The Good Soldier Svejk

The film brings Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical novel, set in the First World War, to the screen with puppets. Josef Lada’s illustrations, as well known as the book itself, are the source for those puppets. Svejk is a soldier who does as he pleases in the army and is a master at producing talk. The stories he tells in his own favour are realised in the film through cut out animation. The work is in three parts and the director finds the last one the most successful; that assessment is the director’s own. Using puppetry for a war story is the film’s most marked choice. The adaptation was one of the hardest tasks Jiří Trnka took on. The seventy six minute Czechoslovak film was completed in 1956.