Václav Mergl

A man breaks into a large, seemingly abandoned old house to plunder the gold received. But the house is really abandoned?

Within a relatively small framework this short cartoon tells us about two little cousins—a beautiful one and an ugly one—that prove that all that glitters is not gold, and even an embodied beauty can have the heart of a werewolf. From an artistic point of view, the message of the story is underlined by Salamoun's specific style.

A military scientist successfully creates robot soldiers in the shape of crabs, which turn out to be deadly warriors, but soon he discovers that his ambitious invention evolves in unexpected ways.

Astronauts landing on an unknown planet are overcome with greed evoked by all-consuming amoebas transformed into gemstones. The greed kills the entire crew and the amoebas can take over their ship and eventually Earth. Among other techniques, Mergl uses animated xylographic illustrations and the film‘s uniqueness is underscored by its soundtrack.

A short film by the Czech animator Vaclav Mergl.

A microbe enters the bloodstream of a young woman.

A short animated film from 1990.

“Inside the material, faint smiles form, various tensions collide and samples of shapes thicken.” This quote by Bruno Schulz introduces Mergl’s graduate film, in which he animated clay – a seemingly lifeless material. Accompanied by jazz music, the film depicts the processes of formation, decline and proliferation while supplementing the geometrically formed material with a raster “veil.”