Both Twitch and SlashFilm have posted an adorable trailer for the Czech puppet film Kuky Returns. The film is the work of Jan Sverak, the Oscar-winning director of Kolya. Combining tiny puppets with (presumably) some CGI and a natural landscape, Sverak and his team have crafted something timeless, slightly creepy, and wondrous to behold.

Very little is known about the film or its technical brilliance at this point, although I’ve embedded a couple of puppet tests after the jump. The script was written by Czech director Alice Nellis, and is based loosely on true flood stories from the Bohemia disaster in 2002. FilmNewEurope also reports that the boy in the film is played by the director’s son Ondrej.

But the true stars of the film are the amazing puppets and the technical means used to bring them to life. It feels like some Grimm fairy tale illustration that escaped the pages of a sketchbook. The life of the puppets is expanded brilliantly by the use of real bugs and live critters, which gives the illusion of both realism and decrepitude. This film must have been painstaking to produce given the tiny objects lovingly crafted in intricate detail. My only regret is the fact that it’s in another language. Hopefully an English-language dub can be produced so that a film of this sort can delight English-speaking children around the world. They desperately need to have something so authentic planted in their imaginations.

Here is the breathtaking trailer. Bravo, I say! After the jump you can see a couple of tests for this film.

Here are some videos that provide some background to this project. Some of these are tests done by the director as proof-of-concept:

From 2008:

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