Flora Cross

It's amazing what Jan Sver k (Kolya) and his team have achieved here with the simplest of means. Cutting between live actors and a real forest alive with puppet and stick animation, Kooky tells of a small, red, sawdust-filled toy bear lost in a rather charming and exciting adventure fantasy. There were concerns that this new English-language version would lose some of the special flavour of the Czech, but Sver k has supervised an exemplary translation. With naturalistic cinematography and deliberately low-tech, labour-intensive puppet animation, Kooky comes off like a cross between The Wind in the Willows and Jan Švankmajer's early work. It's a quasi-Animal Farm power struggle amongst gnarly forest flora and fauna at the same time as being a sweetly old-fashioned celebration of childhood imagination that adults will thoroughly enjoy. Six-year-old asthmatic Ondra (Ondrej Sver k, Jan's son) converses with his stuffed toys as if they were alive. After he reluctantly agrees to let his mother discard his favourite, Kooky, he begins to obsess over Kooky's fate. The puppet action begins as Ondra imagines Kooky escaping from a massive garbage dump, dotted with the broken remains of abandoned toys. Trying to make his way home, Kooky is pursued by two twisted plastic bottles, and loses his way in a magical--as opposed to special effects-fake--forest full of mysterious creatures. Will Kooky make it home With marvelously humorous dialogue and production design to take your breath away, Kooky truly is a cinematic fable for all ages.

The Naumann family celebrates Eliza's (Flora Cross) big spelling bee victory.

Eliza Naumann (Flora Cross) correctly spells a difficult word.

Eliza Naumann (Flora Cross) tells her father, Saul (Richard Gere), that she won a spelling bee.