Tales from the Magic Garden

Tales from the Magic Garden is a stop-motion feature from four countries and four directors, the product of nearly a decade of collaboration between David Súkup (Czech Republic), Patrik Pašš (Slovakia), Leon Vidmar (Slovenia) and Jean-Claude Rozec (France). It premiered in the Generation Kplus strand of the 2025 Berlinale, and it comes out of a Central European animation tradition, the line of Jiří Trnka and Jan Švankmajer, that has long treated puppet animation as an art form for adults and children alike.

The framing device is simple and tender: three siblings, left for a weekend with a grandfather mourning his late wife, try to draw him out through the family habit of telling stories. Each tale they invent becomes its own handcrafted short. The four directors divide the anthology between them, giving each segment a distinct texture while keeping to a shared, pleasantly spooky atmosphere. At seventy-one minutes it is brief, and finely made (critics compared its craftsmanship to the standards of Laika), and its emotional register stays generous without turning saccharine.

Reviewers singled it out as an unusually thoughtful piece of children's cinema, one that lets young viewers meet grief as a subject instead of shielding them from it, and that offers storytelling itself as the way to do so. It is also a fine advertisement for the small but distinguished European stop-motion studios that pooled their resources to make it: Maurfilm, Artichoke, ZVVIKS and Vivement Lundi!