New Jan Svěrák film Kooky opens in Czech cinemas

After three years of work, a new film by the Oscar-winning director Jan Svěrák called Kooky opened in Czech cinemas on Thursday. It is about a teddy bear lost in a forest inhabited by various fantastic creatures. It is shot using state of the art technology, and features the director’s father and son as voice actors.

Kooky is a red teddy bear, stuffed with wood shavings. That is most unfortunate: his owner, six-year-old Ondra, suffers from asthma, and his mother chucks the toy away one day as all the dust is bad for the boy’s condition. Kooky therefore finds himself on a dump, but escapes to a nearby forest, where he meets his mentor and other fantastic creatures inhabiting the woods.

Kuky

This is the plot of the Jan Svěrák’s latest movie, Kooky. The director says it took a long time before he got a precise idea of how the film should be made.

“I’ve always wanted to make a movie set in nature, but I didn’t know what it should be about. This idea is about three years old, that it would be a puppet movie. But for two of those three years, we were only thinking about how we could do it, because there was no such technology. No one had tried it before, so we had to figure it out ourselves.”

The film has real actors as well, but most of the action takes place in a deep forest inhabited by eccentric characters, such as Captain von Hergot, the forest elder, who becomes Kooky’s mentor and defender; the evil Anuška, who wants to take over the forest, two bullies who guard the dump want to get Kooky back to where he escaped; and many others. All the forest scenes were shot in location, which was sometimes difficult.

“The biggest problem with shooting on locations was light, because in a forest, the light keeps moving and when you set everything up, it moves and then it’s gone. Also, when you’re shooting a micro-world – we are used from the big movies that here you can plant some grass, here a tree – but in the micro-world, every interference is visible. Whenever you step somewhere, or bend a flower and replace it, it’s not same. When you re-build it, it’s no longer organic.”

Jan Svěrák, photo: Falcon

The original puppets, their cars and other elements of the imaginary world were designed by a Brno-based computer games developer, Jakub Dvorský, from Amanita Design.

“In terms of design of the creatures and props, it’s quite similar to designing games, but when I work on a computer game, my job is much wider. I’m also the producer, I do all the business stuff, and marketing… In fact, I’m in the role of the director. But this time, I was just the designer, so it was much easier for me.”

How much freedom did you have in creating all those characters and props?

“Quite a lot in the beginning. All the characters were only roughly outlined in the script, and every creature really evolved. Every time I designed rough sketches, sent them to Jan Svěrák, and he told me what he liked what he didn’t like, so it was a dialogue between us on the evolution of each creature.”

Once Kooky gets involved in forest politics, he helps his friend Captain von Hergot to fight off attempts by Anuška and his evil minions to replace him as boss. There are car chases, flame throwing, and other features that are not usually seen in puppet movies. Jakub Dvorský says it was great fun designing all the cars and other props.

Photo: CTK

“I enjoyed designing the cars very much. The cars are made from rusty tubes and pipes and things like that – from people’s trash. So it was very enjoyable to find out how the little creatures made the cars that would suit themselves. For instance, one car is made from the exhaust pipe from a real car, and there are of course many little details created by the little hands of those forest creatures.”

Jakub Dvorský got the job after director Jan Svěrák saw some of his creations, particularly the web-based game called Samorost. The designer says Kooky’s world is different from the world of his own creations, although some of the elements are similar.

“The approach is little different from our games. Nobody likes dumps of course, or looking at people’s waste, but it’s there, so it was interesting to integrate it into the universe of the film. There is a very nice forest, and the dump behind it, and some city… In our games, we create a world that’s completely imaginary, there are parts of real nature and parts of real trash. But this film is set in the real world, only inhabited by fantastic creatures.”

The puppet film will certainly capture children’s imaginations. However, it does lose focus at times and the pace drops towards the end. Kamil Fila is a film critic for the news website aktualne.cz. He says Jan Svěrák – who also wrote the script – may have taken too much upon himself.

“There are a number of reasons; I think the scrip is very inconsistent. Jan Svěrák is not used to writing is own scripts, and I think the movie really lacks some solid base to move on from. Another thing is that the film is unfortunately stuck between an experiment, an unusual film, and at the same time is should be a huge hit. It never really takes off as a spectacular, action-packed movie, and it remains very poetic and thoughtful. I know it’s subjective but I thought that some parts of the movie are boring. It never happened to me before with any other film by Jan Svěrák, but it has some dead spots.”

After the Oscar-winning film Kolja, Jan Svěrák went on to shoot two locally successful films: 2001’s Dark Blue World and Empties from 2007, which became the most popular film that year. Kamil Fila says the director has a desire to make Hollywood-style productions, and at the same time, appeal to specific Czech audiences.

Making of Kooky, photo: Falcon

“Jan Svěrák has always wanted to be successful in the US. He won a student Oscar, which allowed him to make splashier, Hollywood-style movies that have always been commercially successful in our country. In that sense, he is a Czech Spielberg, the Czech film hit maker. After Jan Svěrák won an Oscar for Kolja, he had offers to come and work in Hollywood, but he turned them down because he thought the films were too little humane. So he stayed here but he still wants to have great budgets and big productions, and at the same time he wants to do these nice, gentle Czech stories, typical for the Czech nature, if we understand it in terms of such clichés and stereotypes.”

The new film, Kooky, is set to become one of the hits of the season. It will also be one of two Czech movies featured in the main competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.