in a poetic way: we had yet to find how to express the action in a dramatic and epic form. It was only with Old Czech Legends that we mastered this issue.¹

This one scene is a perfect illustration of Trnka’s point. It comes toward the end of Old Czech Legends, when the coward-prince Neklan assumes the throne. An unstoppable barbarian army approaches, and we meet Neklan alone in his chambers. His conscience is eating at him: he can’t bring himself to rise to the occasion. For several minutes, we watch him wilt.

Like many have noted before, it’s a performance worthy of the stage, played out by an inanimate object. Why does it work so well? That’s what we’re exploring today.

Here we go!