I lured Kauto, my 6-year old son, to watch an ancient black & white Czech animation from an ancient VHS. To my surprise, Kauto watched the whole movie with me! It was Karel Zeman's Vynález zkázy from 1958, known in Finland as Salaisuuksien saari (The Island of Secrets) and in the English-speaking world as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (or Invention for Destruction). It's the film version of one of Jules Verne's lesser-known novels, Face au drapeau AKA Facing the Flag (in Finland as Isänmaan lippu). Zeman is best known for his animation collage in which he uses live actors mixed with stop-motion animation and the original illustrations for Jules Verne's novels. It's very beautiful, as if the fictional world of Verne comes out alive on screen. As an adventure, The Fabulous World of Jules Verne is slow-moving, but it also contains lots of beauty. It's the beauty of a silent cinema, of something happening for the first time and the thrilling sensation we get out of it. Zeman is one of the great artists of cinema.
Here are the opening credits. Seems like you can watch the whole film on YouTube. (More overlooked films at Todd Mason's blog here.)
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4 comments:
This is indeed a bubbling-under overlooked film...used as a "kiddy" programmer for most American stations in the '50s and '60s and into the '70s...
The US title is pretty stupid... You'd think "The Secret of the Island" or some such would be more crowd-pleasing.
Verne was more of a "brand name" or draw than the titles of nearly any of his novels by the time this was released here...even the likes of MICHAEL STROGOFF are Much more obscure than Verne himself in the States. TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES..., JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, and just maybe FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON were just about his only titles to rival his own fame...I'm sure even MASTER OF THE WORLD was advertised in its film version here as JULES VERNE's...
Oh, of course, and AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS.
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