Paul Fierlinger

Paul Fierlinger (born Pavel Fierlinger; March 15, 1936 – April 4, 2025) was a Czech-American creator of animated films and shorts, especially animated documentaries. He was also a part-time lecturer at University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

Early life

Paul Fierlinger was born on March 15, 1936, in Ashiya, Japan. His father, Jan Fierlinger, was a Czechoslovak diplomat, and his uncle Zdeněk Fierlinger was a prominent figure in the Czechoslovak communist regime from 1948 until 1968. He spent the World War II years in the United States. He studied at a boarding school in Poděbrady, where his schoolmates included Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, and Václav Havel. There, at age 12 Fierlinger created his first animated film by shooting drawings from his flipbook with a 16 mm Bolex camera. His experiences of youth and the difficulties of adapting to life in the United States and then returning to Czechoslovakia are documented in his biopic animated film ''Drawn from Memory''.

European career

In 1955, he graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Bechyně. After two years of military service, he freelanced in Prague as a book illustrator and gag cartoonist for cultural periodicals under the pen name Fala. Fierlinger established himself in 1958 as Czechoslovakia's first independent producer of animated films, providing 16 mm films from his home studio in Prague for Czechoslovak Television and the 16 mm division of Kratký Film. Fierlinger was one of the first animators in all of the communist countries across the Eastern Bloc to get away with privately producing animated films, which he sold to many state-run film and television studios across Czechoslovakia. Thus, he created approximately 200 films, ranging from 10-second station breaks to 10-minute theatrical releases and TV children’s shorts.

In 1967, Fierlinger moved from communist Czechoslovakia to the Netherlands for freedom, where he pitched for a number of station breaks for Dutch television in Hilversum. He then went to Paris, France to work for a short stint as a spot animator for Radio Television France and ended up in Munich, West Germany for half a year, having been offered the job of key animator on a feature film at Linda Films, ''The Conference of the Animals''. In West Germany, before his departure to the United States, he married Helena Straková, a Czechoslovak compatriot and photographer.

AR&T

In the United States Fierlinger formed AR&T Associates Inc., his own animation house, in 1971. It produced animated segments for ABC's ''Harry Reasoner'' specials and PBS' ''Sesame Street'', including the popular '' Teeny Little Super Guy'' series; a network ID for TVPaint; Nickelodeon; and more. Since 1971, AR&T produced over 700 films, of which several hundred were television commercials. Many of these films received considerable recognition, including an Academy Award nomination for
It's So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House
'. His other awards include some from the Ottawa International Animation Festival for ''And Then I'll Stop'', a 1989 film on drug and alcohol abuse. At that time, Paul and Helena divorced.

1990s and beyond

Fierlinger became a steady provider of many TV commercials and sales films for US Healthcare (now Aetna), winning a variety of international awards. At this time he met and married Sandra Schuette, a fine-arts painter and printmaker at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Together they developed a small series of interstitial