Director/Production Design – Karel Zeman, Screenplay – Radovan Kratky & Karel Zeman, Based on the Novels Two Years Vacation (1888) and Mysterious Island (1874) by Jules Verne, Producer – Zdenek Stibor, Photography – Josef Novotny & Bohuslav Pikhart, Music – Jan Novak, Special Effects – Frantisek Krcmar, Arnost Kupcik & Josef Zeman. Production Company – Filmove Studio Barrandov/Filmove Studio Gottwaldov.
Cast
Jan Bor (Marek), Cestmir Randa (Professor Findejs), Karel Effa (No 13), Michal Pospisil (Jakoubek Kurka), Jan Cizek (Martin), Jan Malat (Pavel), Josef Stranik (Petr), Jitka Zelenohorska (Kathy), Jana Sedlmajerova (Renata), Vaclav Tregl (Editor), Vera Macku (Mother), Vaclav Svek (Captain Nemo)
Plot
Prague, the 1890s. At a demonstration of new airships, Professor Findejs is about to launch his newly designed ship when a nearby balloon explodes. His volunteers desert him and instead five boys climb aboard the ship, cut the ropes and take off. The airship sails away out to sea and the boys are stranded on a desert island. There is outrage in the press and among the public with a police investigation and a call for the boys’ parents to be brought to account. On the island, the boys find help provided for them and meals left by Captain Nemo. Meanwhile, a spy is despatched to obtain Findejs’s fireproof fuel formula. An expedition is sent to find the boys and arrives at the island, only for the crew to be waylaid by pirates who have infiltrated their ranks.
Karel Zeman (1910–1989) was a Czech film director who has gained a reasonable reputation – one wishes it was a far wider one as his films never cease to amaze. Zeman’s specialty came to be a blend of animation and live-action in unique ways that no other director has ever managed. Zeman first attracted attention with his second film The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958) and went on to make a number of other films with the same blend of animation and live-action. (See below for Karel Zeman’s other films).
The Stolen Airship was the second of Zeman’s adaptations of Jules Verne, preceded by The Fabulous World of Jules Verne and followed by On the Comet (1970). Here Zeman adapts one of Jules Verne’s lesser known works, the juvenile Two Years Vacation (1888) where a group of schoolboys are shipwrecked and end up surviving on a desert island, and the more popular and multiply filmed Mysterious Island (1874), a sequel to Verne’s most popular novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), in which a group of US Civil War soldiers are swept away on a balloon and land on a desert island where their survival is aided by Captain Nemo.
Zeman returns to the style he adopted in The Fabulous World of Jules Verne and Baron Munchausen (1962). There is the colour scheme that places much of the film in sepia tone. There is also the vehicles and sets that are often drawn or cardboard flats or Monty Python-styled cutout animations, lending a peculiar artificiality to what is on screen. There are also more of the novelty Steampunk inventions that turn up Fabulous World.
The airship takes off – Karel Zeman’s amazing blend of live-action and animation
The background is constantly littered with all manner of weirdly fantastical flying machines that look like they came have come to life from Victorian illustrations. We get some splendid inventions – a cigar-shaped airship with a cannon mounted on the underboard as a crew propel it through the air with giant paddles shaped like wings; a cabbed vehicle that travels on horse legs; airships that are driven by pedal-powered propellers. Captain Nemo has a submarine where the periscope has a tiny chimney hat and inside giant flywheels and a set of mechanical arms that appear and provide Michal Pospisil with a violin to play.
As the opening tour through history shows, The Stolen Airship is a film where Zeman places far more of an emphasis on slapstick comedy. In fact, there is just as much focus on the comic shenanigans set around the newspaper, the parents, the police officials and the spy as there are on the boys’ desert island adventure story, a whole side of the story that does not appear in the respective Verne books. The most appealing of the scenes are those with the spy (Karel Effa) who sits eavesdropping in a cafe with a set of fake arms to hold a newspaper up in front of him while he peers over the top with a periscope or listens in with a gramophone horn. Or later scenes where he imprisons the professor and his secretary with a set of handcuffs that are like mechanical arms attached to a chair.
