For obvi­ous rea­sons, most art pro­duced under oppres­sive regimes comes off as painstak­ing­ly inof­fen­sive. For equal­ly obvi­ous rea­sons, the rare works that crit­i­cize the regime tend to do so rather oblique­ly. This was­n’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech artist and stop-motion ani­ma­tor Jiří Trn­ka, “the Walt Dis­ney of East­ern Europe.” In its cen­tral con­flict between a hum­ble har­le­quin who just wants to sculpt flower pots and a giant, inva­sive gloved hand that forces him to make rep­re­sen­ta­tions of itself, one sens­es a cer­tain alle­go­ry to do with the dynam­ic between the artist and the state.

“Trnka’s per­son­al expe­ri­ence of total­i­tar­i­an­ism under the com­mu­nist regime is pro­ject­ed and reartic­u­lat­ed in the mean­ing and knowl­edge he trans­mits through his short,” writes Renée-Marie Piz­zar­di in an essay at Fan­ta­sy Ani­ma­tion. “The state-run stu­dios had the pow­er to approve or cen­sor cer­tain top­ics and con­trol fund­ing accord­ing­ly. Trn­ka was thus depen­dent on their fund­ing, yet resis­tant to their pol­i­tics, and this ambi­gu­i­ty lim­it­ed the free­dom of expres­sion in his work.”

In the har­le­quin, “Trn­ka crafts a char­ac­ter through which he not only por­trays him­self as the artist, but any free-think­ing indi­vid­ual who gets robbed of their agency and induced into fol­low­ing and act­ing accord­ing to an ide­ol­o­gy and regime.”

Com­plet­ed in 1965, The Hand would turn out to be Trnka’s final film before his death four years lat­er, by which time the rulers in pow­er were hard­ly eager to have his ani­mat­ed indict­ment in cir­cu­la­tion. 1968 had brought the “Prague Spring” under Alexan­der Dubček, a peri­od of lib­er­al­iza­tion that turned out to be brief: about a year lat­er, Dubček was replaced, his reforms reversed, and the Czechoslo­vak Social­ist Repub­lic “nor­mal­ized” back to the ways of the bad old days. Banned after Trn­ka died in 1969, The Hand would remain not legal­ly view­able in his home­land for two decades. But today, it’s appre­ci­at­ed by ani­ma­tion enthu­si­asts the world over, and its expres­sion of yearn­ing for cre­ative free­dom still res­onates. In the late six­ties or here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, fear the gov­ern­ment that fears your pup­pets.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch The Idea, the First Ani­mat­ed Film to Deal with Big, Philo­soph­i­cal Ideas (1932)

The Hob­bit: The First Ani­ma­tion & Film Adap­ta­tion of Tolkien’s Clas­sic (1966)

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

4 Franz Kaf­ka Ani­ma­tions: Watch Cre­ative Ani­mat­ed Shorts from Poland, Japan, Rus­sia & Cana­da

An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czecho­slo­va­kia (1930–1989)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.