Film Adventurer Karel Zeman

A loving look at Karel Zeman, an iconoclastic Czech animator, made by the museum dedicated to preserving his work. There has been nobody else like Zeman in the history of motion pictures, although if you were able to create a new person by mashing together Ray Harryhausen and Georges Melies you might get a close approximation. Zeman made a number of animated shorts and features as well as a number of live action movies with animation that are utterly charming and still hold up well today.

The documentary is made up of three components: clips from his movies, interviews with collaborators and fans (such as Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton), and sequences of animation students trying to replicate his effects. The clips are fantastic (although there aren't enough of them) and the interviews are informative. The bits with the students didn't work for me and dragged the film down, but people who are interested in how animation works would probably get a lot out of them.

Watching the clips of his work in this movie made me wonder if maybe animation didn't take a wrong turn somewhere along the line. The trend now is for hyper reality, while Zeman reveled in animation's artificiality. It is fun to speculate as what an animator could do with CGI to make a purposefully artificial looking movie, but I don't suppose any Hollywood studio would green light that. This documentary gives us a glimpse of what we are missing.

It's worth noting that the version I watched on Netflix was about 52 minutes and the runtime listed on here is 102 minutes, so either that's wrong or I watched a truncated version missing 50 minutes of material.

Perhaps because I'm already familiar with the work of Karel Zeman and have visited the museum in Prague dedicated to his work, I don't find anything in this modest documentary to be all that insightful. However, there is plenty of information to be found, with the most interesting tidbits being those relating to how the evolving political climate of the Czech Republic affected the work of the eponymous filmmaker. The other stand-out segments simply involve explorations of the inventive and impressive visuals that served as Zeman's bread and butter. A group of students remaking three key shots from their inspiration's filmography is intriguing, but it's never focused on enough to have the impact it deserves. Similarly, a reunion of the surviving cast members of Journey To The Beginning Of Time (1955) is as touching as it is totally glossed over, which seems like a real missed opportunity. The film is full of moments like that, half-formed ideas that ought to be fully explored yet are only ever touched on. Another small issue is the decision not to tell the audience who it is we're watching being interviewed, which is all well and good when it's world-famous Tim Burton but not so good when it's a Czech film scholar (from what I can tell). Ultimately, this is a relatively generic documentary about a much more engaging subject. It's decent, don't get me wrong; it just never goes above and beyond. Perhaps it will blow the minds of the uninitiated, but it likely won't be all that impressive to those already well versed in the world of film. If I have seen a truncated version, I can't really comment on the effectiveness of the proper version. If I haven't, I can safely say Zeman deserves more.