Those of a certain age will remember the Eastern European cartoons that appeared regularly on British TV during the hours assigned for children’s programming. Their mood, colour-scheme, and graphic style was totally different from American or British fare, and so was the music: herky-jerky jazz or whimsically abstract electronic music. Most nations in the Communist Bloc had their own state-run animation studio, but Czechoslovakia and Poland were the leading country. Associated with Warsaw’s Studio Miniatur Filmowych, Jan Lenica was a giant of Polish animation whose graphic design talents also extended to postage stamps, movie posters, children’s book illustration, and the creation of sets and costumes for the theatre.
Like Harry Smith before him and Terry Gilliam after, on “Labirynt” (1962) Lenica uses photographs and illustrations from the 19th Century and moves them around in a deliberately awkward and non-naturalistic way. But the atmosphere is very Central European, a macabre absurdism that’s equal parts Eugene Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Max Ernst, and Bruno Schulz. There’s a profusion of man/animal and man/machine chimeras: a gentleman with dragonfly wings, a flying crow-man, bats with human faces, a walrus with a top hat and wings not strong enough to bear its weight, and a bearded scientist who has merged with some kind of medical or scientific instrument. David Cairns hits the nail on the head when he compares Lenica’s masterpiece of steampunk psychedelia to a nature doc: “the dreamstuff is arranged as an urban ecosystem of incomprehensible mating rituals, lurking predators and the eternal fight for survival.”