Tales from the Magic Garden

Tales from the Magic Garden is a four-country, four-director stop-motion feature, 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 arrives in a Central European animation tradition — the lineage of Jiří Trnka and Jan Švankmajer — that has long treated puppet animation as an art form for adults and children alike rather than a children's novelty.

The film's framing device is simple and tender: three siblings, left for a weekend with a grandfather mourning his late wife, coax him back to life through the family habit of telling stories. Each of the tales they invent becomes its own handcrafted short, and the four directors divide the anthology between them, giving each segment a distinct texture while holding to a shared, pleasantly spooky atmosphere. At seventy-one minutes, the craftsmanship is meticulous — critics reached for comparisons to the standards of Laika — and the emotional register stays generous without turning saccharine.

Reviewers singled the film out as an unusually thoughtful piece of children's cinema, one that treats grief as a subject young viewers can meet rather than be shielded from, and that offers storytelling itself as the means of doing so. It stands as a showcase for the small but distinguished European stop-motion studios — Maurfilm, Artichoke, ZVVIKS and Vivement Lundi! — that pooled their resources to make it.