A Visual Tour of Karel Zeman

The great trickster of film.

A still from The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Happy Thursday! Glad you could join us. This issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter explores filmmaker Karel Zeman and his visual craft.

Zeman isn’t as famous today as he once was, but a certain mystique endures. He was a Czech animator, director and effects artist. In the 1940s, he became one of the animation heavyweights of Czechoslovakia, alongside Jiří Trnka and Hermína Týrlová. But Zeman had his own style.

He was obsessed with the technical side of film — with old-fashioned movie magic. That led him to animate glass, to combine stop motion with cel animation and, in his peak years, to make sprawling feature films in which human actors, animation, special effects and camera trickery coexist.

To quote one writer, Zeman was “an eternal experimenter who painstakingly [sought] out his own artistic identity.”¹

That’s what we’re getting into today. Here we go!