Written and directed by Jirí Barta. Music by Vladimír Merta. Art direction by Lenka Kerelová. Cinematography by Jan Vycítal. Edited by Helena Lebdusková.
Produced by Krátký Film Praha and Studio Jirího Trnky.
This short film from Czechoslovakia uses a mixture of live action and stop motion.
The movie begins with close-up shots of an axe chopping into logs. One log splits into multiple pieces of wood, some of which have faces. These wooden sticks rush about the landscape, seemingly elated that spring is coming, with the stop-motion footage intermixed with time-lapse photography of seeds germinating and the ice receding.
The wooden stick with a maiden’s face is attacked by a crow, which pecks the stick to pieces and swallows the splinters.
The stop-motion crow now turns into a creepy, skull-faced, winged piece of wood. This weird log-thing flies over the countryside, enters a cavern lit by candles, and roosts upside down like a bat, becoming an icicle. Sunlight enters the cave and the icicle becomes the death-faced stump again, which fights a wooden carving of a knight on a horse. The knight wins!
The other sticks carry the winged, skull-headed piece of wood aloft and place it atop a bonfire on a hill. Then, instead of burning the bonfire, a stick with the maiden’s face uses a newly-grown leaf to make the bonfire burst into a flurry of spring growth, with long blades of green grass consuming the monster-branch, transforming it into a normal piece of wood once more.
Jirí Barta’s sweet-and-sinister short is inspired by Vesna, a female character from Slavic mythology, who is associated with rituals conducted in rural areas during springtime. Here she is represented as the wooden stick with a maiden’s face that is consumed by the black crow, then returns anew to ignite the return of spring, as symbolised by the bonfire of rapidly-growing grass.
The yarn, which possesses a typically surreal Eastern European folktale vibe, begins in an upbeat manner, turns darker with the arrival of the crow-stump-creature, then seemingly becomes upbeat again after the (ritualistic-looking) ‘burning’ of the winged branch transforms it into a regular stick again, which starts to grow fresh leaves. This would be the happy ending, right? But Barta chooses to finish the story by showing the sticks being collected by a villager to be used as firewood. The final shot is of smoke issuing from a chimney! The end!
The stop-motion animation of the sticks and the puppet crow was done outside, on location in the Bohemian Forest, the High Tatras, and the Koněprusy Caves.
Barta’s other short films include THE VANISHED WORLD OF GLOVES (1982), THE PIED PIPER (1986), THE LAST THEFT (1987) and THE CLUB OF THE LAID OFF (1989).
Monster Zone 