For more than four decades, Polish filmmakers have drawn on their nation's rich tradition of graphic art, avant-garde theater, and puppetry to create some of the most technically sophisticated, darkly satiric, and fantastical animation in the world. This survey of Poland's finest hand-drawn and computer animation is distilled from a comprehensive program mounted by The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Featured are Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk's wickedly surrealist visions of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when Polish artists would cloak their indictments of Stalinism, power politics, and repression in allegorical storytelling and ironical wit. The exhibition also reveals a breathtaking range of animation forms and techniques, whether in Witold Giersz's vibrant calligraphies of oil-based paint from the 1960s; Jerzy Kucia's sensuous, jarring juxtapositions of sound and image in the 1970s; or Piotr Dumala's groundbreaking plaster-plate innovations of the 1980s and 1990s. Even today, venerable Polish animation studios and independent animation filmmakers continue to produce works noted for their atmospheric tension, subtle graphic shadings, and meticulous, at times even grotesque, attention to detail.
Joshua Siegel
The Museum of Modern Art, New York