Cast:
Lubor Tokoš (Simon Hart), Arnošt Navrátil (Professor Roch), Miloslav Holub (Count Artigas), František Šlégr (Captain Spade), Václav Kyzlink (Engineer Serke), Jana Zatloukalová (Jana), and Otto Šimánek (Man in Train) Directed by Karel Zeman.
Review:
"I came to the conclusion that my Verne film must come not only from the spirit of the literary work, but also from the characteristic style of the original illustrations and must maintain at least the impression of engravings" - Karel Zeman
Admittedly, having a nickname of being the "Czech [Georges] Méliès" is a good selling point to talk about a director for the first time. Karel Zeman was born in Austria-Hungary (present-day Czech Republic) in 1910. He loved puppets from a young age, but his parents wanted him to study business rather than continue with puppet theatre. He ended up studying advertising design in France, and his visits to the cinema grew his interest in animated movies. He eventually went into work in advertising. He got offered a job at a film studio due to director Elmar Klos liking what he saw when being asked to report about a window-dressing competition that Zeman won. Zeman was hired to work at Bata Film Studios (in a suburb of Zlin in what is now the Czech Republic) within the animation department. He began his directing career with shorts in 1945, with a couple of shorts involving a satirical puppet made of wood called Mr. Prokouk being quite successful. His first film as a feature director was The Treasure of Bird Island [Poklad ptačího ostrova] (1953), which was adapted from a Persian fairy tale that was comprised in various forms of animation that aspired to look like the illustrative style of miniatures. Journey to the Beginning of Time [Cesta do pravěku] (1955) was his next feature and his first with actors that were used in tandem with special effects (such as stop-motion), which received a good deal of attention. Over the next fifteen years, Zeman would direct five further films that mixed effects with actors that saw him take inspiration from paintings, illustrations, engravings, drawings, and the works of Jules Verne (four of the six films, including this one, were based on his books). In total, Zeman directed ten feature films until his death in 1989. In 2012, a museum dedicated to his work in the Muzeum Karla Zemana opened in Prague.
Invention for Destruction [Vynález zkázy] was loosely based on the 1896 novel Facing the Flag by Jules Verne; writers for the film script were Zeman, František Hrubín, Jiří Brdečka, and Milan Vacha. Warner Brothers released an English-language dub in 1961 that re-titled it to "The Fabulous World of Jules Verne" (complete with anglicized names for the actors and a new introduction) This was his third feature film and his biggest breakthrough as a director, one that became wildly successful in its native country of Czechoslovakia (it wasn't a box office success with the English dub, but it had plenty of admirers) while inspiring plenty of versions for other countries to view. An admirer of Verne, Zeman set out to make a film that would resemble the line engravings in Verne's Victorian works (as originally illustrated by Édouard Riou, Léon Benett, and others). Zeman and company did their effects in numerous ways, such as hard runner paint rollers, matte paintings, lined filters, and matted-in sky backgrounds. This results in a diverting effect that practically jumps at you with its illustrative quality without turning out too gaudy. Given that there are still films in the last couple of years that have tried to replicate the look of certain illustrative works such as fairy tales and comic books such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), Invention for Destruction is a worthy curiosity to view in the sense of sight. There are numerous references to various Verne works since it isn't a straight adaptation, which results in scenes spent in the sea or with aircraft. As such, the movie is quite a dazzler in terms of its imagination, which is the star of the show more than anything. That isn't to say the perspective of the actors (led mostly by Tokos) is sidelined, it just means that one finds it to be an absorbing experience of entertainment in adventure more so than drama. Its climax is a particular gem in thrills, one that excites the viewer regardless of how easy the outcome might seem from viewers of the curious explorer. A director who strived to stimulate imagination and please the hearts of children, Karel Zeman would prove influential to future directors such as Jan Švankmajer, Terry Gilliam, and Wes Anderson, and it is obvious to see why. Invention for Destruction is a worthy delight for all audiences in its 83-minute runtime.
Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.
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