Little Mole (Jak Krtek)

These two lovely books (while not vintage...published in 2007) are based off characters from the 1950's-60's. I was so excited to find them at a thrift shop. The illustrations are so beautiful!

Here is a little about the animated short films (you can even watch some on Youtube) The first film called "Jak krtek ke kalhotkám přišel" ("How the mole got his pants") was released in 1956, and the cute main character won itself an enormous popularity in many Eastern European countries as well as Germany, Austria, India and China. Production for further episodes started in 1963 and since then, around 50 episodes have been created.

The first episode of the cartoon was narrated, but Miler wanted the cartoon to be understood in every country of the world, so he decided to use his daughters as voice actors, reducing the speech to short non-figurative exclamations in order to express the mole's feelings and world perception. They also became the bottleneck of the creation process as they were the ones who got to see the whole film first, thus Miler was able to decide whether the message of the movie was able to get to children or not.
The Little Mole Collection is on my wish-list! When our last dvd player died we got a multi region dvd player and it has played everything perfectly. Let's not get off onto movies/dvds I could probably have a third blog dedicated to those!

Jak krtek ke kalhotkám přišel - by Zděnek Miler, published in 2007