TV REVIEWS : An Animated Autobiography

Paul Fierlinger has had the kind of adventurous, irony-stuffed life that most artists could only dream of living. And that may be part of the problem with Fierlinger’s autobiographical animated film for “American Playhouse,” “Drawn From Memory.”

Fierlinger’s story combines the kind of unexpected human intrigue of a John le Carre yarn with the quicksilver imagery of a Saul Steinberg drawing in motion. But there’s something bloodless about this unique PBS enterprise, as if Fierlinger were writing and drawing once removed from himself.

The son of a high-ranking Czech political official and diplomat, young Paul experienced a strange, rootless journey from Japan to the United States, where his parents, wrapped up in anti-Nazi activism, passed him off to various boarding schools and families taking in wartime refugees.

Fierlinger’s drawings from these early American memories contain a Currier & Ives romanticism that’s a universe away from the war-torn Europe he returned to after the war.

This shift should be startling, but the combination of Fierlinger’s gentle animation style and Paul Messing’s badly calculated, cloying score softens what should be a dramatic, even abrasive tale. The Iron Curtain falls on Czechoslovakia--with some help from Fierlinger’s relatives, who cynically switched allegiances from West to East--but it falls here like tissue, not a hammer.

Notably, the film’s most memorable animation moment doesn’t stem from something Fierlinger witnessed first-hand, but from a tall tale he heard in a Prague bar about a kooky border escape. It’s the one time this artist imagines the possible, suggesting that Fierlinger might have benefited from a world-class Czech animation culture to which he seemed to have no ties. Where his naturalism tends to contain emotions, the fantastic surrealism of most Czech animation delivered an astonishing expressiveness under harsh circumstances.

“Drawn From Memory” is about one man’s desire for freedom, but the desire never quite finds flight.

* “Drawn From Memory” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.