Director – Karel Zeman – 1958 – Czechoslovakia – Cert. U – 82m
*****
Blu-ray/DVD available from Second Run.
Review originally written as an entry for
the Aurum Film Encyclopedia: War (series editor: Phil Hardy).
Sadly, the book was never published.
Vynález Zkázy
aka
Invention For Destruction,
The Invention Of Destruction,
The Deadly Invention,
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1961, US version)
KRATKY FILM PRAHA | STUDIO LOUTKOVYCH FILMU GOTTWALDOV
Feature length trickfilm adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel Une Invention Diabolique is less about war itself than its causes – specifically scientists who work without regard for how their experimental research will be used by others. Professor Roche (Navrátil) is kidnapped from a sanitarium and taken by clipper (towed by a prototype submarine invisible from the surface) to the island of Back-Cup where mysterious captor Count Artigas (Holub) invites him to continue his research – a task the childlike scientist is happy to undertake. The professor’s travelling companion, research assistant and the film’s narrator Simon Hart (Tokos) wants by contrast to escape and warn the world of Artigan’s plans to attack using a giant gun.
Zeman shoots his film with an all-encompassing diversity of live action and animated techniques, mixing actors, natural history photography and studio sets (augmented by drawings of set sections matted into his locked-off frame) on the one hand with live action and stop-frame puppetry, animated models, drawings and any other method you care to name.… Read the rest