In 1991 this country was still Czechoslovakia. Just two years after the booting out of Communism there was a searching for new directions in the animation studios. After 40 years of numbing “socialism,” no one really knew the way ahead in the restored free-market economy. Old Communist Party leaders were kicked out, but the various new owners knew nothing about the need for publicity, promotion or sales personnel, so there were none!
Zdenka continued as production leader of the cartoon animation studio known as “Bratři v triku,”(Brothers In Tricot). It was still going full-blast, but was on its own to find financing, customers, and distribution. We were running on empty, working hard, and simply counting that our reputation for innovation and high quality would carry us along. This was the workplace Zdenka grew up in and worked in for 65 years, and where I joined her 50 years earlier.
EU-TV sent in a crew in 1991 to interview Zdenka and me. This week I’m pointing you to Zdenka’s interview, still smoldering in the Dungeon. Next week you’ll hear what I had to say. Both of us were flying blind. Sadly, ten years later the studio was defunct, but in 1991 we had great hopes!
In the meantime, this country cracked in half, and we were in the Czech Republic. The “Brothers in Tricot” animation studio, was tossed from one new owner to another, none of whom had any interest other than its vast archive of old films. None of them knew anything about film production, marketing, or distribution. It fell on us to keep it going, which we did for ten more years, well in excess of any reasonable retirement age, until the conditions no longer existed to continue. We managed to make a lot of worthy films during that final decade, working for our own longtime clients, with virtually no support from the largely invisible owners.
You can sense what we were doing, what we hoped and strived for, in these interviews of 1991. Instructive! XXX Gene