Film Adventurer Karel Zeman (2015)
A look at the life, work and importance of Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman (1910-89), a genius of world cinema, a wizard of special effects, revealing his sources of inspiration and his revolutionary filming techniques.
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Fresh and Exciting
This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
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.