Le dirigeable volé

I saw this movie for the first time when I was five or six years old - and it was a fantastic expirience. It made me to read the original book by Jules Verne - and I must say that it's less amazing and astounding than the film. I always loved the charming b&w scenes - you'll never know if the move is played by live actors or if it is all animated. Let yourself get amazed!

The Czech had a prolific movie industry in the 60s, profiting from beautiful shooting locations as well as a plethora of talent. Even among all this talent, Karel Zeman stands out. While he's not well known to the general public, his influence on filmmakers leaning towards the extravagant cannot be exaggerated - Tim Burton's, but especially Terry Gilliam's idiosyncrasies are derived from Zeman's quirky productions.

"The Stolen Airship" is a nice boy's adventure yarn with satiric undertones, which shines by its flawless atmosphere and seamless mix of live action and animation. Zeman achieved this by hand-colouring the whole movie - as a result, the live-action sequences have a beautiful pictorial atmosphere which blends excellently with the painted backgrounds and animated sequences, often giving the impression of colour lithographs and coloured engravings. Which fits the general mood of the movie exceedingly well, there are few movies that capture the Jules Verne atmosphere like this one (compare it to the Verne illustrations from the 19th century: http://jv.gilead.org.il/rpaul/ ).

Summary: While the story itself is just harmless (but entertaining and charming) fun, the aesthetics of this production make it a must-see for lovers of animation and/or Jules Verne. Not only highly recommended, this is in fact required viewing.

There's something interesting about Czech animation of the 60'. There was talent, and an interesting will to explore, try new things. Plus, the Czechs were probably the most actively discontent people of the soviet satellite states. When this film came out, the Prague spring was about to happen, the country was boiling with tension and will to change.

Creative minds usually boil at higher temperatures under such contexts. So, I assume that some metaphor of search of freedom might be made of this story. Flying away, escaping land, searching for places where one can try the unthinkable back home. Intellectuals not playing along the regimes on the other side of the curtain were having tough times. This would be a suitable metaphor, in the line of what Svankmajer was doing.

Also, the choosing of Jules Verne, so loved by this director, is itself a comment on the kind of thing he was trying to pull off. The reason why we love Verne is the inventiveness of the science fictions he proposes. He didn't write sci-fi as Philip Dick, where the scientific otherworldliness is the framework for the exposure of a cleverly conceived deep exploration of things close to us, in our "real" world. Instead, with Vernes it's really about the world, in physical terms, the verisimilitude of the scientific proposal, to live in that world, as it is defined by the writer. He gives us the seduction of hipper-realism, the sensation that what we're reading might be possible (indeed much of it is right now being done), wrapped around the fascination of a fantasy parallel world. On top of everything, experimenting is what drives this kind of creators.

The trouble with this film is that the codes are outdated. I don't connect to the visual presentation of this film. This world sounds flat and not fascinating today. There is visual sensitivity here, in how animation and real action are mixed, how the yellow tone is used to unite the whole bits. A lot of effort was put into it, and it may have worked in its day. But not now. It's a scream for freedom, and we feel it even today, As such, it's good. As a film, i really think that there are other adventures more worthy of being lived, other journeys for useful to be taken.

My opinion: 1/5

Cinanima 2011

http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

This is an absolutely enchanting, instantly appealing story to anyone who remembers being young: a 5 kids steal an airship from a county fair and embark on various adventures. Karel Zeman captures the adventure of being young without getting sentimental or turning the story into a Dennis the Menace episode. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this movie is the cinematography, designed to look like moving woodcut pictures from old children's books. It looks and "works" much better than you'd expect it to. The backgrounds are stylized mattes, the foregrounds are painted to look crosshatched, and stop motion paper cutouts are used to depict objects in a stylized yet consistent way. I cannot recommend this movie enough.