“In film, you only get feedback after the fact, once the work is finished and can’t be changed, whereas the theater is a living organism. “I saw it as a good opportunity to test the material for a feature-length animated film, since the great gift of the theatrical form is direct feedback from the audience,” Klimt explains. At the time, he was thinking about a feature-length puppet film with the same story and subject matter. Writing for the theater led Klimt to his central theme, which is the relationship between humans and animals. Thus Laika, Qin and Gagarin(2003) was born. It was such a success that the theater that produced the show expressed interest in another project by the same team, and the three creators agreed it should be about animals and space. In 2000, Aurel Klimt, together with artist Martin Velíšek and musician Miro slav Wanek, created a puppet theater show called The Enchanted Bell, based on Klimt’s successful short film Of the Enchanted Bell(1998). The idea of making an animated film about the canine cosmonaut had a lengthy evolution. Klimt’s filmography includes several black comedies inspired by Russian culture, including Mashkin Killed Koshkin (1995) and The Fall (1999), both based on short stories by Daniil Kharms. “I’m fascinated by the absurdity of certain aspects of Russian society and politics.” “All this was my main inspiration: the real historical events and the propaganda created around them,” explains Klimt. So it was that a street dog became a casualty of the Cold War. Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian leader, ordered the flight nevertheless, in the rush to beat the United States with the first living creature in orbit, scoring a propaganda victory. Little did they suspect that the unwilling first astronaut died after just a few hours in orbit, from stress and overheating, or that she was launched on a hastily prepared Sputnik that was never meant to return to Earth. During the Cold War, all the public knew was the official propaganda about the peppy little doggy. When Klimt first began considering the topic, in the 1990s, information from the archive of the Russian space program was just starting to be released. The film’s first half-hour is based on actual events from the life of Laika, who was shot into space on November 3, 1957, but the remaining 60 minutes are pure fiction. I think it’s a big topic, and a perfect fit for animated film,” says Klimt, the movie’s art director, screenwriter, editor, director, and producer all rolled into one. “I find it fascinating how humans put themselves above other living creatures on Earth, how they decide whether or not they have the right to exist, and how haughtily they treat them, especially in the name of science. Suddenly the animals’ harmonious lifestyle is in jeopardy. After a short time, however, they are joined by Russian astronaut Yuri Leftkin, followed, in true Cold War spirit, by his American rival, Neil Knockout. The animals wander around the cosmos before settling happily on a distant planet where they befriend the local life-forms. In the wake of Laika’s launch, other animals are also shot into space, not only from Russia, but also from the United States. It tells the hard-knocks story of Kudryavka, a street dog on the outskirts of a Russian megalopolis who is caught and forced to become a pioneer of space travel, changing her name to Laika. Now, Aurel Klimt’s Laika, currently in production, is also science fiction, but in musical theater style. The Christmas Ballad(2016), a puppet short by Michal Žabka, with a screenplay by the late great of Czech puppet animation, Břetislav Pojar, was an attempt at animated sci-fi. First Snow (2015), a student film by Lenka Ivančíková, introduced animal puppets, and Deep in Moss (2015), by Filip Pošivač and Barbora Valecká, which started life as a short film before being reborn as an online TV series at, featured fantastical forest creatures. Radek Beran’s feature-length The Little Man (2015) brought the aesthetics of puppet theater into Czech film, showing clearly the puppets’ strings and wires, while Jan Balej, in Little From the Fish Shop(2015), combined puppets with digital animation. Most of them build on the storied tradition of Czech puppetry, but several have shown an ambition to branch out in a new direction. The Czech Republic has upped its output of puppet films in recent years, in every genre: shorts, student films, features, and TV series.
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