Karel Zeman - Life

Life

Zeman was born on November 3, 1910, in Ostroměř (near Nová Paka) in what was then Austria-Hungary. In the 1920s, he studied at a French advertising school, and worked at an advertising studio in Marseilles until 1936. It was in France that he first worked with animation, filming an ad for soup. He then returned to his home country (by now Czechoslovakia), after visiting Egypt, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

Back in Czechoslovakia, Zeman advertised for Czech firms like Baťa and Tatra. At Baťa's window-dressing school, where he was teaching, Zeman met the animator Elmar Klos and showed him a sample of his work. Klos offered Zeman a job at Zlín's animation studio. After some consideration (his wife and children were already established in Brno), Zeman accepted the job in 1943. At the studio, Zeman worked as an assistant to the pioneering animator Hermína Týrlová, and in 1945 he became the director of the stop-motion animation production group. The same year, in collaboration with his brother Bořivoj Zeman, he made his first short film, Vánoční sen ("A Christmas Dream").

Zeman then went on to solo work, including a series of shorts starring a puppet called Mr. Prokouk. His half-hour film Král Lávra (1950), from the poem by Karel Havlíček Borovský, won him a National Award, and was followed by his first feature film, Poklad ptačího ostrova (1952). His most unusual film may be the short Inspirace ("Inspiration," 1948), which tells a wordless, poetic love story using animated glass figurines.

It was in 1955, however, that Zeman began the work for which he is probably most famous: six feature films that combine live-action and animation techniques to create artistic visual styles. These were:

• Cesta do pravěku (1955), inspired by Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and the paintings of Zdeněk Burian
• Vynález zkázy (1958), based on Verne's Facing the Flag, and filmed to emulate the original illustrations for Verne's novels
• Baron Prášil (1961), celebrating the legendary Baron Munchausen and the engravings of Gustave Doré
• Bláznova kronika (1964), a satire of the Thirty Years' War, suggested by the drawings of Matthäus Merian
• Ukradená vzducholoď (1967), inspired by the Verne novels Two Years' Vacation and The Mysterious Island, the Art Nouveau style, and the 1891 Prague Centennial Exhibition
• Na kometě (1970), an anti-war fantasy based on Verne's Hector Servadac

In 1961, he was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival.

After this, Zeman experimented with more classical forms of animation, beginning with seven shorts about Sinbad the Sailor which were then expanded into the feature film Pohádky tisíce a jedné noci (1974). His final films were Čarodějův učeň (1977), from the novel The Satanic Mill by Otfried Preußler, and Pohádka o Honzíkovi a Mařence (1980).

He died in Zlín on April 5, 1989, a few months before the Velvet Revolution.