Jan Svankmajer is the undisputed Mac Daddy of surrealist animation. While achieving such an accolade, he’s become a great source of inspiration for contemporary filmmakers such as the Brothers Quay. This lavish three-disc package demonstrates why.

Compiling all the Czech maestro’s 26 short films (made between 1964 and 1992), the package also includes a 54-page booklet and two-and-a-half hours of spectacular extras. These feature such eye-opening delights as The Cabinet Of Jan Svankmajer and Les Chimères Des Svankmajer documentaries; a trailer for his latest full-length movie (Lunacy); the music video he made for punk band The Stranglers’ frontman Hugh Cornwell (Another Kind Of Love), and the Svankmajer special-effects sequences he created for commercial projects when he was banned from making his own movies by the Czech authorities for seven years.

One of the most remarkable facets of Svankmajer’s work is that it is resplendent with childhood memories (albeit macabre ones), from those times when young minds are unfettered and unaffected by the constraints of society and the adult world. Which is why, for example, slabs of meat can cavort in a delirious dance of death.

Svankmajer breathes nightmarish life into the inanimate with an alchemist’s skill. And, while the results are to varying degrees violent, funny and deranged, they are never anything less than mind-bendingly magical.