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“All of cinema is essentially animation” - Walerian Borowczyk

Polish animation, influenced by jazz, poster design and collage, took off in the late 1950s when artists found creative freedom in the wake of Stalin’s death. Pioneering filmmakers like Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica would change the form and usher in a golden age of filmmaking that would enable this art form to be appreciated around the world including winning prestigious international awards at festivals such as Cannes, Annecy, Oberhausen and an Oscar for Rybczyński’s Tango. This collection of 27 films spans the breakthrough works of the late 1950s to the close of the classic era in the 1980s, capturing some of the form’s essential films.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY FEATURES

High-Definition digital transfers of 27 classic animated films on two discs

Original uncompressed PCM mono audio

Audio commentaries on select films by Polish film expert Daniel Bird (2025)

Visual essay by film historian and Eastern European cinema expert Michael Brooke (2025)

Optional English subtitles

Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Filippo Di Battista

Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by animation expert Karol Szafraniec
Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

Wow, wonderful!

Complete List of Films

Banner of Youth (Borowczyk, Lenica, 1957) APEA
Love Requited (Borowczyk, Lenica, 1958)
The Changing of the Guard (Halina Bielinska, Wlodzimiez Haupe, 1959) APAF
New Janko the Musician (Jan Lenica, 1960)
A Little Western (Witold Giersz, 1960) APCA
Playthings (Kazimierz Urbanski, 1962) APAF
Labyrinth (Jan Lenica, 1962) APAF Szulkin
The Chair (Daniel Szczechura, 1963) APAF
The Red and the Black (Witold Giersz, 1964) APAF
Everything is a Number (Stefan Schabenbeck, 1967) APAF
Horse (Witold Giersz, 1967) APAF
Cages (Miroslaw Kijowicz, 1967) APAF Szulkin
The Stairs (Stefan Schabenbeck, 1968) APAF
The Son (Ryszard Czekała, 1970) APAF
Journey (Daniel Szczechura (1970) APAF
Roll Call (Ryszard Czekała, 1970) APAF
Road (Miroslaw Kijowicz, 1971) APAF
The Banquet (Zofia Oraczewska, 1977) APAF Szulkin
Barrier (Jerzy Kucia, 1977)
A Hardcore Engaged Film. Non-camera (Julian Józef Antoniszczak, 1979) APAF
Reflections (Jerzy Kucia, 1979) APAF
Tango (Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1980) APAF
Solo in a Fallow Field (Jerzy Kalina, 1981) APAF
The Source (Jerzy Kucia, 1982)
Chips (Jerzy Kucia, 1984) APEA
A Gentle Woman (Piotr Dumała, 1985) APAF
Parade (Jerzy Kucia, 1987)

Previously available on:
APAF = Anthology of Polish Animated Film
APCA = Anthology of Polish Children's Animation
APEA = Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation
Szulkin = The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin

on top of everything else, the cover art rocks. I have been hoping to see Radiance involved with short films more - the De Seta release last year set a nice precedent. hoping this keeps up!

Most - although not all - of these films were in the PWA Polish animation DVD sets way back when, but I've been fortunate enough to have a sneak preview of most of the masters being used to fuel this set and the improvements in terms of fine detail are sometimes staggering.

This is really great and I’m glad there’s no overlap with the Arrow Borowczyk set.

Arrow's Borowczyk discs are still in print, so I imagine this wouldn't have been an option anyway.

There is overlap with the Szulkin set though

Same licensor, so a different situation. I don't think there's anything to stop Radiance including, say, Banquet on all their releases, aside from the fact that it would be deeply weird.

I annotated the list of films above to denote where else they've been available up until now. If I've tracked everything correctly, the first PWA set is very well represented, comprising 19 of these 27 shorts (and only leaving 9 shorts off, 2 of which can be found on Arrow's Story of Sin). As previously mentioned, 3 of these 19 shorts were also included as extras on Radiance's Szulkin set. The second PWA set only covers 2 of the films here, leaving off lots of great material that could be good for another volume (though some of those Borowczyk/Lenica, Rybczyński, and Szulkin shorts can be found elsewhere). That all leaves 6 films that I believe are new to this collection!

Mały Western/A Little Western (Witold Giersz) is included in PWA's Anthology of Polish Childrens Animation.

Oh, I wasn't even aware of that one!

Updated specs:

High-Definition digital transfers of 27 classic animated films on two discs

• Original uncompressed PCM mono audio
• Fifteen new audio commentaries on select films by film historians Daniel Bird, Ela Bittencourt, Michael Brooke and Kambole Campbell (2025)
• Animated Poland - a newly created programme by film historian and Eastern European cinema expert Michael Brooke (2025, 59 mins)
• Optional English subtitles
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Filippo Di Battista
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by animation expert Karol Szafraniec
• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

I can't speak for the others, but my commentaries total 38 minutes and cover Banner of Youth, Love Requited, The Changing of the Guard, The Chair, Cages and The Stairs.

I now have a final copy, so can confirm that the commentaries are:

Banner of Youth (Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica, 1957) - Daniel Bird, Michael Brooke*
Love Requited (Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica, 1958) - Daniel Bird, Michael Brooke*
The Changing of the Guard (Halina Bielinska, Wlodzimiez Haupe, 1959) - Michael Brooke
The Chair (Daniel Szczechura, 1963) - Michael Brooke
Cages (Miroslaw Kijowicz, 1967) - Michael Brooke
The Stairs (Stefan Schabenbeck, 1968) - Michael Brooke
Journey (Daniel Szczechura (1970) - Kambole Campbell
Banquet (Zofia Oraczewska, 1977) - Ela Bittencourt
Barrier (Jerzy Kucia, 1977) - Ela Bittencourt
Reflections (Jerzy Kucia, 1979) - Ela Bittencourt
Tango (Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1980) - Kambole Campbell
The Source (Jerzy Kucia, 1982) - Ela Bittencourt
Chips (Jerzy Kucia, 1984) - Ela Bittencourt

*The first two films have two separate commentaries apiece - I was asked to cherry-pick half a dozen titles from Disc One, so I focused on the ones that I discussed least in my video piece. It turned out that Daniel Bird had also recorded commentaries for the two Borowczyk-Lenica films, but since we'd worked entirely independently they unsurprisingly had a sharply different focus (there's next to no substantive content overlap), so although I initially said I'd be perfectly fine with them dropping mine, I'm glad they published them.

Incidentally, every other film in the set is tackled at least in passing in my video piece, and sometimes in rather more detail, complete with citations from the filmmakers' other work.

Blueprint Review:

It’s a wonderful set from Radiance. A real treasure trove of short films and a wealth of background to help you best appreciate them. I hope we get more world-cinema animated classics on Blu-ray in the future. A box set of Eastern European animated features, perhaps? Here’s hoping. To help make this a reality, make sure you buy this set to show your support.

And I really cannot emphasise enough how much of an improvement these high-definition transfers offer over the old PWA DVDs. Not that there was anything wrong with those at the time (in fact, they were comfortably the best presentations of Polish animation that I'd seen up to then), but they were from standard definition telecines made anything up to two decades ago, whereas these are clearly recent state-of-the-art HD restorations. And for filmmakers like Witold Giersz, Jerzy Kucia and Julian Antoniszczak, where the texture of their images is at least as important as their content, it's genuinely revelatory.

Are english subs burned into any of these shorts or are they able to be turned off?

They're optional - but since the films are all dialogue-free they mostly don't need subtitles except to translate very occasional onscreen text. I think Love Requited, which has quite a few text intertitles, is the only film that needs any kind of translation for comprehension purposes.

I was not originally interested in this, but it looks like such an indispensable release that I couldn't resist. It's already shipped from OrbitDVD. If I can tear myself away from my inexplicable marathoning of Maciste films on Tubi and YouTube, I'll dive into it right away.

There used to be a livestream "show" on Twitch that featured Eastern Bloc animation, sourced from God knows where, and it was a lot of fun. I think the streamer got booted and moved the show to some service inaccessible to me and then eventually it petered out.

I grew up with eastern European animation, thanks to the BBC's commendable policy of showing Polish/Czechoslovak/Yugoslav animated shorts between Play School and Jackanory at the turn of the 1970s, and then discovered Jan Švankmajer and Walerian Borowczyk in the early-to-mid 1980s (I went to the ICA's 1985 Borowczyk retrospective for the rampant filth - I'd have been seventeen, so it was an understandable priority - only to be absolutely enthralled by their animation showcase).

One of the reasons why these films are often dialogue-free - which I think applies to everything in the Radiance collection - is that it made international distribution much more straightforward, and animation would duly be responsible for a pretty substantial chunk of the relevant film industry's hard-currency income - which of course is another reason why eastern European film industries took animation so seriously.

In fact, the first foreign word I consciously recall is "Konec" - or Czech for "The End" - because I'd seen it so many times.

Come to think of it, this year's Best Animation Oscar winner Flow did something similar - it's completely dialogue-free (or rather, the cat miaows, the dog barks, and the capybara makes whatever noises capybaras make), and I suspect that's because the alternative would have been a commercially tricky Latvian soundtrack or a tooth-grindingly unconvincing English one.

Just finished the set, and it's a fantastic collaborative effort by all involved. I'm not even a huge fan of any individual film, and don't like about half of them, but I still loved the experience and I'm excited to dive into the contextual commentaries next go-round. Anyways, figured it might mean something to someone to get a recommendation from a person who doesn't gel with the material so much still lauding the package as a whole

MichaelB wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 8:44 amIn fact, the first foreign word I consciously recall is "Konec" - or Czech for "The End" - because I'd seen it so many times.

And yet I'm still nonplussed when I watch a silent Asta Nielsen melodrama about a tragically fallen woman, and the final pulling of the heartstrings is unceremoniously interrupted by a title yelling "SLUT,"

I had the same experience with the end credits of Master of the House!

zedz wrote: Tue Jul 22, 2025 8:03 pm

MichaelB wrote: Mon Jul 21, 2025 8:44 amIn fact, the first foreign word I consciously recall is "Konec" - or Czech for "The End" - because I'd seen it so many times.

And yet I'm still nonplussed when I watch a silent Asta Nielsen melodrama about a tragically fallen woman, and the final pulling of the heartstrings is unceremoniously interrupted by a title yelling "SLUT,"

In Copenhagen you will see large signs in storewindows that read SLUT SPURT, generally referring to a "clearance sale"....I found out Asta Nielsen and Carl T Dreyer also lived down the street from eachother, in otherwise unremarkable residential buildings.

Speaking of end credits, the end credits to The Stairs look incredible in HD!

I'm very familiar with these titles, and the HD upgrades are phenomenal.

Granted, this means that, say, the edges of the optical printing in Tango are more obtrusive than before, but I like that - this film would be very easy to remake absolutely seamlessly, but the fact that you can visibly see the truly phenomenal amount of effort that Zbigniew Rybczyński went to in order to pull it off (the commentary quotes some jaw-dropping stats) arguably makes it an even more potent experience.