Ah, what an age to be living in—when each day brought science new and ever more glorious triumphs!

— Opening narration

     George Pal was a native of Budapest, Hungary. He cut his teeth in advertising, before becoming head of the animation department at Berlin's legendary UFA studios. He fled the outbreak of World War II by escaping west to America, where he found success as the producer of a series of stop-motion animation shorts called the Puppetoons. From there, Pal branched out into feature film production and created some of the early classics of American film fantasy: Destination Moon, War of the Worlds, Tom Thumb, The Time Machine, and The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Karel Zeman (pronounced Karl Zuh-MAHN) was also born in what was then known as Austria-Hungary, just a year or so after George Pal. And Zeman, too, got his start in advertising, making animated soup commercials for a studio in France. Karel Zeman, however, retreated to the east when the war broke out. As a result, he found himself, at war's end, on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain from his more famous countryman. And yet Karel Zeman really is, in some quite startling ways, the George Pal of the Soviet Bloc. And his pictures are as good, and in some cases better, than Pal’s. Together, they make up Eastern Europe’s greatest legacy to fantasy filmmaking—and Zeman needs to be better known.

One of his earliest films, Vanocni sen (Christmas Dream), won the award for Best Animation at the 1946 festival in Cannes. His next and possibly most unusual picture was the short subject Inspiration, made in 1949. Here, Zeman used a series of glass figurines to produce some amazingly smooth animation, very similar to the effects Pal achieved in his celebrated short The Ship of the Ether. Pal went on to feature a little Austrian everyman named Mr. Strauss in many of his Puppetoons; Zeman’s everyman was called Mr. Prokouk, whose films had titles like Mr. Prokouk at the Office, Mr. Prokouk the Inventor, and so on. Perhaps Zeman’s best-known movie is 1952’s Cesta do praveku. Dubbed into English, with some additional material filmed in New York, it came to America as Journey to the Beginning of Time and was serialized as children’s television programming throughout the 1960s. A highly stylized journey up the River of Time to the very source of life, Journey skillfully combines a flavorful Boy’s Life-style adventure story done in live-action with some astonishingly beautiful animation.

Finally, in 1956, Zeman made his masterpiece, Vynález zkázy (An Invention for Destruction). Based mainly on Jules Verne’s 1896 novel Face au Drapeau, it was given an American release under the title The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. Inspired by the distinctive engravings of Benette & Riou which had illustrated the original Voyages Extraordinaires, Fabulous World fully justifies its grandiose title. In no other movie perhaps, is the ironic sense of anachronism, the quixotic charm of this strange little corner of the science fiction universe so quintessentially caught up and bottled on film. The images really do look like 19th century lithographs come to life and the storytelling really does seem to be filtered through the extinct attitudes and alien objectives of another era. Watching these actors wander carelessly through their impossible two-dimensional world can still give you the kind of thrill many of us felt at our first viewing of Toy Story and other breakthrough animated films. The producers of the American version dubbed the technique Mysti-mation, possibly in an attempt to draw the same kind of cinemagoers who’d recently enjoyed Harryhausen’s Dynamation hit 7th Voyage of Sinbad. At any rate, Mysti-mation really does mystify at times, a rare case of a film actually living up to its ballyhoo. Fabulous World may be hard to see today (especially with decent picture quality) but it remains well worth every effort. Nominated for a Hugo Award in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation, it’s one of the essential Fireside Science-Fiction films.

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne was so well received, in fact, that Zeman returned to Jules Verne more than once in the following years. In Ukradená vzducholod (1967) [aka “Two Years Holiday” and “A Stolen Airship”] five young boys steal a futuristic dirigible from the Prague Centenary Exhibition of 1891 and travel to a remote South Pacific island where they encounter Captain Nemo himself. And in 1970’s Na Komete [literally “On the Comet” and based loosely on Verne's Hector Servadac] a colonial army corps stationed in Africa gets whisked away on a passing comet to a bizarre world of dinosaurs. Zeman also made a version of the Baron Munchausen fables with something of a Jules Verne flavor. It should be noted that all of these films continue the Fireside genre’s preoccupation with the Cold War…interesting, in that in Zeman’s case the worries about technology are coming from the communist point of view, yet they play out in the same familiar ways.

In his final years as a filmmaker, Zeman’s career continued to parallel that of George Pal. Like Pal, he made films based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (O Honzikovi a Marence [Hansel and Gretel]) and on other European fables (Krabat, Carodejuv ucen [Krabat -The Sorcerer’s Apprentice]). Yet Pal himself only ventured once into the realm of Scientific Victoriana—1960’s classic The Time Machine. Karel Zeman specialized in the genre, and from him come some of its finest moments, images of pure visual poetry that rank with the greatest ever committed to film. We can only hope that someday soon, some enterprising DVD producer will give The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (and the rest of Zeman’s masterworks) the kind of video presentation that will give them a chance to widen in America his already-cherished reputation.