Il barone di Münchhausen

By now, nearly everyone should be familiar with the Munchausen story or, at least, some portion of it even if shi didn't grown up on these German drinking boasts which got way out of hand.

This is not the first or last treatment of the braggart Baron, but this version has a charm that many others lack.

The film is shot, predominantly in sepia tone with occasional bits in exaggerated color for artistic emphasis. Those who recall the pink coat in Schindler's List will have some idea of what is happening. But, in this case, the effect is not so much an attempt to indicate a major event that was necessarily slighted in the film. Rather, it helps to emphasize the aspects of the fantastic and the fairy tale romanticism that the director is emphasizing.

The live actors are shot against an animated background and are often blithely unaware of the fantastic things that are sweeping around them while they concern themselves with the essentially silly issues of their lives. This is Czech animation which seems rather exotic to those of us raised on Disney-esque 'realism'. Still, it's stylism adds a charm to the film that helps to reinforce the multiple layers that the director has built into this piece.

You should not attempt to become involved in the film so much as to sit back and marvel at the world that is passing unobserved by those passing through it.

When it has finished,you will want to watch it again and again to catch how all the different visual layers interact in your mind if not on the screen.

If I had to compare this effect to any other film, I suppose I would choose the way that Altman weaves the foreground and background into the midground in "M*A*S*H", though the two films are very different and have completely different statements about the world.

This is a fantasy and it is truly fantastic, but only on an adult level. Children will have many questions that all come down to 'why is it happening that way?' For children, fantasy is a chance to dream dreams and play games. This is a film for adults that has found an adult way to present the wit and contradiction of the original stories while acting out the ingenuousness of the characters' actions.

See this one. It deserves your attention.

Live action with stop-motion and puppet animation. A modern astronaut meets Baron Munchausen on the Moon after landing his spacecraft there. The entire film has a quaint, charming 19th-Century look, mood and feel, thanks to the Baron himself narrating the picture, and some of the most imaginative production design, special visual effects and movie sets ever put on celluloid. Like his previous film, The FABULOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE (AN INVENTION FOR DESTRUCTION), Zeman uses 19th-Century woodcut engravings modeled after those of Gustav Dore as his guides for most of the intricately-fashioned backdrops in this marvelous movie. Highly imaginative in every way possible, this film is like a turn-of-the-century Georges Melies nickelodeon reel in appearance, but has a mysterious, mystical, dreamlike quality which makes this look like a lurid, delightful dream. Often hilarious, it is full of humor, wit and charm. Zeman is clearly a master in control of his medium. One of his best films ever. Another film I would love to have on Video that is still inexplicably unavailable in America.

In effect, the other commentary of this movie says everything that could be say for this excellent movie. I want to say that this movie and "On the comet (Na komete) are two of the best animation movies that I ever saw. I saw this movie in 35 mm at "Cinemateca Uruguayan" because there was playing a Karel Zeman's homage, but I think that it's necessary to review this classics films and to get it on VHS or DVD. Zeman is a genius director with the mix of animated stop-motion frames and people, filming in studios or in natural locations and also drawing over the negative, painting it, all the technics are used with masterly.

I don't see how anyone will ever top Karel Zeman's version of this story. It's unfortunate that it is so difficult to find. It has a beautiful score and the execution of the animation and visual effects are flawless. Zeman's artwork is quite amazing and is the grandfather of the look in films that was yet to come with the advent of CGI. He combines animation, matte paintings and stop-motion puppets to create the world of Baron Prasil or Baron Munchausen if you saw it in the United States. Released to laserdisc back in 1989, it is now only available on Japanese Region 2 NTSC DVD. I managed to get a copy but it is not dubbed or subtitled into English but that's okay because in a Karel Zeman movie, the visuals ARE the story so you can probably figure out what is happening without understanding the dialogue. Some people consider this to be Zeman's finest film. I have a hard time deciding if I like this one better than INVENTION OF DESTRUCTION or JOURNEY TO PRIMEVAL AGES. In any case, it's a remarkable and unique film so catch it if you can.

Zeman's magnum opus is every bit as compelling and otherworldly as the legends indicate. In fact, as I also have FABULOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE & ON THE COMET on tape, take my word for it: PRASIL/MUNCHAUSEN is the Zeman to see if your only seeing one. Given those hallucinatory Gustav Dore-meets- Arthur Rackham visuals, the wildly disjointed narrative and from-hunger post-synched soundtrack actually ADD to the out-of-body experience that is this film. It's like stumbling into somebody else's fever dream. While Zeman's other films generally succumb to a deadly torpor around halfway through, this one is just so jampacked with surreal oddities and unforgettable bizarro setpieces that you're in flabbergasted joy right through to the end. Terry Gilliam (a major Zeman fan) attempted a lavish remake that missed the whole point of this film's one-of-a-kind quality: the sense throughout that this is a handcrafted film, an artisan's project free of studio meddling, brand name stars or big budget elephantiasis. PRASIL's amateurism is its crowning glory. Essential viewing...at least once.