A Midsummer's Night Dream · reception & legacy
1959 · Jiří Trnka
How A Midsummer's Night Dream has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Trnka's most ambitious puppet feature met a cool, divided reception at Cannes in 1959 — critics balked at Shakespeare without Shakespeare's words — and the disappointment stung him; today it's widely regarded as the summit of his art and one of the most beautiful puppet films ever made.
What's debated
The perennial fight it starts: can A Midsummer Night's Dream work stripped of the verse — is wordless puppet Shakespeare a sublime translation or a category error?
Its footprint
Its afterlife runs through animation itself — Trnka, the so-called 'Walt Disney of the East', made this the showpiece that generations of stop-motion animators cite, and the English version carries the unlikely prestige of Richard Burton's voice.
Where it stands
A cult object of animation cinephilia — the 'you must see this' title for anyone who thinks stop-motion peaked with Aardman or Laika, and a slow canon-climber as restorations circulate.