Directed by:
Robert Waltl

Story and script:
Svetlana Makarovič

Animation:
Nataša Berk, Matej Modrinjak and duo son:DA (Miha Horvat, Metka Golec)

Voices:
Svetlana Makarovič, Robert Waltl, Ljerka Belak, Vesna Zornik, Violeta Tomič, Tadej Pišek

Music:
Mitja Vrhovnik - Smrekar

Language consultant:
Nataša Berk, Miha Horvat, Matej Modrinjak

Production and distribution:
Mini teater

Format:
HD, 32' 14''

Premiere:
December 2012

Sapramouse has to go on a new journey. For the second time. She has to find and search for happiness and build a new home.

Will she make it?

You will find out with the new short animated movie Sapramouse 2 – Sapramouse’s Luck

The flying collage and broken visual mesh-up of mouse’s luck following the story and script of  Svetlana Makarovič, directed by Robert Waltl, with music by Mitja Vrhovnik-Smrekar with voices by Svetlana Makarovič, Robert Waltl, Ljerka Belak, Vesna Zornik, Violeta Tomič and Tadej Pišek and animating team Nataša Berk, Matej Modrinjak and duo son:DA

About animated movie

In this short animated movie besides Sapramouse also star personalized animals known from author’s other fairytales (squirrel, rabbit, frog) and also a human character – blacksmith. Animated movie is suitable for youngest and a little bit bigger children that will in the fairytale recognize situations from the real world and also adults that will be reminded by these fairytale characters of what is most important in life – friends and responsibility for own happiness.

Well known Sapramouse is looking for luck this time. Sapramouse doesn’t want to listen to her friends advises who tell her to mend the shabby looking cottage before the winter comes. Arrogantly she ignores them but when the snow blizzard tears down her house, she becomes so pessimistic that she wants to die. Friends that offer to help her are turned away by her unkindness, only Froggy the frog remains who reveals her the wisdom of how to find her lost luck. Sapramouse starts literally to enforce the metaphoric proverb that each is the smith of his own luck. The path to the blacksmith is demanding and full of dangers and the pessimistic Sapramouse complains about her destiny.

Nevertheless she safely reaches the blacksmith where all night long she shapes her luck– a small heart. The sign of her outer happiness changes her look on the world – no longer pessimistic in spite of the fact that unpleasant things happened to her on the way home. She finds out that it is possible to have a more optimistic look at life. All the accidents that happen to her on her way home could even be more dangerous. As she made the visible symbol of luck her friends have built her home and in doing so repaid her good deeds.

Sapramouse realizes that is good to have friends and that this is the actual luck she searches and that good deeds, kindness and hospitality are repaid with goodness. Personified animals from the author’s previous stories appear in the story: squirrel, jay bird, rabbit, frog and even a human blacksmith.

In the late autumn Sapramouse stands in front of her shabby cottage and Froggy the frog advises her that it is high time make the repairs or else it won’t last the winter. At that time wind suddenly blows and brings a snow blizzard. Sapramouse cottage collapses and animals criticize her why she didn’t fix it sooner. Stubborn Sapramouse won’t listen to critics; she would rather lie down in the snow and wants to die. Froggy the frog convinces her that each smites his own luck and that she should go to a blacksmith to make luck. Sapramouse hits the road and the blacksmith helps her shape a small heart that for Sapramouse symbolizes her own luck. On her way home bad things happen to her, but in spite of that she is convinced that she still has luck, as it could have been even worse. And as she approaches her home she sees that her woodland friends have fixed her house. “What a luck that I have Luck” she says to herself.

About the author

Svetlana Makarovič (born 1939) is a Slovenian writer of prose, poetry, children's books, and picture books, and is also an actress, illustrator and chanteuse. She has been called "The First Lady of Slovenian poetry." She is also noted for borrowing from Slovenian folklore to tell stories of rebellious and independent women. She is well-known adult and youth author. Her works for youth have become a part of modern classic and youth canon, which both hold a special place in history of the Slovenian youth literature. She won the Levstik Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011.

About the director

Actor, director, puppeteer, and art director - has succeeded in accomplishing an utopic theatrical project within the recent years. He created numerous acting roles in Slovene and Croatian theatres and films starting in 1987 (Drama SNG Ljubljana, SMG Ljubljana, Ljubljana Puppet Theatre, Cankarjev dom, Freyer Teater, Teater ITD Zagreb); after 1999, he established himselft also as a director.

Many of his directing creations won prestigious awards in different festivals (Mažuranić's The Fabulous Adventures of the Apprentice Hlapich, Pushkin's The Tale of the Fisher and the Fish, Andersen's Tinder Box in Osijek/Croatia and Thumbelina in Zagreb/Croatia, Grimm's The Wolf and the Goatlings, Stoisavljević's Norwegian Forests, Lili Novy's Mojca and the Animals, A.Rozman's Hansel and Gretel...); his performances were played on tours and in numerous international festivals. He created a large number of acting roles in radio plays.

After his rich experience in an institutional theatre, Robert Waltl abandoned the safety of official institutions. In 1998, on base of his own financial means, he started a new Slovene theatre - MINI TEATER. The vast range of his original ideas may well be seen in the openness of his theatre programme directed towards the youngest spectators, offering them - unlike the commercial projects in other private theatres - puppet performances of the best quality. The programme for children consists of classical and contemporary authors.

Robert Waltl however, cultivates also a high quality drama for adults. MINI TEATER has put on stage a number of cult texts of the 20th century as first stage performances ever in the world: Robert Walser's Schneewittchen after Party, B.M. Koltes's The Night at the Edge of Forests, H. Mueller's Medea Material, and the world premiere of B.M. Koltes's The Day of Murders in the Story of Hamlet. Mini teater is the only theatre so far that published the drama texts of this cult French playwright.

Robert Waltl as an actor succeeded - beside directing an acting in different performances - in creating six mono-plays in five seasons: The Fabulous Adventures of the Apprentice Hlapich (by Ivana B. Mažuranić), The Night at the Edge of the Forests (by B.M.Koltes), Caliph Stork (by W. Hauff), The Frog King (by J.&W.Grimm), The Happy Prince (by O.Wilde) and The Donkey of Nasareth in Freyer Teater. Working with directors like Ivica Buljan, Edi Majaron, Luis Zornoza Boy, Slavčo Malenov, Robert Waltl is not just a reproductive actor; he works also as a co-director and dramaturge, which brought him a number of prestigious awards in Slovenia and abroad. He took part in many international festivals all over the world: Iran, Venezuela, Poland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Belarus, Russia, Croatia, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Hungary, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Holland, Macedonia, Denmark, Chorea, China, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Egypt, United Kingdom.

The acting span that Robert Waltl demonstrates in his performances is fascinating: his ritual dedication and his ethnic and musical research of the Slovene Christmas celebration heritage in The Donkey of Nazareth; his narrative and transformative art or his communicative ability in The Adventures of the Apprentice Hlapich; his masterful animation in traditional puppet techniques in The Frog King and Caliph Stork; his working with objects, projections and music in The Happy Prince; his radical performer energy in the cult French text The Night at the Edge of the Forests, a monologue of 50 pages with dense concentration and the finest articulation that Waltl succeeds in presenting in a 40-minutes theatrical firework ... So, in this unique project of six mono-plays we can follow so many different elements building up the mosaic of Robert Waltl as actor-director-animator-organizer. Yet, beside everything listed above, Robert Waltl gave his contribution as animator and director to the first virtual puppet performance in the world - Thumbelina, where he decided to do research in some completely unknown and undiscovered fields of theatrical, visual and inter-media art. Robert Waltl is a recipient of many awards and recognitions, among which the prestigeous Award of the Slovene National Association of Drama Artistis, the Župančič Award given by the City of Ljubljana for his contribution to the cultural image of the City, and a number of awards from different festivals in Croatia, Bosnia&Herzegovina, China, Iran, Poland, Belarus, and Serbia&Montenegro.

About son:DA

Metka Golec and Miha Horvat, the two members of the art duo son:DA, describe their collaboration as an alliance for discussion and communication that produces joint art projects in common cause. Their creative work extends to the fields of audio-visual performance, multimedia installations, and computer drawings and prints.

Communication is, indeed, the central principle in son:DA’s art, as can be seen directly in their work as well as in the way they process and manipulate static and flexible visual information. They bring it all together in technically demanding installations that include a rich, though not necessarily operative, technology park, with television screens, computer monitors, adaptors, video-recorders, CD and DVD players, cameras, etc. Important to their work is the open display – literally, the exhibition – of technology, screws, cables, time, and energy – all the essential linking elements that go into the presentation.

The artists bring their experience with spatial and audio-visual installation to their computer drawings, as well. These drawings are made using a computer mouse and a suitable application. Traditional drawing skills, along with the various associated tools and aids, have been modernized through the use of the computer, which preserves drawings not on paper but in the form of a digital code ready for printing out. The images in the duo’s computer drawings illustrate imaginary landscapes from the past and the future. It often seems, in fact, that they are drawing the past in the future. The figures in their pictures are continually struggling with an everyday reality that is focused on and tangled up in communication, a reality in which people often appear to be alone, confined within their own mental territories, which they try to control and expand through connections. The drawings point to the moments when a person is confronted by communication pollution in the form of trivial pleasures, entertainment, glowing signs, and idle time passively spent. These are precisely rendered archeological discoveries of things that, on the one hand, make our lives comfortable and, on the other, give rise to conflict, misunderstanding, and the search for ever new and different channels of communication. These channels are today’s highways of capital, the routes by which the everyday life of individuals is enmeshed in a structure of dependence under the control of various corporations.

son:DA combines the traditional and the contemporary, not only in formal visual terms by linking freehand drawing and hand-coloring to computer drawing and color fills, but also in terms of the content by displaying various degrees of technological development. This display is not, however, merely about drawing and documentation; rather, as the duo’s name suggests (the Slovene word sonda means “probe”), it is about probing the landscapes of the human mind.

(Bozidar Zrinski _ 27.biennale of graphical arts _ 2007) 

FROM CRITIQUES

»This time’s story of Sapramouse (that once again leaves home but not to the dentist’s as the first time but to the blacksmith’s to make her life and friendship happiness according to the advice given to her by her frog friend) is set on the old TV screen (constantly being occupied by this annoying fly) and several times as old computer game. But most of all the surroundings – set – is no longer a forest but an urban place. And very urban is the Sapramouse herself. For the screening of it all several different elements were being used as a collage in movement: mainly drawn and partially puppet fairytale creatures, most different graphical motives and last but not least archive movie footage from urban surroundings. Such visual staging grows in most unique art and whole artistic achievement that with visual diversity easily draws attention and is not only suitable for children’s audience but for all types of viewers with the ear for experimental.« Uroš Smasek, Sploh ne le za otroke (not only for children); Večer, 18. 12. 2012