Viktor Kubal Animated Restorations

ABOUT THE SERIES:

The American Cinematheque is pleased to pay tribute to the legendary Slovakian animator Viktor Kubal, known as the “Slovak Walt Disney,” with this retrospective highlighting the new restorations of his most acclaimed work. Over the course of many decades, Kubal produced innovative, much-loved children’s shorts, but also more subversive — though no less groundbreaking — feature films, usually based on folk tales. The omission of dialogue in much of his work is both experimentally daring and artistically spectacular, as he surrenders his stories so that they are told simply by the magical combination of music and moving image.

Perhaps his most well known work, THE BLOODY LADY is a retelling of the infamous Elisabeth Bathory folk tale about a noblewoman accused of murdering hundreds of young women and men and using their blood to sustain eternal life, a story which is also considered to be one of the key inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Rarely screened in North America, the genre-defying JURKO THE HIGHWAYMAN is a retelling of another classic folk tale — this time, Robin Hood.

Kubal’s aesthetic tendencies are undeniably revolutionary, but just as vital to the progression of animation as an art form is his role in the development of the animated portrayal of women, largely due to the fact that women in his films evolve and actively participate in shaping the arc of his iconic stories. This detail is particularly subversive when considering he worked almost exclusively in Communist Slovakia. His complex and humanist constructions of female lead characters were in many ways unrivaled at the time. These elements are observable in both his feature films and his many short works, such as “Earth,” “The Weatherman,” “Chess,” “Idol,” “High Noon,” “Two Good Friends,” “The Marzipan Comedy” and “Cinema.”