Vaclav Havel and Milos Forman are among those providing voices for their former schoolmate Paul Fierlinger's animated feature Drawn from Memory, screening today. But the director, as Geoffrey Macnab discovered, still has bitter memories of his Czech past

There is a long, distinguished tradition of Czech animation since the Second World War, but it can't be said that Paul Fierlinger, the director of Drawn From Memory - An Animated Autobiography is really part of it. Most Czech animators seem resolutely opposed to US animation, which they regard as slick, commercial and superficial. They prefer a more oblique, poetic style, full of metaphor and symbol. Fierlinger, although from a Czech background, is nothing if not direct.

Drawn From Memory, which premiered at last year's Sundance Festival, was fully financed by the American Playhouse, “the first time they'd ever financed an animation film." He describes it as being “like a New Yorker style of cartooning rather than a Disney."

It is basically a father/son story," Paul Fierlinger says of the film. But this is no dewy-eyed evocation of times past. It's a searing, often bitter, attempt at settling old scores. I just loathed my father. I hated him. I just bring him back to life and kick him around. Then I put him back in the grave and everything's fine. It's a kind of catharsis."

Fierlinger is a little nervous about how Drawn From Memory will be received by Czech audiences. After all, it rakes over some very painful moments in the country's recent past. Still, he can console himself with the thought that no audience is likely to be as critical as the one which watched the film recently in the US. The analytical society in Philadelphia asked me to organise a special screening. I ended up in this auditorium full to overflowing with child psychologists. They took the film apart and analysed me through it. It was one of the scariest experiences I've ever had."

The clue to Fierlinger's anger is in his name. He's the nephew of Zdenek Fierlinger, the first Communist prime-minister in post-war Czechoslovakia and a politician hated by almost everyone. His father, too, became prominent in the Communist government. You have to understand that we were the only family with that name. To introduce myself as a Fierlinger used to send shivers up people's spines."

Born in Japan in 1936 (where his father was then a diplomat) Fierlinger spent the war years in boarding schools and foster homes in the US. He arrived in Czechoslovakia for the first time when he was 10 years old. My father needed me out of America because it would suit for his political purposes."

He was miserable from the very first moment he set foot on Czech soil. I just kind of slogged my way through life for the next 20 years, hating everything in this country and I expressed those feelings in the film a lot." Whereas the American sequences in his cartoon are vibrant and colourful, the Czech scenes are deliberately drawn grey and drab.

At least, the young Fierlinger made one or two interesting friends at his elite boarding school. My roommates were Vaclav Havel, Milos Forman and Jerzy Skolimowski." Both Havel and Forman are featured in the movie and were good enough to provide voice-overs for their characters."

Fiercely rebellious from an early age, Fierlinger went out of his way to antagonise his family. He signed up as an apprentice coalminer (I didn't last there too long because I was a weakling"), and then took a menial job in a remote part of Silesia, just to show that I wasn't going to take advantage of my position."

Eventually, after military service and art school, he carved out a niche as a cartoonist, newspaper illustrator and animator. He even had his own mini film studio in the rotting basement of his Prague house. I was the first private 16mm enterprise in any part of the Communist world and I got away with it." During this period, which he refers to as his Bohemian interlude," he admits he was almost happy. I made a good living here. I spent the money as soon as I got it - I lived like a pig."

All the time, though, Fierlinger yearned to return to the US. His father, who had done everything to stop him leaving Czechoslovakia, finally died in 1967. A few months later, Fierlinger falsified some documents and scarpered. His early years in the US were very tough. I had a 1935 Kodak cine-special nailed to the wall of my bedroom," he recalls, and I used a Sears & Roebuck shelf as my animation stand. It was very primitive."

Nevertheless, after stints on Sesame Street and working for the Democratic Party, he eventually established himself on the American animation scene: he calculates that he has now made in the region of 800 films; everything from animated logos to hour-long dramas.

As for America, he was, and still is, obsessed with the country. It was the one thing I worked hardest for in my life - to get back to the US. There's hardly a day, even after 30 years, that I don't feel grateful I'm there."

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