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Journey to the Beginning of Time
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Wikipedia article
'Journey to the Beginning of Time' (, literally "Journey into prehistory") is a color 1955 Czechoslovak science fiction adventure film directed by Karel Zeman. Produced using a combination of 2-D and 3-D models, it was the first of Zeman's productions to include actors in conjunction with stop-motion and special effects. It won awards at the International Film Festivals of Venice and Mannheim.
The documentary-type nature of the film showing extinct animal species behaving naturally in their own environments was most unusual for its era and foreshadowed many later TV productions that would depict prehistoric life for educational rather than purely entertainment purposes. 'Cesta do pravku' should not be confused with a dubbed and partly re-filmed US version of the film that was released in 1966 under the title 'Journey to the Beginning of Time'.
The film is, according to server Kinobox, the best Czech science fiction film of all time. The film was a great success abroad, especially in East Germany, the United States, and Japan. In New York City alone, it was screened in 96 cinemas at a time. No Czech movie has managed to do this before or after. Steven Spielberg also mentioned the picture, saying that its quality is incredible given the time it was created. In his film 'Jurassic Park', we can also see a very similar scene where examining the sick dinosaur was intended to get protagonists as close as possible to the reptile.
Plot
The story involves four teenage friends who want to show to the youngest one a real-live Trilobite. On school holidays, they undertake a journey in a rowboat against a "river of time" that flows through a mysterious cave and emerges on the other side onto a strange, primeval landscape. The boy actors were Josef Luk (Petr, the main narrator), Petr Herrmann (Tonk, who also narrates in part), Zdenk Hustk (Jenda), and Vladimr Bejval (Jirka). As they make their way upstream, they realise that they are travelling progressively farther back in time, and face various perils as they do so (but learn much about prehistoric life in the process). The animals depicted in 'Cesta do pravku' were never shown interacting with animals of other periods and as can be seen in the diary that the boys keep, the different parts of the river represented distinct time periods.
Comparison with other works
The plot is somewhat similar to that of the novel 'Plutonia' (1915) by the Russian palaeontologist Vladimir Obruchev, in which a team of Russian explorers enter the Earth's crust via an Arctic portal (a huge depression in the Earth surface created many millions of years previously by the impact of a giant asteroid, into which prehistoric animals had entered), and follow a river that leads them through a sequence of past geological eras and associated animal life. Some scenes in 'Cesta do pravku' recall Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel 'The Lost World', with four male protagonists exploring a prehistoric world where they find evidence of native human habitation, are attacked by a group of enraged pterosaurs, witness a twilight fight between a carnivorous dinosaur and a herbivorous one, encounter a 'Stegosaurus' up-close, and see one of their members, Petr, nearly chased down by a 'Phorusrhacos'.Production
Zeman's use of unorthodox and seamless production techniques ensured that the film was free of jerky stop-motion sequences and grainy splicing of stop-motion with real-time footage that characterised Hollywood's animated films until the advent of computer-generated imagery. Filming took place on the Morava river near Bzenec town in the Czech Republic at the nature reserve named (in Czech) Osypan behy and on studio sets.
Zeman was heavily influenced by the palaeo-art of the celebrated Czech artist Zdenk Burian (1905-1981), and much of the film's imagery was inspired by Burian reconstructions that had been painted under the guidance of Czech palaeontologist Josef Augusta (1903-1968). In some scenes, 2-D 'profile' images of animals originally depicted by Burian were filmed in real time (as in the 'Styracosaurus' sequences), whilst other well-known Burian scenes were recreated in stop-motion using a combination of 2-D and 3-D models (as in the 'Deinotherium' and 'Uintatherium' sequences). Possibly for the sake of continuity, Zeman also used models or 2-D profiles when depicting extant species including bison, a python, flamingos, vultures, various antelopes, giraffes, and a jaguar (which was briefly spliced with footage of a real animal in one of only three instances of live species footage). In some scenes, miniature models of the actors and their boat/raft were also animated.
In addition to numerous miniature animal models and 2-D 'profiles', Zeman also used larger models of heads and bodies of animals (including a full-size 'dead' 'Stegosaurus' and swimming woolly rhino, 'Brontosaurus' and 'Trachodon' models), as well as life-sized model plants (as in the Carboniferous forest sequence, and the encounter with the 'Styracosaurus'). The use of 2-D profiles and 3-D models animated by concealed means had the advantage of filming in real time without the need for labour-intensive stop-motion. Two of the film's prehistoric species were not based on Burian images; the 'Stegosaurus' and the 'Ceratosaurus' with which it fights in a twilight scene (it remains unclear as to why Zeman did not use Burian images in these instances).
'Cesta do pravku' was made on what would be considered a small budget by western film-makers. It discussed the various time epochs as defined by palaeontologists and the types of animals typical of those periods, using information known in the 1950s. Whilst many animated feature films, particularly those in the US, used models of prehistoric animals in contrived sequences, Zeman instead depicted animals acting naturally in their own environments as if being filmed for a documentary, with the actors observing from the relative safety of the river. Such a philosophy was unusual at the time and was more typical of later TV productions that depicted prehistoric animals in an educational context (including the BBC's 'Walking with Dinosaurs' and 'Walking with Beasts' series) which became popular following the advent of computer-generated imagery that negated the need for time-consuming, highly skilled manual animation. The original release of Zeman's film was 93 minutes, although the East German release had a slightly shorter running time.
Marketing and retrospectives
In 1966, another version of the film was released in the US by William Cayton whose company had been marketing Russian animated cartoons and feature films from the 1940s and 1950s, especially those of the famous Soyuzmultfilm studios (well known titles included 'The Firebird', 'The Frog Prince', 'Beauty & the Beast', 'The Space Explorers', and 'The Twelve Months'). The films were dubbed, sometimes re-titled, partitioned into chapters and distributed to US TV stations. In the case of 'Cesta do pravku', Cayton replaced the opening and closing scenes of the original with new footage of American boys who entered the film in a dream sequence whilst visiting the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The film was copied to poor quality film stock and edited into short segments (about six minutes each) for presentation as a serial, syndicated to various children's television programs. The US version was released on VHS video by 'Goodtimes' in 1994. Because of the new sequences, none of the actors' faces could be shown until the original footage began.
In April 2001, 'Cesta do pravku' was screened at the 'Brooklyn Academy of Music' in Brooklyn, New York, as part of the retrospective entitled 'The Fabulous World of Karel Zeman'. In 2010, it featured at the 50th 'Zln Film Festival' (May 30 - June 6) in the Czech Republic, one day of which (June 4) was dedicated to Karel Zeman to honour the centenary of his birth. The four original actors also attended the ceremonies (three from the Czech Republic and one - Vladimr Bejval - from the US).
In 2004, a DVD version of the film appeared in Japan, in Germany in 2005, and Spain in 2007. The Japanese and Spanish versions had different digital masters. The first German DVD had no digitally remastered images, but another German version with Czech and German dialogue, and 15 min of extras showing some of Zeman's filming techniques, was released in Jan 2010. This version used some modified sound effects for the dubbing, and the picture quality is below that of the original. Unfortunately the announced DVD of the original was held back for licence-juridical reasons and it remained unavailable commercially (as of April 2011) although copies of the original circulate amongst enthusiasts. In February 2020, The Criterion Collection included the film as part of their "Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman" box set.
Several scenes of the film were used by the British ABC Weekend TV in the 1961 television serial 'Pathfinders to Venus'. The scenes were that of the Pteranodons flying overhead and the battle between the Ceratosaurus and the Stegosaurus.
See also
*List of stop-motion films
References
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