Introduction
The Internet’s potential for global shrinkage, electronic travel, and animated transmission is a technological development that would have left citizens of previous centuries stupefied by such wondrous demonstrations of magic. Typing in the address for the Czech animator Michaela Pavlatova’s website transports one as if by sorcery to Prague, and a realm of moving words and images with a distinctly unique and deliciously demented perspective. Her site embodies an attitude that seems rather different from the outlook of artists and animators in the English-speaking West, and while difficult to pinpoint exactly, consists of a mixture of irony, black humor, a delighting in the absurd and the erotic, yet also a very moving focus upon the intricate nuances of domestic life and relationships.

Such an irreverent and soulful blend certainly contains a strong universal appeal, and Pavlatova has received numerous awards and accolades at international film festivals. In 1992, she was nominated for an Oscar for her animation Words, Words, Words (1991), and in 2006 she received the equivalent of a Czech Oscar for her most recent animation, Carnival of Animals (2006). Her particular vision can be seen as both drawing on, and departing from, features that have come to be associated with the Czech animation tradition. This tradition in the context of animation history has acquired such an aura of significance and weight that the term seems to be inscribed in capital letters. Yet Pavlatova is a vital contemporary player on the international animation scene, and a sure sign that the Czech animation tradition is fluid, rather than a practice immortalized in stone. She acknowledges her artistic inheritance, but also plays with expectations, allowing for the injection of new aesthetic and conceptual considerations. Over the course of this paper, I will explore some examples that reflect this duality, and consider how Pavlatova incorporates a uniquely female perspective that differs from that of many of her male artistic elders and peers.

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