Jan Svankmajer is a Czech surrealist puppeteer and animator who was born in 1934. He uses a mix of both stop motion animation and live action to accomplish a very unsettling storytelling aesthetic. A lot of his work appears to be inspired by early animators such as George Melies who used stop motion as a way to create trick films. You do not need to watch a lot of Svanmajer’s work to see that this same idea of tricking the audience by making strategic cuts and using stop motion elements. However, I will say that his techniques are much more advanced and hold up much better than Melies’s.
Svanmajer’s most famous piece of work is a three-part short film called Food that features 3 distinct shorts examining the relationship with humans. The whole film is a combination of stop motion, videos, and claymation. Most of the clay is only used for a few frames to create very scary wild expressions that can make the viewers skin crawl by how uncanny and how abrupt they are.
LeAnn Schmitt
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 