Krteček

A recent post on BoingBoing about a children's show called Pocoyo reminded me how much I appreciate old-school cartoons. They tended to be much more laid back than a lot of the frenetic fare available these days -- a lot of it coming from Japan (seizure inducing or not) and most of it blaring annoying synthesized music.

I'm glad that Magda enjoys the slower paced DVDs I got her in the Czech Republic. I grew up on animations and book illustrations by Zdeněk Miler and enjoy passing it on to my daughter. His art is pretty timeless and beside his trademark Krtek (Mole) (here's bunch of them), he's done a lot of other cool stuff.

Magda's favorite right now, is a collection of shorts about a violin playing cricket. Simple story lines with nice, mellow soundtrack of mostly solo string instruments. These were actually published after my time (late '70s) and the main menu on the DVD comes in a curious collection of languages, including Finish!

The series of Krtek movies started in 1956 - with an educational film explaining how flax becomes linen. The first movie (How the mole got his pants) is the only one with real spoken dialog. After that he used his daughter's to provide the voices -- without intelligible words -- for the characters.

I looked on YouTube and found several movies, including the classic The Mole and the Green Star from the year I was born. There are also some more recent ones of varying quality, including one from 1997, Krtek a Maminka, where he gets to help some bunnies as an obstetrician!?! You gotta love that crazy Eastern European kulture.