Journey to the Beginning of Time (An American's Guide to Czech Movies) (Patreon)

Imagine an alternate history where Ray Harryhausen made Jurassic Park. You’ll get something like Karel Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time.

Zeman is one of the most influential names in off-beat, surrealist animation. Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and Jan Švankmajer all count themselves among Zeman’s fans. Zeman’s brand of mixed media, tying together stop-motion, puppetry and live-action filmmaking, predates even the best work of Ray Harryhausen. Comparisons to George Méliès are certainly warranted. Yet like Méliès, he was screwed over by others — in his case, the Soviet authorities censored him — and he fell out of the public consciousness. One suspects this, and being Czech, has to do with his relative obscurity in the English-speaking world.

Perhaps another aspect of Zeman’s anonymity compared to his peers is his relative lack of interest in plot and character. Like Harryhausen, the plots of his movies are engines for the neat and quirky special effects. Zeman mastered in-camera matte effects in the Fifties. Journey to the Beginning of Time looks gorgeous — its stegosauruses and wooly mammoths are broadly convincing, due to the deft interweaving of 2-D and 3-D objects (something Terry Gilliam later learned from and used extensively). And that’s pretty much all the movie sells itself on. The main characters are four boys who read Jules Verne, want to go back in time to see dinosaurs, row into a cave, and finally themselves millions of years in the past. There’s little plot development beyond that, except for the occasional bit of peril. It’s simply an exhibit of childhood wonder at how cool dinosaurs and special effects are.

This could tip into sentimentality, and yet Zeman doesn’t quite go there. The dinosaurs aren’t terrifying monsters or cute misunderstood friends. They’re simply creatures to be observed and documented. The boys expound on the Silurian era and prehistoric rhinos at length — really, it’s an early movie by nerds for nerds. Zeman basically has some toys to show off, and he does so. It’s not hard to see why Czechs appreciated his movies at the time, and why they stuck in the minds of so many cinephilic weirdos.