The other day, taking a bath, I perched my laptop on the toilet seat and watched “The Hand,” an 18-minute stop-motion animated film about a sculptor being menaced by a white-gloved hand. I highly recommend watching it—it’s available for free on YouTube (update: it got pulled down)—and also reading the Animation Obsessive essay that discusses not just the film but also its director Jiří Trnka, the conditions of both its creation (in communist Czechoslovakia), and the general reception it received when it was released (as a one-dimensional Cold War parable).
