The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship (1905)

To me, this movie is perfection.

hyped garbage

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This short from Georges Méliès is an interesting mix of surrealism and science fiction. It begins with a professor (The Inventor Crazybrains, played by Méliès) in his workshop where he dances in excitement over his new plans of an airship. He goes to sleep and dreams these two clownish creatures enter his workshop, wreck his plans and make a huge mess. He then sees the airship he's planning to invent take flight, with beautiful girls appearing in it and flying away. This element makes no sense and is kind of just thrown in. A fireball hits it and makes it explode, and the inventor awakes in his laboratory only to lose his marbles.The color tinting (which appears to be stencil-color) looks excellent for a movie of the time, especially the explosions. As for the plot, it doesn't really go anywhere but that's okay since the visuals more or less keep your interest. I'm not sure why the inventor goes crazy either and the whole thing makes little sense. Then again, most dreams are that way. At only three minutes it's fun while it lasts and at least has a little bit of a plot, unlike other Méliès films around the same time.

An old professor has an idea for an airship. He has all the diagrams and documents with plans to achieve his project. However, when he falls asleep, imps come in and mess things up. In his dream when he tries to realize his plan, everything falls apart; as a matter of fact, it explodes. One big problem is all the unrelated junk that occurs just to show it off.

This is obviously a vague statement given this was still made almost 110 years ago. It's a black-and-white film that runs for roughly 2.5 minutes and has quite a few supernatural elements like people floating in space. But technical aspects were also present here with a zeppelin depicted. The star here was not Méliès himself anymore like in his earlier works, but the story. However, the story is not really too interesting I must say. I did not think this was among the director's best works and I do not encourage anybody to start with this one if you want to take a look into Meliès' filmography. But probably almost nobody will as this is one of his lesser known works. All in all, not a great watch. thumbs down.

This is a rare case where I prefer the film's English language title more than its original French one. "Le Dirigeable Fantastique" was renamed "The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship"--now THAT's a great title! Like so many of the films by Georges Méliès, he stars in this one and it's a film that is pure goofy fantasy. It begins with some odd women entering the professor's lab and holding him down with a blanket as two weird creatures cavort about. Later, you see that perhaps this is just part of his dream...or not. The dream consists of showing a dirigible seemingly flying across the sky as the Professor sleeps. Oddly, hot ladies of the period keep emanating from the balloon! Then, this sadly ends when the dirigible explodes--and he's once again back in his room! This is a mega-weird short. I am not sure if the plot (for what it is) works too well, but it is nice eye candy.