A CINEMA RETRO EXCLUSIVE:

DIRECTOR JOHN STEVENSON (""KUNG FU PANDA", "SHERLOCK GNOMES") PAYS TRIBUTE TO A SPECIAL EFFECTS GENIUS

Stop motion animation is still the most magical of special effects techniques to me, because instinctively you know that real light is falling on a real object that is seemingly moving of its own volition. Computer Generated Imagery may be able to create more complex and fluid motion, but we instinctively know that what we are looking at does not exist in our world. There is still an arcane power in watching something you know you can touch move on its own. So films featuring stop motion animation were my great passion as a child.

Stop motion animation was the Rolls Royce of special effects techniques in the 1960s and early 1970s. If you were a young fantasy addict a new Ray Harryhausen film at the local ABC cinema was the equivalent of a new MCU film dropping today. Because Ray Harryhausen lived in London he sometimes appeared on British television with his models ( programmes such as “Screen Test” with Michael Rodd in 1970) where he would explain the principals of stop motion animation, which gave me a basic understanding of the technique at a young age. Stop motion animation could also be found in children’s television shows like “The Pogles” and “The Magic Roundabout”, commercials and even on “The Old Grey Whistle Test” where clips from Ladislas Starevitch’s films would sometimes accompany music tracks (courtesy of Phillip Jenkinson). It was a golden age if you were a fan of the technique, and Ray Harryhausen became my idol, representing everything that was magical about the movies for me. But I had yet to discover Karel Zeman.

I first encountered Karel Zeman’s work on a British children’s T.V show about movie special effects that showed extracts from a 15-minute Czech film called “The Magic World Of Karel Zeman” made in 1962. At the time I had no idea what I was looking at. The only part I remember clearly was a scene that showed some children climbing on the back of a dead Stegosaurus, then the camera tracked around to reveal that the Stegosaurus was a painting on a sheet of board close to the camera while the children stood on a wooden frame a long way in the distance. This was supposedly how they shot the scene from “Journey To The Beginning Of Time” (Many years later when I finally got to see the film I was amazed to discover that the film employed a life size prop, not a painting. I wondered if Karel Zeman was playing a joke by deliberately misleading the audience?) As a child I was fascinated by this short clip of film and wanted to know more about the movie and the person who made it, but Karel Zeman was elusive and it was difficult to find any information on him in the pre-internet 1960’s. It would be another thirty years before I was able to see his film.

Karel Zeman was Czech and began his film career in advertising and first worked in animation making an advertisement for soap. In 1943 he accepted a job offer at Zlin animation studio and in 1945 became director of the stop motion animation production group and made his first short film “A Christmas Dream” (“Vanocni Sen”) which combined animated puppets and live action. Zeman then created a series of puppet shorts featuring a character called Mr. Prokouk, which were very popular. In 1948 he made the beautiful short film “Inspiration”(“Inspirace”) using animated glass figures, and two years later directed the half hour film “King Lavra” (“Kra Lavra”) which went on to win a National Award. Karel Zeman’s first feature film “The Treasure Of Bird Island” (“Poklad Ptaciho Ostrova”) was completed in 1952 and used innovative techniques to evoke Persian art. Then in 1955 he made the first of his six feature films to use his unique combination of live action and animation techniques that would secure his place in movie history, the remarkable “Cesta Do Praveku”, or “Journey To the Beginning Of Time”.

JTTBOT tells the story of four children who venture back in time to discover the origins of life on Earth. On the way they encounter creatures from the Quaternary, the Tertiary, the Mezazoic, and Paleozoic eras. Uniquely and charmingly, no time is spent on a logical explanation for their trip. There are no fantastical devices here-no time machines, no boring into the center of the Earth, no discovery of lost plateaus or uncharted, mist shrouded islands. The boys want to go, so they go. They take a small boat and enter a mysterious cave tunnel and emerge in prehistory travelling further back in time as they follow the river to its source.

Apart from Karel Zeman’s most obvious accomplishments in creating myriad special effects sequences, his skill as a director is evident in his handling of the child actors, most of whom were not professionals. He elicits natural, unforced performances from his cast with none of the sentimentality or grating archness found in many American and British films featuring child actors from the same period. Zeman’s use of the camera is also very effective with many tracking shots taken on location or on studio sets closely following the children before an encounter with a prehistoric creature. These shots with the camera following just behind the children’s shoulders or tracking back in front of their faces puts the audience directly inside their experience and makes the build up to the reveal of the various creatures much more powerful. Compare these pre-effects sequences with similar scenes in American dinosaur films from the same period such as “Unknown Island” (1948) or “The Lost Continent” (1951) to see that Zeman’s direction is much more effective. Perhaps his least appreciated talent is as a writer. Apart from a few places where the film becomes too studiedly educational, most of the dialogue between the children flows naturally and believably. His abilities as a scriptwriter would become more apparent in his later works.

But the main reason anybody sees a film like this is to see the recreation of prehistoric life and it is here that Karel Zeman differentiates himself from Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. These movie giants concentrated on one technique, stop motion animation combined with live action via miniature rear projection or travelling mattes, to create their illusions. They occasionally used giant props (King Kong’s hand or the Pteranodon’s feet from “1,000,000 Years B.C.”) to interact with the human actors, but all the creatures were primarily brought to life by stop motion animation (sometimes augmented by a mechanical head for close up’s like the King Kong bust, or the Ceratosaurs from “The Animal World”).

Karel Zeman is different from every other movie magician by fearlessly utilizing every FX and animation technique available to him at the time and often switching technique multiple times within a single scene. Examples are the mammoth, which is sometimes a stop motion creation and sometimes a mechanical puppet shot in camera on location with the children. The Phorusrhacos is a stop motion puppet, a hand puppet for close ups, and a paper cut-out for the running shots. The Brontosaurus is a combination of a mechanical head atop a painted flat body for the shots on land, and a hand puppet for the shots in water. The Uintatherium is combination of stop motion and close up’s using a mechanical head. Zeman is also fearless about using completely different techniques not commonly used in visual effects films, such as creating a herd of bounding antelope, giraffes and a Smilodon purely through paper cut out animation. An Edmontosaurus (called a Trachodon in the film) and an amphibian (possibly an Eryops) are brought to life as hand puppets. This willingness to use any technique to create the creatures means that the menagerie in “Journey To The Beginning Of Time” is much larger than in Willis O’Brien’s “King Kong” (9 stop motion creatures, King Kong, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, two legged lizard, Tyrannosaurus (probably), Elasmosaurus, Pteranodon, prehistoric vulture (possibly Merriam’s Teratorn), various birds) or Ray Harryhausen’s “1,000,000 Years B.C. (13 creatures including a photographically enlarged iguana, tarantula, and grasshopper, Allosaurus, Archelon, Brontosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Pteranodon and its two chicks, Rhamphorhynchus, Triceratops, and a live warthog). In “Journey To The Beginning Of Time” we see 30 creatures (Mammuthus primigenius, Coelodonta, Deinotherium, Honanotherium, Smilodon, Moropus, Uintatherium, Phorusrhacos, Helladotherium, Pteranodons, Styracosaurus, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Edmontosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Meganeura, Eryops, Trilobite, plus a giant boa constrictor, a swimming amphibian, a sea snake, flamingoes, antelopes, giraffes, crocodiles, a leopard, vultures, turtles, various animated birds and a large, real carp). Zeman also outdoes Harryhausen and O’Brien by having multiples of the same animal in shot instead of the one representative of each species that show up for their one sequence in “King Kong”, “Son Of Kong”, “I,000,000 Years B.C.” or “The Valley Of Gwangi”, usually to menace the heroes or get into a fight. JTTBOT has a flock of flamingoes, a flock of Pteranodons, herds of antelope, gazelle and giraffe, a congregation of crocodiles, two grazing Helladotherium and two battling Coelodonta. These brief scenes of herds of wildlife eating or galloping add immeasurably to the believability of Zeman’s prehistoric world and make it seem like life continues once the camera has moved on, rather than the line of solitary creatures waiting for their turn to be menacing in the O’Brien or Harryhausen films.