Burrowing Into the Heart : Zdenek Miler’s Mole--a beloved icon of European animation--is making his U.S. debut in the home video market.

Who would you rank high on a Who’s Who list of cartoon favorites? Mickey, Bugs, Bart, the Mole . . . the Mole?

While he may be unfamiliar to Americans, the Mole, a rotund, slope-shouldered little fellow from the Czech Republic, has been a beloved icon of European animation for close to 40 years. His international appeal has garnered awards for excellence at film festivals from Cannes to Montevideo.

The Mole has now arrived on American shores, in the children’s home video market. The first two releases, in January and at the beginning of this month, have just begun to hit stores.

In all, 25 Mole cartoons will be widely available to audiences here, in a new video series from Kid Start Entertainment, the children’s division of Picture Start Inc., a Chicago-based distributor specializing in short independent and foreign films.

Created by Czech animator Zdenek Miler, 75, the cartoons vary in length from five to 30 minutes and are notable for colorful, captivating artwork, nonverbal, nonviolent messages and Jacques Tati-like musical whimsy in original scores by Czech composers, performed by the Czech Symphony Orchestra.

“The Mole is my image of goodness,” Miler said through a friend and interpreter, Milena Fischerova, in written and telephone interviews from Prague.

“It’s how I wish everybody would behave. I cannot stand cruelty. You do not find it in my films.” Violence, he said, “remains in children after they see such movies. It’s like (putting) something that is bad into a pot. . . . I try to put in much, much goodness so there remains very little place for the bad things.”

Miler avoids a preachy tone in his work--”children don’t like to be put wise,” he said. Instead, his lessons in peace and compassion for living things are wrapped up in playful fantasy.

He uses decades-old vocal recordings of his own children, now grown, for the characters’ endearing giggles, tears and an occasional “ ‘allo,” an element that complements the simplicity and charm of films with such prosaic titles as “The Mole and the Car” and “The Mole and the Green Star.”

Central to each is Miler’s philosophy of nonviolence and the wonder of discovery, a quality that “makes them just as delightful for parents as for kids,” said film critic Michael Medved, by telephone from Chicago.

Medved (whose book “Hollywood vs. America” accuses the film industry of eroding family values) hosted Kid Start’s launch of the Mole, a Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony for Miler at the 1994 Chicago Film Festival.

Medved called the series “fresh and lovely,” describing his three children as fans. “It’s one of those things, if given half a chance, (that) will captivate people,” he said. “ ‘Barney’ and most other videos for children are childish; the Mole is childlike. There is an important difference.”

Even when Miler deals with technology run rampant, as he did in 1984 in “The Mole in Town,” the furry Everychild and his innocent friends are fascinated with the huge machines that clear the forest and cover it with roads, factories and high-rises.

Once his curiosity is satisfied, however, and after some mischief-making involving sausages and exhaust pipes, Mole is ready to move on to more nature-friendly surroundings. His dismissal of what is to him the humans’ absurd preference for the artificial is gentle but firm.

Environmental themes recur in his cartoons, Miler said, because “thanks to the past political regime, the environment in our country suffered most in the whole of Europe. Nobody cared about pollution and ecology.”

The Mole’s creation came about in 1957, when Miler was trying to create a new cartoon character to add interest to an educational film. Lost in thought during a forest stroll, Miler tripped over a molehill and inspiration “flashed across my mind.”

Since that fortuitous stumble, Miler’s Mole has endured through tumultuous times, including the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the 1989 “velvet revolution” that led to the country’s division into separate republics.

The Mole also survived Miler’s use of the cartoons to sometimes poke fun at Communist officialdom with caricatures of self-important bureaucrats.

The animator exults today that because of the revolution that reshaped his nation, “we all can breathe out free, we are not afraid anymore,” but he said the “past regime” never gave him any trouble over the content of his films.

Even when “sometimes I joke about the bureaucracy,” he said, “I did it in such a gentle way. . . . Everybody likes to laugh about silliness,” he observed, “(especially) the silliness of others.”

Nor did it hurt Miler that his films were “a very good export article all over the world and brought high profits to the state.”

The Mole’s U.S. invasion may have similar profit potential, particularly in the face of growing parental reservations about “Power Ranger”-type violence and gushy, overmarketed Barney. With children’s video market observers wondering if the recent surge in “how-things-work” kidvids has stifled imaginative, story-based product, the Mole’s timing looks especially good.

K id Start, which supplies inter national films to libraries and schools, and plans to eventually produce a television showcase for children’s films from around the world, is banking on Miler’s Mole, not only because the cartoons have “withstood the test of time,” said Picture Start President Jeff Hellyer. “I simply think it’s time for something new here.”

Hellyer, who said that nonviolence is the basic tenet of the Kid Start division, is optimistic that American audiences will see what attracted him to the Mole.

“He is very much like a good and curious child,” Hellyer said, “who finds himself in situations which often involve analogies, metaphors and parables to human existence.

“They’re about harmony, just being good, using your head a little bit to figure things out--messages that are not coming through in much of today’s children’s programming. And, the beautiful, fluid cel animation rivals anything put out by any major studio.”

Indeed, the colorful, unique cartoon renderings reflect Miler’s early ambition to be a painter. When his studies were cut short by World War II, he fell into animation “by chance,” and among his creative influences were French Impressionists and Surrealists and Czech painters, as well as French animators and early Disney films.

When his first film, based on a story by Czech poet Jiri Wolker about a millionaire who steals the sun, won a bronze medal at the Venezia Film Festival, Miler said, “I decided definitely not to leave this profession.”

Miler continues to create films and is at work now on “a big heap of sketches” for six new five-minute Mole cartoons, finding inspiration in someone “very important for my work,” his 5-year-old granddaughter Karolinka. “She is my sun,” Miler said.