RIP Günter Rätz

 

Deutsches Institut für Animationsfilm – DIAF

May 6, 2024

With dismay, we learned today about the death of the renowned puppeteer and animation filmmaker Günter Rätz. On the 1st He died in May - four weeks before his 89. Birthday. To many film lovers, he is best known as the creator of DEFA classics such as Auguste, Teddy Brumm or The Flying Windmill. The Berlin-born and learned bricklayer was one of the founding fathers of the DEFA-studio for action films Dresden and worked on more than 100 films. As an animator, screenwriter and director, he was always keen to expand the diverse possibilities of the action film. This is how he developed the abstract "wire men" Philopath and Patafil in the early 1960s and was artistically responsible for about a dozen episodes of the more than 50-part series. In "The Little Tirili" he animated characters behind a canvas, experimented with vertical magnetic flat figures ("The Bird Tree") and with dolls with moving mouths (e.g. B. Karl May film "The Trail Leads to the Silver Lake"). In addition, he collected and translated international textbooks and trained the young animators in the studio in the early 1980s.

After the settlement of the DEFA studio in Dresden, Günter Rätz continued to work in the animation industry. He made films together with children and young people of the Dresden deaf school, animated for Hylas cartoon Dresden and acted as an author and in other functions in several puppet cartoons after Jules Verne, produced by Manfred Durniok in China.

RATZ, Günter

Born: 5/1/1935, Berlin, Germany

Died: 5/1/2024, Dresden-Omsewitz Saxony, Germany.

 

Günter Rätz’s westerns – director, writer, animator:

The Trail to the Silver Sea 1987–1989

The Spirit of Llano Estacado – 1988 [film was never completed]