Jan Pinkava

Who is Jan Pinkava?

Jan Jaroslav Pinkava, Ph.D. is the director and writer of the Pixar Oscar-winning 1997 short film Geri's Game and the originator and co-director of Pixar's Oscar-winning 2007 film Ratatouille.

He is the third-born of four children of the Czech polymath Václav Pinkava alias Jan Křesadlo. The family emigrated to Britain in 1969, where he obtained British citizenship.

He attended Colchester Royal Grammar School from 1974 to 1982 showing interest and talent in the arts, music, drama and sculpture.

After obtaining an 8mm movie camera for Christmas in 1975, he began experimenting with pixilation, stop-motion plasticine, paper-drawn and cel animation. He had some early prize-winning successes in animation competitions. Most notably, he won the Young Film-Maker's Competition of the Year Award 1980 on the long-running BBC children's quiz series Screen Test for his animated short "The Rainbow".