The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

Zeman By Proxy

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
aka Baron Prásil  
Czechoslovakia 1962
Directed by Karel Zeman
Second Run Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Many story spoilers.

Baron Prásil is the Czechoslovakian name for Baron Munchausen. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is the third of the six feature films by this wonderful director to utilise live actors pitched against various animation styles. It’s a film which was on TV a lot when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s but which seems to have dropped off the radar a bit over the last few decades. Like a lot of great films we were used to being exposed to back in the day, kids now, among them up and coming filmmakers of the future, just aren’t getting the opportunities to easily see the classics of cinema like they used to. For sure, there are still some modern classics shown but, honestly, TV stations are just not educating people with quality product like they should do in these dark times.

So, anyway, of the three Karel Zeman films I’ve watched since Christmas, this is probably my least favourite. That being said, it has all the usual Zeman charm in abundance and is certainly as inventive and entertaining a spectacle as his previous two features, for sure. This one is very similar, stylistically, to his previous cinema release, Invention For Destruction (aka The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne, reviewed here) and uses a lot of matte paintings and sets built which are based, somewhat, on Gustave Doré’s illustrations for one of the more popular 19th Century versions of the legends based on the real life Baron. The difference being that this one is shot in colour... although it’s not a colour film as is typically understood by that term these days. Rather, the live action scenes, starring actors such as Milos Kopecký (Munchausen), Rudolf Jelínek (Tony the moon man, who is actually not in any way such a thing) and Jana Brejchová (as Princess Bianca... although she was a bought woman sold to ‘The Sultan’ by pirates) and, indeed, the majority of the animations and drawings in the film, are obviously shot on monochrome stock and then tinted. The difference between the same process here than in most silent films where colour tinting was more common, being that sometimes a few colours are assigned to different sections of the screen simultaneously.

The film starts dramatically on Earth with shots of nature turning to aviation via butterflies, birds, various aeroplanes (including something like a jumbo jet) and then to rockets headed to the moon (the reality of which would not come to fruition for another seven years). Then, Tony the astronaut sees footprints on the moon. He follows them and finds the original rocket from Jules Verne’s From The Earth To The Moon and is then, astonishingly, greeted by the three central protagonists of that book who, like their companions, don’t need space helmets like Tony to be able to breath the atmosphere. Cyrano De Bergerac also greets them (he had some adventures on the moon in one of his literary incarnations, if memory serves... although my old English translation paperback of his lunar adventures is either up in the loft or donated to charity a couple of decades ago) and, lastly, Baron Munchausen adds his welcome.

The five of them obviously mistake Tony for a moon man and the good Baron decides to fly him back to Earth in his ‘star galleon’ (my term) flown by geese for Tony to see how Earth dwellers live. Of course, by the time they get to Earth the clock has flown back and the two have various of the Baron’s famous misadventures, picking up the ‘princess’ in the palace of The Sultan where, in a wonderful moment of satire, the Baron starts talking in comically abrupt woodwind sounds very similar to the sounds used by the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Tony remarks (in this translation, other versions referenced on the documentaries included are obviously taken from a much different subtitle translation) that the Baron’s conversational tones in this manner are... “Musical but hard to follow.” “The language of high diplomacy!” retorts the Baron and, yes, I couldn’t agree more.

And the adventure continues as the Baron and his two companions escape the sultan but, after using a smoke screen made up of Turkish tobacco, which everyone on the ship they are in puffs to summon up said smoke screen (even the ship’s figurehead has a puff), they end up in the belly of a giant fish and, later, during a battle scene, we also have a version of the famous cannon ball ride (there and back) so the Baron can gain the advantage of seeing what the enemy are up to. When Tony is slung into prison for stealing all the gunpowder for one of his scientific ‘fantasist’ inventions, the Baron lights the gunpowder which was hidden in a well in the castle for just such a purpose and the three of them are blown back to the moon.

It’s a nice flight of fancy from beginning to end and, along the way, you’ll see the usual Zeman inventiveness such as the Baron riding a sea horse which actually does have four legs with flippers for feet to swim with, accompanied by a swordfish on which the Baron hangs his clothes and dresses while riding said sea horse, a captivating but perhaps over used red smoke (the old coloured droplets in water trick) and even a battle being conducted like a piece of concert music.

Like I said, it’s not my favourite of his works but it’s still an excellent film and, like the other two Blu Rays in this series from Second Sight, there’s a hefty bunch of extras on the disc including a feature length documentary on the life and work of Zeman, which includes complimentary comments and interviews from some modern directors who have been influenced by Zeman’s works such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam (whose own, even more wonderful film of the Baron’s tales certainly stole a few things from this version, as well as others). These are found alongside a wonderful featurette by Michael Brooke of facts and figures about both the many and varied film and TV incarnations of the Baron’s adventures, plus his interesting insight into the musical score for this version. This featurette in particular was a real eye opener for me... I mean, we’ve all heard of the medical terms Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen By Proxy but stuff like Munchausen By Internet was new to me and, well, I loved the mathematical uniqueness of Munchausen Numbers for sure. Although, how you discover something like that last, where a specific four figure number is broken down into separate digits, each number multiplied by a factor of itself and then added to the previous to end up with the sum being the original number you started out with, is beyond me.

And there you have it. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is certainly a fabulous film with a fabulous director and with another fabulous batch of extras from Second Sight. And now I’ll have to track down some more of this director’s work at some point soon. And also some more Czech cinema. I’ve seen a couple of other interesting films from Czechoslovakia in the last couple of weeks (which will show up in review on this site at some point fairly soon) and I’m really enjoying what I’m seeing from the cinema of this country. I’ll get back to you on those.

Invention For Destruction

 

 

One Good Verne
Deserves Another

Invention For Destruction
aka Vynález zkázy
aka The Fabulous
World Of Jules Verne
Czechoslovakia 1958
Directed by Karel Zeman
Second Run Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Invention For Destruction is the second Karel Zeman film I’ve seen in a couple of weeks and, once again, I’m pretty impressed. This one sees the Czechoslovakian surrealist going more and more artificial with his world view and I can see how future directors such as Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson (bringing the Zissou) may well have been influenced by his style.

It’s based on For the Flag, a novel by Jules Verne (one of my favourite writers although, I have to say, I’ve not read this one) and while I was initially disappointed that the director had chosen to shoot this in black and white, I soon realised this is because the whole film is supposed to look like one of the original woodcut illustrations of that book come to life. So it was filmed in Zeman’s brilliant hodge-podge process which was energetically touted at the time as mysti-mation. Frankly, mysti-mation is about as useful and honest a movie making bit of hyperbole as terms like Tohoscope, Supermarionation or Dynamation but, that’s okay, I love silly terms like this and can’t get enough of them.

So basically, the film is a combination of stop motion animation, puppetry, flat cut out illustrations and live action on sets made to look like those illustrations. And I have to say, it’s so well done that I was completely taken in, at first, as to how the man managed to get the actors to move around the drawings without any matte lines or whatever showing. It was only after a minute or two, when I realised a shadow was being cast by an actor's arm on the drawings, that I realised that a lot of it was a built set with giant sized versions of the illustrated cut outs for the actors to move around in. Also, there are clever and cost effective combinations where some of the cutouts in, say, the foreground layers of the frames are obviously smaller drawings put in front of the sets and actors before the camera and, well, it somehow all looks like it’s the same scale, or certainly gives the illusion of it. It can’t have been easy to do to get all those crosshatched lines and details to match up as well as they do here. There’s some amazing sets with a wonderful homage, at one point, to a certain shot in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (no, not the shot you’re immediately thinking of when I say that) and the costumes worn by the actors and actresses are wonderfully flat and patterned and also completely blend in with the wonderful sets and illustrations (the sets and costumes were painted with the lines from specially made roller brushes).

I was totally bowled over by this small tale of a plot by a Nemo-like Count to kidnap a professor and bankroll the scientist’s new explosive energy force invention so he can use it for a super canon to threaten the world with. The actors are all superb in this, reacting quite naturally to their ‘beyond artifical’ environments and it includes, despite what I said in my earlier review of Zeman’s Journey To The Beginning Of Time (read that one here), that sense of the appreciation and wonder of certain parts of the environment by a couple of the adult characters, that was a more natural reaction for the kids in the previous film... but which manages to carry over a little into this one too.

Also, the score by Zdenek Liska works very well with the action of the thing... almost like it’s doing old style Hollywood Mickey Mousing with the cues but often responding to the camera movement within the environment, rather than necessarily trying to catch any action captured within the content of the frame. For instance, there’s a truly wonderful series of establishing shots by Zeman, at one point, of the camera zooming into an illustration of the building, then cutting and doing a similar zoom of the building from a different angle and... then again a third time and going through a window into the next scene. Each time the camera swoops towards the building, Liska catches those with musical flourishes of his own. It’s a nice moment.

It’s also a very inventive and the surrealistic ideas which are presumably added in, a lot of the time, by Zeman’s fertile imagination, are charming pieces of on-screen surrealism which make the film a pleasure to watch. For instance, there’s a scene where the head bad guy aims his flintlock and it misfires. That’s because it’s a clockwork flintlock and, as soon as he winds it up with the key on the handle, a steady stream of shells are projected from the weapon like it’s a miniature, hand held machine pistol. Yeah, lots of great ideas here such as strange, floating air tanks kitted out to be underwater bicycles (with little bells ‘a ringing’), an underwater sword fight between two divers and, worth the price of admission alone, a small group of roller-skating camels. I mean, wow, what more could you ask for.

There’s even a nice sequence when the hero’s oxygen tank is running out, as he’s trying to escape his captors underwater, where two fish swim together and both hit a vertical, invisible join and swim behind it so only the ends of their tails remain. Those two halves of juxtaposed tails have then formed a butterfly which flies away under the ocean... this flight of fancy used to underline that the character is hallucinating while running out of oxygen. Again, lovely stuff.

Not much more for me to say about Invention For Destruction except that I wish these movies were better known over here because they’re perfect to catch children with at a certain age. I was totally blown away again by this one and Second Run have included some nice extras on here including two of Zeman’s short films. I’m really looking forward to seeing his 1962 film, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen next and the review of that one should be appearing here in a couple of days time. Meanwhile, if you’re a fan of cinema and the way live action and animated work can be combined effectively on screen, definitely check this one out sometime.

Gatchaman - Battle Of The Planets (live action movie)

Fiery The Phoenix Fell

Gatchaman - Battle Of The Planets (live action movie)
2013 Japan 
Directed by Tôya Satô
Universe DVD (NTSC)

Back in the late 1970s, as a direct result of George Lucas’ first Star Wars movie (reviewed here) taking so much money at the box office and related merchandising, new science fiction films and TV shows were the order of the day. Back around about 1978/79, I used to get home from school some week nights and watch my favourite cartoon show, Battle Of The Planets. Five teenagers who were a “science ninja team” called G-Force, battling against the evil Zoltar who was menacing the earth with his alien forces and devices such as giant, mechanical centipedes etc.

Every now and then we’d flip back to the beloved robot Seven Zark Seven on Centre Neptune, who would fill us in on events that were happening off screen and basically try to tie everything up for us (we didn’t know that was his purpose... hold on, I’m getting to that). This flying R2D2 clone with a cloak and camp voice also had a cute robot puppy dog, One Rover One (if memory serves) and they would also relay instructions back to our five heroes from their own controller.

The five adventurous heroes... Mark, Jason, Princess Astra, Tiny and KeyOp... would dress up in bird costumes and fly around doing acrobatics and taking their enemies out with boomerang weapons before getting into their starship, the Phoenix, and kicking Zoltar’s backside form their joint cockpit. If they were in desperate need, the five would join minds in the ship and “transmute” the hull into a flaming version of itself, known as going into "Fiery Phoenix" mode. The action was cool, the robots were cute and the music was great.

What wasn’t commonly known in the Western world at the time was that the majority of the footage for this particular cartoon show didn’t actually follow in the wake of the science fiction band wagon created by Star Wars at all... it was a cartoon show called Gatchaman which actually started in Japan in 1972 and was popular enough that it ran for over 100 episodes. Not only that, but the versions we were seeing as Battle Of The Planets (I can still hear the narrator booming the title out over the opening music in my head... a much loved childhood memory) were very much changed from what they were originally. I’m told (I’ve never got around to trying to get hold of the original cuts although I’ve got an idea they’ve just been released on blu-ray in the US so... I’ll get there eventually) that the original series was not only a lot more violent than the version we saw (with decapitations etc aplenty) but also a lot grimmer, more depressing and positively melancholic in tone than the Western bastardisation of it... although, to be fair, the main hero... Mark... was never exactly a bundle of laughs in the UK version, from what I remember. Although I do recall flapping around and pretending to be him when I was nine years old.

What was happening was that the stories were being rewritten and softened in tone by the American distributors who were also recording new vocals in English, to match their new stories. The cute robots were added in to give the “much needed” R2D2 knock off element, in addition to filling in and providing links to cover the material that was spliced out, and the music was partially rescored in some places. The evil Zotar, it turns out, was actually a female villain... but we never noticed back in the 1970s because the people doing the dubbing had given him a male, villainous voice and laugh. All the names, of course, were different... so when it came to watching this new live action movie version... well... I basically just name checked them to the cartoon characters who were still in my head, to be honest.

Now this film is a big budget, adaptation of the original Japanese Gatchaman cut of the cartoon show, so I have no idea if it’s faithful to the story of the original version, I’m afraid. It’s a million miles away from the story of the US version but... that was always to be expected, to be honest. Since the movie has, at time of writing, not been picked up for distribution in either the USA or UK, I had to import a foreign DVD of the film. I’m not sure just how authentic a copy it is, but it has subtitles for various languages, including English. A word on that, though. When I say the subtitles are in English, what I mean is that they’ve been written by someone who clearly doesn’t have English as thier first language. Some of the non-sequiturs and bizarre dialogue manifestations are a bit much but... I’ve seen worse. At least I could kind of make some sense of what was going on... so that’s a big plus compared to some translations I’ve seen.

Now then, since this has had no commercial distribution over here, I was expecting the film to be pretty awful, in all honesty. I just needed to see it because of the place the Battle Of The Planets show has in my heart and it’s something I always wanted to see a live action version of.

As it happens, the movie is a hell of a lot better than I imagined it would be. Don’t get me wrong... it’s not the most fantastic movie out there... but it does have as much credibility in terms of both budget and entertainment value as films like the new Godzilla and Pacific Rim manifestations recently at our cinemas (for my reviews of each of these, click here and here). The camera work is fluid, but often gives the impression that it’s hand held, and the editing is nicely done in a way where you won’t get confused. The story is nonsense but, that’s no surprise and, again, it stands up to the two movies I just threw up earlier in this paragraph.

I was unsure of it at first. The alien invasion which gives the film its basis and which leaves humanity struggling, takes place in 2015. Yeah, right. Way to go for completely dating your film before it’s properly outside the stable gate fellas. Even so, the lead in sequence is timed just right and before long we have G-Force in action... locking hands and swooping in a circle to kick alien butt, just like they used to in the opening titles of the Battle Of The Planets cartoon show. And it’s awesome. I was really happy just seeing these characters, who even looked a lot like the original animated versions out of costume too, mixing it up with a load of wirework which was very reminiscent of the action style of the source material.

And that was me happy for the rest of the movie. Sure there are some pacing issues. The six minutes to save Tokyo at the end seems to expand out for over 20 minutes in real time while the characters monologue like crazy with each other, so that was annoying. Also, the twist reveal with one of the characters is telegraphed a mile off but... I was okay with it. It was a logical point to get to in the script. The special effects are great... especially that first fight scene involving a giant and sinister car wheel rolling around and destroying large areas of the Japanese cityscape.

It could maybe have done with a little re-editing and rewriting in the dialogue scenes and the addition of one other action set piece or two but, all in all, it held my attention and it did have a spectacular kind of feel to it. I was disappointed that the music from the original show wasn’t used but, saying that, the score in this does have the same kind of vibe and I don’t think some of it would have seemed out of place if it had been included in the original cartoon. The film even has an extra, “I saw that one coming”, scene after the end credits but, strangely, the Japanese warn you on the subtitles that this is coming before starting the end credit roll... so that was nice of them.

As I said earlier, this isn’t the best film in the world and anyone who was not into the original show, in either of its forms, would probably find it a little simplistic and vacuous. I, on the other hand, loved it for what it was and, considering the budget and the competency of the direction on this thing, I’m really surprised that we’ve not been allowed some kind of release of it over here or stateside. There are even a few English actors speaking their native language in it at a few points. If you were into the original show or, even if you just like the idea of watching multicoloured, flying “science ninjas” doing a dance of death with mechanical, alien doom legions... then there’s not much I can’t recommend about this wonderful addition to the Gatchaman canon. They even got the Fiery Phoenix manifestation in right near the end. So if you ant to see some, not too tightly balanced but thoroughly entertaining mayhem... it’s time to transmute and give this one a spin, methinks.