Krtek was drawn to be understood without a single word. Zdeněk Miler cut his mole out of paper, laid it over gouache-painted sets, and shot the whole thing with several exposures per step — so the figure trembles very slightly against a field that never moves.
The system keeps that division. The ground is painted cobalt, saturated and flat. The figure is pure black with one red nose. Nothing glows, nothing gradients, nothing needs a caption to be read.