Magic (Post) Realism: Little Otik (Czech Republic – 2000)

Little Otik | Directed by – Jan Švankmajer (Czech Republic – 2000)

Karel Horák and Božena Horáková are a childless couple, and on medical reasons are doomed to remain so. While on vacation in the country, Karel decides to buy the house they are staying in and while fixing it, he digs up a tree stump that looks vaguely like a baby. After an evening spent cleaning the stump up, he then presents it to his wife Božena, who names it Otík and starts to treat it like a real baby. Božena then works out a plan to fake her pregnancy, and becoming more and more impatient, she eventually ‘gives birth’ one month early. But when Otík comes alive he has an insatiable appetite. Alžbětka, their neighbours’s daughter, has been suspicious all along, and when she reads the fairy tale about Otesánek, the truth becomes clear to her. Meanwhile, little Otík has been eating and eating, and growing and growing.

Based on the folktale Otesánek by Karel Jaromír Erben, the film is a stop motion-animated feature film set mainly in an apartment building in the Czech Republic. Directed by Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová, the film clearly bears the signs of these two Czech artists’s craftmanship. Leading representatives of Czech surrealism, Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová dabbled into many arts and crafts, such as film making, animation, writing, drawing collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In his film work, Švankmajer created an unmistakable and quite specific style, determined primarily by a compulsively unorthodox combination of externally disparate elements.