Karel Zeman died in 1989, several months before the Velvet Revolution, which saw the communist regime in Czechoslovakia stand down and democracy return. It was sad that Zeman didn’t live to see the Iron Curtain come down because he would have been among the first to show his movies to a whole new generation. Called the “Czech George Méliès” by critics, Zeman saw the Frenchman, a pioneer of cinema in the 1900s, as his biggest influence. But whereasMéliès is part of film history textbooks, Zeman is a footnote despite his body of work being one of the most impressive in the history of animation.
Zeman was born in 1910 and moved to France to work in advertising in the 1920s and 30s. There, he began using animation before returning home in 1936, three years before all of Czechoslovakia was annexed by Nazi Germany, and would import his techniques for local ads. While the war was happening, Zeman met film director Elmar Klos and hired him to work in his studio in the city of Zlin. Hermína Týrlová, who is considered “the mother of Czech animation,” worked with Zeman on her short children’s films before Zeman became head of his own production company.
In 1952, Zeman would produce his first full-length feature, The Treasure of Bird Island. Based on a Persian fairy tale, he would begin his standout animation by combining two and three-dimensional drawings, including puppetry, to construct an orthodox fix that advanced what an animated film could be. His second full-length feature would start the string of work which is known as Zemanesque in his home country. Starting with Journey to the Beginning of Time, Zeman mixed animation with live-action, filming real actors on-set or on location as part of the story. In Journey, a group of kids finds themselves rowing down a river going back to prehistoric times and confronting extinct raptors. Steven Spielberg cited the film as an influence in making Jurassic Park.
Zeman didn’t have the big budgets that Hollywood films did. He would construct his movies with an original aesthetic made from scratch. Colors, sounds, and visual gags play up to Zamel’s chaos where every shot is a surprise. He would meticulously draw up every set design, something totally different to invent another universe that had never been seen before on the screen. His follow-up, Invention for Destruction, is based on a Jules Verne novel that combines science fiction with the pirating genre. It is not a direct adaptation of the novel and Zeman provides a love letter of inspiration from George Méliès. Carefully looking at the original designs from Verne’s novel and vintage illustrations, Zeman keeps the visual style as faithful as possible while using every trick in the book for consistency.
The Fabulous Baron Munchausen was next, playing an important role in the career of director Terry Gillam, who also started out with animation. (Gilliam would direct his own version of Baron Munchausen which ended up being a notorious flop and filled with production problems.) Zeman’s version feels like an acid trip with all the characters of different eras crossing paths at once. It does not stop altering itself with the pastel colors, either being changed by the scenes or simply melting with each other. The centuries of history are blended into one large anachronist story, fitting for the character of Baron Munchausen. His next film, A Jester’s Tale, took a slightly political tone as a satire set during the Thirty Years’ War with a tone for pacifism; The Stolen Airship is another Jules Verne adaptation shot mainly in black-and-white but did not have similar feedback as his previous films.
1968 would be a tumultuous year for Czechoslovakia. The “Prague Spring” was crushed by the Soviets who opposed the country’s growing dissociation from communist rule and figures once part of the country’s arts and literature groups found themselves out of work and censored completely. Zeman avoided the purge, but after his 1970 film On the Comet, he was forced to scale back his projects thanks to tighter budgets and stricter script approval from the government. He went to do more traditional animation movies and TV shows, preferring cutout techniques over hand-drawn ones which were commonplace and were cheaper and faster to create. His last film, The Tale Of John And Mary, was released in 1980.
Zeman spent the last decade of his life unable to get any more of his scripts produced and was relegated to an ambassador of Czech film and animation. He was awarded the Order of the Republic by the Czech government and was allowed to travel abroad where his work was exposed to Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, both of whom had homages to Zeman in their own films. Only after Zeman died and Europe was unified with the end of communism were his films given a full retrospective by many filmgoers and critics. In the capital of Prague, a museum dedicated to Zeman’s work opened in 2012. He is, all these decades later, considered, without question, one of the greatest animators of all time.
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