The Emperor's Nightingale
What better time than the holiday season to dive into the wonderful world of toys? Cinema has always loved to use its magic to fulfill an eternal childhood dream: seeing toys come to life. Naturally showcasing animated films, this series takes us at the frontiers of imagination, fantasy, and dreams through movies where toys are very well alive, albeit in different ways. By turns strange, amusing, wonderful, or unsettling, these toy stories inevitably lead us to reflect on our own humanity, while always managing to strike a chord deep within us.
Precede by short film A Christmas Dream by Bořivoj & Karel Zeman
After unwrapping her wonderful new toys under the Christmas tree, a little girl abandons her old rag doll. But once the child is asleep, the doll embarks on a series of nocturnal pranks to win back her affection. This is the first film in which Karel Zeman experiments with combining live-action footage and stop-motion animation, a technique he would explore again in his future feature films.
A young boy falls asleep and dreams that his toys come to life... Thus begins the story of an emperor who befriends a nightingale, only to abandon it for a bird made of precious stones. An adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale directed by one of the pioneers of Czech animation and the grand master of puppetry, Jiří Trnka.
Jiří Trnka
Jiří Trnka was a Czech animator and film director. He was one of the founding figures of Czech animation. Renowned for his stop-motion films made with puppets, he was also a painter, illustrator, sculptor, and set and costume designer for both film and theatre.
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