Jan Svankmajer’s animation is witty, macabre, violent, and always perverse in its bizarre transformations of objects and beings. His films have spawned many imitations in television advertising, music video and has inspired fellow animators. This video contains a retrospective collection of his short films. “Jabberwocky” interprets Lewis Carroll’s verse as a last magical adventure before adulthood; “J.S. Bach: fantasia in G minor” probes the mystery of the real with the great composer’s help; domestic mayhem is on the menu in “Punch and Judy”; while “Leonardo’s diary” transports the renaissance polymath to the twentieth century; “The Ossuary” tours the ultimate bone-yard, a monument to the Black Death; and in “The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia” Svankmajer hammers an animated nail in the coffin of Czech communism.