Karel Zeman

Karel Zeman (3 November 1910 – 5 April 1989) was a Czech film director, artist, production designer and animator. He is best known for directing fantasy films combining live-action footage with animation, including Journey to the Beginning of Time and Invention for Destruction (1958). Because of his creative use of special effects and animation in his films, he has often been called the "Czech Méliès".

Life Zeman was born on 3 November 1910 in Ostroměř, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (present-day Czech Republic). At his parents' insistence, he studied business at high school in Kolín. In the 1920s, he studied at a French advertising school, and worked at an advertising studio in Marseille until 1936. It was in France that he first worked with animation, filming an ad for soap. The same year, in collaboration with Bořivoj Zeman, he made his first short film, Vánoční sen ("A Christmas Dream"). The short, which combined animated puppets with live-action footage, marked the beginning of Zeman's experiments with new techniques and genres.

Zeman then went on to solo work, including a series of satirical cartoon shorts starring a puppet called Mr. Prokouk; the series was a wide success and the character became a Czech favorite. These were:

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), inspired by Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and the paintings of Zdeněk Burian. In 1966 a partly re-filmed US version was released as Journey to the Beginning of Time. Invention for Destruction (1958), based on Verne's Facing the Flag, and filmed to emulate the original illustrations for Verne's novels The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1961), celebrating the legendary Baron Munchausen and the engravings of Gustave Doré A Jester's Tale (1964), a satire of the Thirty Years' War, suggested by the drawings of Matthäus Merian The Stolen Airship (1966), inspired by the Verne novels Two Years' Vacation and The Mysterious Island, the Art Nouveau style, and the 1891 Prague Centennial Exhibition On the Comet (1970), an anti-war fantasy based on Verne's Hector Servadac

He was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival in 1961 and at the 7th Moscow International Film Festival in 1971. The Czechoslovak government awarded him the title of National Artist in 1970.

After his live-action films, Zeman experimented with more classical forms of animation, beginning with seven shorts about Sinbad the Sailor which were then expanded into the feature film Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor (1974). His final films were Krabat – The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1977), from the novel The Satanic Mill by Otfried Preußler, and The Tale of John and Mary (1980). On 3 November 1980, in celebration of Zeman's seventieth birthday, President Gustáv Husák awarded him the Order of the Republic. as well as to the filmmaker Terry Gilliam, who said of Zeman: "He did what I'm still trying to do, which is to try and combine live action with animation. His Doré-esque backgrounds were wonderful." The filmmaker Tim Burton described Zeman's creative process as "extremely inspirational" to his own work, and identified Zeman and the animator Ray Harryhausen as his influences "in terms of doing stop motion and a more handmade quality … Karel Zeman did that amazingly." Harryhausen himself also spoke in interviews of his admiration for Zeman, and the films of the director Wes Anderson have included homages to Zeman's works.

The film historian Georges Sadoul identified Zeman as having "widened the horizons of the eighth art, animation," adding:

bq|He is justly considered Méliès's successor. He undoubtedly brings the old master to mind, not only because he is an artisan impassioned by art, creating his "innocent inventions" with infinite patience rather than with large budgets, but also because of his ingenuous and always ingenious fantasies. Less intellectual than Trnka, but nonetheless his equal, he has great zest and a marvelous sense of baroque oddities and poetic gags.

Filmography

Feature films

Short films