Alois Nebel wins European Film Award for animation

The historical drama Alois Nebel won the European Film Award for best animated feature film in Malta over the weekend. Its director Tomáš Luňák thus became the third Czech, after Helena Třeštíková and Miloš Forman to take home one of the prestigious European film awards.

'Alois Nebel', photo: Negativ

Alois Nebel brings to life not only the unusual lead character – a recluse middle aged train dispatcher – but also the dreary and mysterious border regions of former Sudetenland. Based on a comic-book trilogy by illustrator Jaromír Švejdík, or Jaromír 99, and writer Jaroslav Rudiš, the film tells the story of a man lost in his childhood memories. Alois Nebel lives a quiet life in a small village in the Jeseníky mountains, until flashbacks of the post-war expulsion of German residents forces him to reopen the scars of those traumatic events, almost 50 years later.

In terms of historical gravity, Tomáš Luňák picked a heavy load for his first film. But the original idea for the comic strip that then evolved into a book trilogy and the film, was born out of conversations between two friends in a Prague pub. Here is how Jaroslav Rudiš describes it:

“Jaromir 99 and I created Alois Nebel ten years ago at the Shot-out Eye pub in Žižkov, and we didn’t expect this [success] at all. It actually started as a crazy underground, punk project, or rather a dare between the two of us. I was telling Jaromir about my grandfather Alois, who was a train dispatcher near the border just like Alois Nebel. And we never imagined that this story would become a sort of phenomenon.”

Jaroslav Rudiš, photo: Šárka Ševčíková

Besides being the first Czech animated film to win the European Film Award, Alois Nebel is also the first Czech full-length movie to have used rotoscoping. A technique that basically creates a cartoon out of a normally shot film, allowed the creators to re-invent the look of Alois Nebel and the other characters, although most actors were similar in appearance to their drawn counterparts. It is also black-and-white just as the comic strip. The film’s producer Pavel Strnad, explains why the creators chose to use rotoscoping:

“This technique is quite complicated and it hasn’t been used that much in the past twenty years. The biggest problem is that you are basically making two films, but the result is just one film. Nevertheless, we chose to use this technique in order to preserve the visual style of the comic and, at the same time, utilize the possibilities that real actors can offer.”

Because of the complex technology and the time it took to put it all together, the cost of the film was also quite high by Czech standards – around 2.5 million Euros. When work on the film began six years ago, though, the state cinematography funding could offer a lot of support, as Nebel’s director Tomáš Luňák explains:

“This film is a product of a time when there was much more money in Czech cinematography, when there was a different philosophy, which was to give larger amounts to fewer films. We received a record amount of financial support, without which this film would not have been made.”

'Alois Nebel', photo: Negativ

Since its release in September 2011, Alois Nebel has appeared at festivals in Toronto, Venice and was even in the early stages of running for the Oscars. Some foreign critics have noted that the historical circumstances of the film, which are not all explained to the viewer, are hard to understand for an international audience. Yet, the visual ingenuity of the film seems to have charmed enough animation connoisseurs.