If you took special effects film pioneer Georges Méliès and combined him with stop motion animation genius Ray Harryhausen and surreal fantasist Terry Gilliam, you’d have a filmmaker very close to Karel Zeman. Harryhausen was a contemporary, and so the two men played off of one another’s work. Gilliam names Zeman as one of the biggest influences on the former Monty Pythoner’s exquisitely-designed fantasy films. Born in 1910, Zeman never intended to work in movies but seemed destined to nevertheless. He went into advertising, working in Paris during the 1920 and ’30s. While employed at an advertising studio in Marseilles, the young Zeman had his first experience with filmmaking and animation. He was tasked with creating an animated commercial for a soap product. He traveled extensively before returning to what was Austria-Hungary when he was born but was now the first independent Czech nation, Czechoslovakia, Zeman continued to work in advertising. During the lead-up to World War II, he sought residence in Casablanca but did not get out of the country in time. The newly-formed Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia — a polite way of saying “Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia” — blocked his travel.

After the war, while teaching at a window dressing school, Zeman met Czech animator and filmmaker Elmar Klos, who would become famous for the Academy Award winning film, Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street, 1965). Zeman showed Klos some of the animation work he’d done in advertising, and Klos was so impressed that he offered Zeman a job at Zlin’s Animation Studio. Zeman accepted the position, first as an assistant to Hermina Tyrlova (“the mother of Czech animation”) and soon after as the director of the stop-motion animation group. His first big hit was the series Mr. Prokouk. Throughout the late 1940s, into the ’50s, Zeman made a number of innovative animated short films. In 1955, buoyed by his success, Zeman made his first feature length film: Cesta do Praveku — in English, Journey to the Beginning of Time.

Beginning at the Beginning of Time

Cesta do Praveku tells the story of four lads enthralled by dinosaurs. Deciding that it would be jolly good to explore prehistoric times, the boys take a rowboat into a mysterious cave that leads to a strange land where they bear witness to a progression of prehistoric beasts and events informed by as much scientific accuracy as could be mustered in 1955. For the scientific portion of the adventure, Zeman relied on illustrations by Czech artist Zdenek Burian, based on research by paleontologist Josef Augusta.

It’s a simple set-up inspired by Jules Verne and fueled by the desire to make a children’s film that was both educational and a rollicking adventure. It was a huge undertaking, one of the first films to feature such extensive use of stop-motion animation and Zeman’s first film to combine live-action actors and sets with miniatures, 2D animation, and matte paintings. In every aspect, Zeman and his crew succeed. The special effects are a delight, and even though the plot is basically “four boys look at things,” the energy never flags. It helps that the four young leads are perfectly acceptable. These are the sort of lads who would strap packs to their backs on a whim and be just fine hiking through the Ural mountains on their own, probably noting a lot of interesting things about the flora and fauna.

The land through which the four lads drift is segmented by epoch, with their initial encounter with the most recent of earthly creatures — prehistoric humans, then wooly mammoths and other giant mammals. As the kids drift further, they travel further back in time, encountering the usual assortment of dinosaurs. Finally, the boys arrive near the beginning of life on earth, encountering living examples of the trilobite fossils they knew from their own time. Zeman was inspired as much by Jules Verne (who did like to indulge in long educational paragraphs) as he was Augusta and Burian, as well as earlier stop-motion dinosaur adventures, such as the 1925 silent film The Lost World, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 story. Zeman’s wonderful sequence involving a sunset fight between a stegosaurus and a ceratosaurus seems a direct homage to famous allosaurus – edmontosaurus – triceratops battle royale in The Lost World. And Zeman’s own images would later inspire other filmmakers. 

Around the same time Zeman made Cesta do Praveku, the career of American stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen was taking off. After attracting attention with his work in the 1949 film, Mighty Joe Young, Harryhausen began a rise that would result in any film for which he handled the visual effects being referred to as “a Ray Harryhausen film,” regardless of who directed or starred in it. In 1955, he was animating a giant octopus for It Came from Beneath the Sea. Zeman’s film would prove to be an inspiration for Harryhausen (minus the attempt at scientific accuracy, but plus Raquel Welch in a fur bikini) when he worked on two dinosaur movies: 1966’s One Million Years, B.C. and 1969’s Valley of Gwangi. It also seems likely that Steven Spielberg was influenced by Karel Zeman’s work when he made Jurassic Park, specifically the scene in which the characters gather around a dying triceratops, which is similar to a scene from Cesta do Praveku, in which the four boys gather around a slain stegosaurus.

After collecting a pile of international awards, Cesta do Praveku was purchased for U.S. distribution. Producers shot new footage with lookalikes for the four boys, visiting the dinosaur exhibits at New York’s Museum of Natural History then rowing a boat across the lake in Central Park and into a cave — at which time Zeman’s film takes over for the remaining run time. Released in 1966 as Journey to the Beginning of Time, it was later serialized in six-minute chunks on American television and aired during children’s programming blocks. In any language, and in any format, it’s a great deal of fun, but for Karel Zeman, it was just a warm-up.

A Vision of Verne


The first of these films wears Zeman’s adoration for Jules Verne on its sleeve — and in its title. Vynalez Zkazy, or The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, is based on Verne’s Facing the Flag. Verne’s book is the tale of a French inventor named Thomas Roch, who devises plans for a weapon so powerful that whichever nation controls it would potentially control the entire planet. The countries of the world are initially uninterested in what is basically an unproven theory, and as a result of his commercial failure, Roch goes mad. The United States sequesters the mad scientist and his doomsday device plans in an asylum. Less dismissive of Roch is Count d’Artigas, by day an eccentric but respectable man who tools around on an old schooner. By night, however, or by day but when no one is looking, he and his crew are vicious pirates who use a secret submersible to sink ships, which they then plunder using a variety of underwater apparati.




Plot and actors both take a back seat to Karel Zeman’s special effects and visuals. The actors were, in fact, told to intentionally deadpan it, though the guy playing the pirate captain of d’Artigas’ band didn’t get the memo — which is fine; no one wants to watch a restrained pirate captain performance. Inspired by the art of Edouard Riou and Jules Ferat, whose work accompanied many of the Verne stories, Zeman went to painstaking lengths to create a motion picture that looks like an ornate Victorian illustration. The result is astounding and riotous despite being filmed entirely in black and white. Black and white does many things well, but “riotous” isn’t usually one of them. Zeman’s actors move through what does indeed look like a storybook illustration come to life, interacting with both 2D animation and stop-motion models, as well as cinematic interpretation of old motion illustrations — the kind of thing where an illustration would be attached to a tab the reader could pull to move the object through a scene.




Riding a Cannonball


Always a fan of the fantastic and absurd, Georges Méliès was the first man to commit the adventures of the Baron to the screen, in 1911’s Les Aventures de baron de Munchhausen. The adventurous German noble found his way to screen several more times, including The New Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1915) by British director Floyd Martin Thornton, and then most famously (or infamously, given the involvement of Joseph Goebbels) in the German film Munchausen from 1943 (you can read an excellent review of that version on Die Danger Die Die Kill). In 1962, Zeman brought his unique cinematic vision to the material and created what is, in my opinion, his masterpiece. Although using a similar mishmash of techniques, Baron Prasil is different from Vynalez Zkazy. Where Vynalez Zkazy‘s primary inspiration was the black and white etchings of Edouard Riou, for Baron Prasil, Karel Zeman turned to the hand-tinted phantasmagoria of Georges Méliès.

Méliès’ own Munchhausen movie was not an adaptation of the best-known stories, but rather was a strange comedy in which the baron, perhaps suffering from drunkenness and indigestion, has a dream in which he is endlessly menaced by lizard men, spider ladies, living statues, googly eyed dragons, capering devils, and other such apparitions. Like most of Méliès’ films, it packs more surreal weirdness into its scant eleven minutes that most feature length works of surrealism. The style Méliès — a stage magician before he become a motion picture pioneer — created for his short films is an obvious influence not just on Karel Zeman, but on the whole of the German expressionist movement of the silent era, where warped and stylized theatrical backdrops took the place of more realistic sets and locations.


Beginning with a bird and progressing higher and higher and through the history of aviation (provided that history includes handlebar moustached Edwardian gentleman on winged penny-farthings — which it should), we soon find ourselves in the company of cosmonaut Tonik (Rudolf Jelínek) who, whilst strolling along the lunar surface, is surprised to find a space capsule, a victrola, and later, three gentlemen — including Cyrano de Bergerac (Karel Höger) — enjoying afternoon tea. Confused beyond the capacity for rational thought, Tonik joins the men and soon also meets the boisterous Baron Munchausen (Milos Kopecký). The men on the moon all assume Tonik is a lunar native, and the Baron decides to take the spaceman to see Earth. Tonik, having nothing better to do, goes along.

And so begins a series of episodic and insane adventures that start in the court of a sultan, where Munchausen and Tonik encounter and save the imprisoned Princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová). After a thrilling and eerily staged battle with the sultan’s forces, the trio find themselves on the run, with Munchausen jealous of Bianca’s affection for Tonik, who the baron considers to be far less interesting than himself. During the journey, Tonik is separated from Munchausen and Bianca, and the baron takes the opportunity to turn on the charm, even after they are swallowed by a giant fish.



Flying Blind on an Airship

It’s difficult to follow up a movie like Baron Prasil, and it was several years before Zeman returned to what had become the stylistically and thematically unified Zemanverse (or that’s how I think of it) — reminiscent of the science fiction universe woven by Japanese animator Leiji Masumoto (Space Battleship Yamato, Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, and more) where there was no real chronological continuity, but there was certainly a continuity of animation style, design, themes, and characters. Zeman’s films are similarly linked as occurring in the same universe without ever actually connecting to one another. The Fabulous World of Jules Verne began with a montage summary of the Age of Progress, while Baron Prasil began with a similar animated montage of the Age of Aviation. In 1967’s Ukradená vzducholod (The Stolen Airship) we get another montage, this one the history of overbearing parents chastising curious — and mischievous — children.

In 1964, the more liberal and reform-minded (relative to Stalin, anyway) Soviet premier Khrushchev, who had assumed power and immediately set about trying to undo the paranoia and damage done by Stalin, was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev identified more with Stalin and set about reversing the small in-roads toward a less totalitarian regime that were pioneered by his predecessor. Thus was born, more or less, the neo-Stalinist movement. Czechoslovakia had been, since the end of World War II, at best half-heartedly part of the sphere of Soviet influence, but nevertheless she was still part of the Eastern Bloc. The drift back toward Stalinism the Soviet Union meant the same for the Czech people. So it’s no surprise that Zeman — like all artists, regarded with suspicion — would make a movie in which the introduction is basically a rejection of overbearing government, and whose entire run time is an escape from Communist oppression, albeit one couched in the language of light-hearted adventure.




And Away We Go…

For whatever reason, The Stolen Airship did not receive distribution in the United States. The others might have been re-edited and dubbed, but they still made it to American television sets. It must have just been a function of weird timing, because his next and final “live action” feature, Na Komete (Off On a Comet), did found its way into the United States, albeit with less fanfare than the other films. Released in 1970, Na Komete is Zeman’s most overtly political film, holding up for ridicule military and governmental bureaucracies and war machines in a sort of Duck Soup style satire, but once again wrapping the satire in a mind-bending final visit to the stop motion, cut outs, illustration, and zaniness of the Zemanverse. Despite being his most biting political film, it is also his funniest. But then, Duck Soup was the Marx Brothers most overtly political film but also their funniest, so the precedent was certainly there.




As French behavior becomes more absurd, so too does its rule become more tyrannical. Determining the whole situation to be rather unusual, the garrison commander declares martial law, arresting all foreigners without charge or warrants. The inhabitants of the comet lapse into petting scheming and casual decadence. When Mars appears on the horizon, Servadac determines that there is no escaping its gravitational pull, and that their little chunk of earth will plow into the planet and kill everyone. This suddenly apocalyptic fate causes everyone to abandon their petty quests for power. Prisoners escape or are released, dancing girls rally, money is abandoned, and soon everyone realizes how easy it is to get along — at least for a little while.


Although the name Karel Zeman may not carry the international recognition of his contemporary, Ray Harryhausen, or even of the men he inspired, like Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton, his place in film history is never the less secure, and the mad, dizzying universe he created is always there, waiting for adventurous filmgoers in stolen airships and hand-cranked submarines to discover. Zeman continued making films and shorts in the 1970s, but Na Komete was his final visit to the Zemanverse. The rest of his work was more straight-forward animation, including a series of Sinbad the Sailor cartoons and the animated feature Čarodějův učeň (Krabat — The Sorcerer’s Apprentice). He all but retired in the 1980s, passing away in April of 1989. Just a few months later, his stolen airship came home. In what became known as the Velvet Revolution, massive demonstrations filled Prague’s Wenceslas Square. In a matter of days, and with almost no violence, the communists were removed from power. Karel Zeman’s stolen airship had finally come home.