Jiří Kubíček
Biography
Jiří Kubíček graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he studied puppetry. Later, he worked as a director and dramaturge for S+H Theatre. In 1973, he started working for the Short Film and between the years 1981 and 1991, he was the chief dramaturge of animated film in the film studios Trick Brothers, Jiří Trnka Studio and Studio Prométheus Ostrava. In the middle of the 80s, together with Břetislav Pojar and Radek Pilař, he founded the Department of Animation at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He has been teaching animation at this department since its beginning and between the years 1990 and 2006, he was the chief of this department. In 1995 he became a professor.
Illustration Features
For more than forty years, Jiří Kubíček has dedicated himself to animation in an artistic, organizational and pedagogical way. He is one of those who are trying to keep the continuity of Czech animation and fight for the conditions of its further production and distribution. Besides his active work as a dramaturge and scriptwriter he initiated and formed an independent study of animation at FAMU in Prague. Not only for his students, he compiled the Dictionary of Animated Film (1997) and Introduction to Aesthetics of Animation (2004), he was a co-author of several monographs on Czech animators and translated Juri Norstein´s biography into Czech. For television, he prepared a documentary series Masters of Czech Animated Film (2004-2006). Kubíček´s cinematography is very rich and especially the episodes of the TV series with clumsy friends Pat and Mat as well as adaptations of fairy tales by Jan Werich are still very popular.