Song of the Prairie

On seeing a puppet show - probably Punch & Judy - Oscar Wilde said, "What an economy of means! And an economy of ends!" I'm certain that the puppet films of Jiří Trnka would change his mind. A painter, sculptor, and illustrator, Trnka (1912-1969), turned to making "puppet films" at the age of 33, and over a career spanning just 18 years he made a handful of delightful films. Given the amount of time it takes to shoot just a few minutes of stop-motion animation, most of his films he made were shorts, but he also managed to make several feature-length films, including The Czech Year (1947), The Emperor's Nightingale (1949, released in the U.S. in 1951 with a narration spoken by Boris Karloff), an animated version of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Svejk (1955) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959). Trnka was directly involved in the creation of his "puppets," but he also designed the settings and backgrounds of his films. The figures themselves don't speak (though they sometimes sing), and their facial expressions rarely change, which simplifies the animation process. Trnka's films attracted attention for their unique artistry, but also because they were different from Disney's animation in their use of human figures.

Just after making The Bass Cello in 1949, an adaptation of a Chekhov story, Trnka made Song of the Prairie, a 21-minute tribute to American Westerns, and a sweet upstaging of John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). One of the things Sergio Leone taught us is how easily the Western film could be boiled down to its essential elements. How a certain landscape (desert, a single building or cluster of buildings on the edge of the wilderness), a railroad track and a train (even if the train whistle was all wrong), cowboy regalia (the hat, the boots, the gun belt, perhaps the chaps), and, perhaps the most important element, the silence, could be used as signals, indicators, around which nothing much needs to happen, can add up to an entire film. An evocation of a genre, without the slightest authenticity. Figures from fantasy. What we also learned from Leone was that Hollywood, where the genre had originated, had been doing the same thing for decades - relying on stock figures, props, costumes, and stories that dealt out morality in either primary colors or black and white.

80 years later, the figures that appear in Stagecoach, Ford's first great Western of the sound era, have become archetypes: the Andy Devine coachman, the Thomas Mitchell alcoholic, the John Carradine card-sharp, the John Wayne hero. They all appear in Song of the Prairie. A stagecoach is pulled along by a team of four horses, two men sitting atop, a pipe-smoking driver and another man riding shotgun, who never stops drinking from bottles of whisky under his seat, tossing empty bottles along the route, with a conspicuous black case conspicuously marked with the word GOLD, and two passengers inside, a large bewhiskered man who remains asleep throughout, and a lone woman, who knits a large sock and who stabilizes the tottering sleeper now and then. A bird flies alongside, chirping, and the woman sings with it. The men atop, and even the horses, turn to watch, enchanted by her song. They are soon joined by a lone rider, who sings, ducking as empty whisky bottles fly past (John Wayne's Ringo Kid doesn't sing, but Gene Autry and Roy Rogers did). The woman hands a red book to the rider, riding alongside the stagecoach. He throws it in the air and shoots his pistol at it, the coachman catches it when it falls and passes it back to the woman inside. Still singing, she holds out the woolen sock she's been knitting and he takes it. Holding it aloft, the rider waves goodbye to her with his hat, his clever horse spinning triumphantly. On the pages inside the book are bullet holes in the shape of a heart.

The stagecoach arrives in a darkened canyon. The stagecoach stops when a man appears on the trail. He climbs aboard and charms the woman with a card trick. Night falls. The crew and passengers adjourn at a farm house. A coyote sings plaintively in the distance (an English horn). Trnka turns the card sharp into the villain, and the attackers of the stagecoach into Mexicans, and they are after the gold. It is guarded by the heavy-drinking coachman, who is sleeping it off atop the stagecoach. He has run out of whisky, so the bandit poisons one bottle and offers it to the guard. He drinks it down, and the only ill effect the poison has on him is that when he spits whatever his spittle hits is vaporized.

The next morning, the stagecoach continues on its journey. The bandits attack on horseback and the woman cries for help. The singing cowboy hears her and gallops to the rescue, tracking the stagecoach by the many empty whisky bottles along the trail. He arrives on the scene in time to see the villain riding away with the woman across his saddle. The hero shoots all the bandits and chases the card-sharp into the canyon. Trnka creates enough surprises to make the hero's triumph both exciting and funny.

Having seen the end-credits of Coraline (2009), I knew how many people (more than 500) were involved in its making, but, being old-fashioned I suppose, I sought out one person, or perhaps two, in the credits to whom I could assign ultimate credit for the film, if only in my own head. I am not an auteurist, but I've grown comfortable with the idea that, generally, every film can be attributed to a single guiding intelligence, whether it's a director or a writer or a producer. I may be completely spoiled, but my ideal in the case of stop-motion animators is Jiří Trnka.