ShareThe Films Of Karel Zeman
Karel Zeman (1910-1989) was a Czech animator and filmmaker. He is considered the co-founder of the Czech animation movement. (New HQ videos added)
Playlist:
Inspirace
1001 Nights
The Special Effects Of Karel Zeman
Baron Munchausen
Karel Zeman (November 3, 1910 - April 5, 1989) was a Czech film director, artist, production designer and animator. Because of his creative use of special effects and animation in his films, he has often been called the "Czech Méliès."
Zeman was born on November 3, 1910, in Ostroměř (near Nová Paka) in what was then Austria-Hungary. In the 1920s, he studied at a French advertising school, and worked at an advertising studio in Marseilles until 1936.[8] It was in France that he first worked with animation, filming an ad for soup.[9] He then returned to his home country (by now Czechoslovakia), after visiting Egypt, Yugoslavia, and Greece.[10]
Back in Czechoslovakia, Zeman advertised for Czech firms like Baťa and Tatra. At Baťa's window-dressing school, where he was teaching, Zeman met the animator Elmar Klos and showed him a sample of his work. Klos offered Zeman a job at Zlín's animation studio. After some consideration (his wife and children were already established in Brno), Zeman accepted the job in 1943.[11] At the studio, Zeman met the pioneering animator Hermína Týrlová and, collaborating with his brother Bořivoj Zeman, made his first short film, Vánoční sen (1945).
Zeman then went on to solo work, including a series of shorts starring a puppet called Mr. Prokouk. His half-hour film Král Lávra (1950), from the poem by Karel Havlíček Borovský, won him a National Award, and was followed by his first feature film, Poklad ptačího ostrova (1952). His most unusual film may be the short Inspirace (1948), which tells a wordless, poetic love story using animated glass figurines.[12]
It was in 1955, however, that Zeman began the work for which he is probably most famous: six feature films that combine live-action and animation techniques to create artistic visual styles. These were:
- Cesta do pravěku (1955), inspired by Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and the paintings of Zdeněk Burian
- Vynález zkázy (1958), based on Verne's Facing the Flag, and filmed to emulate the original illustrations for Verne's novels
- Baron Prášil (1961), celebrating the legendary Baron Munchausen and the engravings of Gustave Doré
- Bláznova kronika (1964), a satire of the Thirty Years' War, suggested by the drawings of Matthäus Merian[13]
- Ukradená vzducholoď (1967), inspired by the Verne novels Two Years' Vacation and The Mysterious Island, the Art Nouveau style, and the 1891 Prague Centennial Exhibition
- Na kometě (1970), an anti-war fantasy based on Verne's Hector Servadac
After this, Zeman experimented with more classical forms of animation, beginning with seven shorts about Sinbad the Sailor which were then expanded into the feature film Pohádky tisíce a jedné noci (1974).[14] His final films were Čarodějův učeň (1977), from the novel The Satanic Mill by Otfried Preußler, and Pohádka o Honzíkovi a Mařence (1980).
He died in Zlín on April 5, 1989, a few months before the Velvet Revolution.
Recommendations
Czech it Out!: Disney of the East
Since the beginning of my career as an animator, I have been awestruck and fascinated by the work of Czech animators. My introduction to it was that of Jiri Trnka, whose The Hand still stands as one of my favorite ever uses of visual metaphor in an animated film. This brilliantly simple, dialogue-free story about the government's abuse of censorship and propaganda delivers a powerful message in less than 20 minutes, and without a word of dialogue. Using an elegant combination of stop-motion puppet animation, and live-action acting from the elbow down, The Hand couldn't say what it said louder than it did. It was one of those foreign films where you feel like you already know so much about both the environment and the attitude the filmmaker is living in.
I once read Trnka be referred to as “the Walt Disney of the East.” Not only do I think the appellation is ill-fitting of an animator like Trnka, but I find it is so much more appropriate for his contemporary, and fellow Czech animator, Karel Zeman. To me, this title fits Zeman for both positive and negative reasons.
Considered the world over “the co-founder of Czech animation,” Zeman, like Disney, wanted to make movies that tapped into the audience's imaginations and show them things never before seen on screen. They both are known for adapting well-known fantasy stories as well as penning them their own. In the case of Zeman’s special effect driven live-action films like "The Stolen Airship" and "The Fabulous Baron Munchausen", he yields incredible results. Often resembling the great animation-driven fantasy flicks from America by Ray Harryhausen, they stand out as the few films that pushed the boundaries of what could be done on film decades before visual effects went mainstream.
But there is, like Disney, an unremarkable quality to Karel Zeman’s work; the images are pretty, but never breathtaking. "1001 Nights" feels like something I had seen in half a dozen Russian shorts: the cut-out animation based on a folk tale/fantasy story. While the story involves far-off lands, including an island on a whale's back, nothing ever feels like it has such scale or depth. Everything is as flat as the paper it's made from, making the animation feel artificial. When compared with other cut-out animated fairy tales from Eastern Europe, like those of Yuri Norstein, "1001 Nights" lacks the finesse and fluidity that makes you forget you're looking at paper cutouts. In spite of a story that includes giant eagles and other myriad dangerous things, the animation is so stiff and lifeless that it never feels as compelling as it should.
One of the biggest issues I had with "1001 Nights" was its reliance on narration. Some scenes would have been more interesting if the words weren't delivered by such a bland narrator. So much of what made me fall in love with animation was learning how the medium could cross languages, and in the best cases, culture barriers. While I've seen plenty of excellent shorts, both foreign and English language, with narration or dialogue, "1001 Nights" felt like being spoon-fed a story that went stale months ago.
However, I didn't find Zeman's work to improve as much as I hoped once he went dialogue-free with Inspirace. While it certainly beats Nights for originality, the animation often feels stiff, most noticeably with a school of fish that moves in such perfect synchronicity and un-organically. The story itself is hardly there at all. Framed as a daydream, it feels for the most part like a collection of things Zeman thought would be cool to animate, and then somewhere in there there's some kind of love story between a ballerina and a clown. The overall style, while having its own kind of beauty, feels cheap and saccharine, like your grandmother's figurine collection. Meaning “Inspiration” in English, the short certainly could be seen as a visualization of inspiration itself, but it doesn't exactly create it.
To get a taste of the Zeman that pack a punch, I highly recommend watching the documentary The Special Effects of Karel Zeman. Featuring great making-of footage from the sets of his features like Journey to Prehistory and The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, its essentially every reason I've wanted to make movies played out in movie form.
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