Eleven-year-old Tony has a unique feature he was born with – he glows. His controlling parents try to keep him at home to protect him from the outside world. Before Christmas, a peculiar girl named Shelly moves into his house and turns his world upside down. For the first time, Tony has a real friend. He introduces Shelly to the fantasy world inside his pillow bunker and she shows him her secret treasure: a magical flashlight. With its light, they create amazing pictures and worlds that only they can see. Thus, they embark on an adventurous search for the origin of the mysterious tufts of darkness which suck the sunshine out of the house. Tony, Shelly and the Magic Light is a film about what it's like to be different, it is a story about friendship and imagination, about light and darkness.
"In my debut, I’ve decided to use the stop-motion puppet animation technology. We shot the puppets frame by frame, which is bound to be a truly adventurous process! To me, animation has always been something magical. As a child, I used to watch the old animated films by Jiří Trnka, a legendary Czechoslovak filmmaker and visual artist. I think that puppets have a potent dramatic aura. When a puppet moves, a sparkle lights in the eyes of both children and adult viewers. There’s something so enchanting about it! And animation breathes life to puppets. The puppets and the settings around them are made of ordinary materials – things that we are familiar with. When watching stop-motion animation, we thus have the intimate feeling that we can ‘touch’ the story."
- Filip Pošivač