Exactly How They Did It

Welcome! Hope you’re doing well. It’s a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our topic this time is stop motion.

We had a piece about New York indie animation in the works for today, but our area was hit with a power outage that’s forced us to delay. The good news: there’s a backup, and it’s something we were already looking forward to sharing.

An animation story that really speaks to us is the one about Kihachiro Kawamoto and Jiří Trnka, the Japanese and Czech stop-motion masters. In 1963, early in his career, Kawamoto went to communist Czechoslovakia to study under Trnka, whose films he deeply admired. It was an encounter between two wholly separate worlds, and it changed Kawamoto as an artist and as a person, permanently.

We’ve investigated the details for a few years now, buying obscure books and magazines in which Kawamoto discussed the trip — including his published letters and diaries from that time. He learned an incredible amount about stop motion, and he documented the Czechs’ methods at length.