Budapest Classic Film Marathon: The Stolen Airship

Director: Karel Zeman

Written by Jules Verne
Screenplay by Karel Zeman
Director of photography: Josef Novotný, Bohuslav Pikhart
Music by Jan Novák
Cast: Hanus Bor, Jan Cizek, Jan Malát

Open Archives / The fantastical world of Karel Zeman 

Introduction: Ondrej Beranek, Producer, Founder of the Karel Zeman Museum

Karel Zeman’s live-action animation film begins with a cultural history of naughtiness. The initial sequences evoke Marcell Jankovics’s movie The Tragedy of Man: ages and styles follow one another in quick succession until, as though by the wave of a magic wand, we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a busy fair where anything can happen, even bad children breaking a chair over a policeman’s head. Then all is revealed: a cigar-smoking old man, his armchair tied to a balloon, falls back to earth with the aid of an umbrella. It is as if a childhood dream could become reality, as if drawing could bring imagination to life, like in the cartoon The Enchanted Pencil. It is like witnessing the birth of cyber punk: then these urchins and scamps fly off over Europe and the ocean in an airship, and we find ourselves knee-deep in a genuine Czech comedy, then in a Verne story that mainly resembles The Mysterious Island. But everything else, too. Everything that might come into the mind of a great artist with an imagination akin to an untethered balloon.