Do emotions have to be expressed in words? Do you remember the classic silent cartoons which accompanied us post-70-and-80-generation grow up, like Mickey Mouse（米老鼠）, Krtek（鼹鼠的故事）, and Ikkyu-san（聪明的一休）? Those spring evenings before a black-and-white TV to watch the lovely stories of the Czech mole, with a bowl of mother-made porridge in my hands, have imprinted in my childhood memory forever. When that mole named Krtek returns to CCTV this summer, I begin to savour in the old animation fresh emotions.

The Mole didn’t live in an isolated paradise, but in the vicinity of human rubbish dumps, with a telephone and gramophone in his burrow, disturbed by soil shifters frequently, and he had to rescue his animal friends from the zoo or lab frequently. How did the Mole live with human intruding and bewildering civilization? We could see he made the box of matches into a pretty bonfire dinner with the Rat; he painted colourful every plant and animal in the wood with deserted paint, so as to frighten away the beast; he even collected birds’ tunes, and played a magnificent Forest Music record by the modern gramophone.

We are accustomed to treating animals in two ways: To banish them to barren “Indian reserve lands”—out of our sight, out of our mind! Or to jail and transform those living creatures to our puppets. How many people can treat everything in existence friendly and interestedly as the Mole did? How many people realize we could actually live in harmony with other creatures and share the luxury of modern Earth?

Piteously we have only one Zdeněk Miler (the Mole’s Father). Luckily we at least have one Zdeněk Miler. Miler was not just a great cartoonist, but also a forever child of Mother Nature.