25/09/2025 - The new animated anthology from four Czech women animators and Studio Kouzelna is a refreshing and innovative take on the tension between creative work and raising children

What happens when creativity is impeded by childcare, and the household becomes the backdrop to both making art and managing chaos? Animums, created by four mother-animators during parental leave and screening at Liberec's Anifilm, is a 41-minute anthology that emerged from the Czech studio Kouzelna, best known for Tony, Shelly and the Magic Light [+see also:
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Adéla Kukalová’s Hodgepodge opens the anthology with a meta take on co-authorship. A mother narrates the story of Little Red Riding Hood to her daughter, drawing the scenes in real time. Hands are visible on screen until the story is hijacked by the child’s imagination. A t-rex fights the wolf, candy overtakes the forest and new obstacles and characters are scribbled into place. The daughter’s crayon drawings clash with the mother’s polished lines, building a visual tension between control and chaos. Red Riding Hood’s frustration mirrors the mother’s, but gradually, the resistance to chaos disappears and is embraced – an attempt at careful orchestration gives way to shared spontaneity. Hodgepodge reframes maternal creativity, not as suspended by parenting, but reshaped through it.

In contrast, Eliška Oz’s Why Don’t You Touch Me explores the collision between ambition and care. The segment showcases a sculptor fully immersed in shaping a figure, a stand-in for artistic identity. But her focus soon shifts to her newborn, and the sculpture, now neglected, begins to contort. Though inanimate, the clay figure becomes a second child, acutely present and increasingly fractured. Oz captures the quiet tension between baby, artwork and self. The slow, painstaking nature of stop-motion mirrors the fragmented rhythms of caregiving itself: start, stop, reset, repeat. Every frame becomes a negotiation, just like the sculptor’s time. Oz doesn’t just depict creative interruption: she animates its very logic.

Vendula Velísková’s Mother Ltd. brings raw humour and self-deprecating bite. Shot in rough-edged stop motion, using real-life photos of the artist, her home and her studio, the film tackles chaos head-on. Every attempt at work is interrupted, every frame is cluttered with mess. Unlike Oz or Kukalová, Velísková doesn’t use metaphors – she just animates reality. The interruptions become the structure, and the disarray becomes the aesthetic. It’s a well-paced, self-aware refusal to romanticise either motherhood or artistic work. Both are unstable, both are valid and both are animated here, side by side.

Veronika Pasterná Szemlová’s Feed, Wash & Love closes the anthology with a wry, detailed portrait of domestic routine. Illustrated in 2D with soft pastels and a journal-esque visual style, the film feels personal as it moves through a loop of care. Except this time around, it is the husband who is dependent on the filmmaker. Fully grown but helpless, he is framed as another dependent. The “second child” is in plain sight. Yet, the film doesn’t end in collapse. Instead, it quietly turns toward something more introspective, offering a small shift that viewers will have to witness for themselves.

As a whole, Animums doesn't offer a thesis on motherhood  – it fractures the topic. Each short negotiates the terms of care: collaboration, sacrifice, defiance, resignation. What unites them isn't the theme but the method. Animation becomes a way to trace the textures of caregiving; its repetitions, interruptions and improvisations. Watching Animums felt intimate and disquieting. As an animator, I saw the fight for space. As a viewer, I thought of my mother. These films don’t ask for sympathy. They ask us to look closer.