The Fabulous World of Jules Verne

A professor and his assistant are seized at sea. The man who takes them is a pirate; he wants the explosive the professor has been developing. The hideout is inside a volcano. Outside there are submarines, balloons, enormous machines and strange vehicles. The assistant tries to escape and meets a woman whose ship went down. The professor does not understand what he is working for; questions are put to him in the name of science and a weapon is built out of his answers. Karel Zeman directs. The film rests on an 1896 novel by Jules Verne and on other books by the author. It is a Czechoslovak production. The whole look of the film was made to resemble the steel engravings in the first editions of Verne's books; the drawings of Edouard Riou and Leon Benett were the model. Live action is placed between painted layers standing in front and behind, so that the actors appear to walk inside an engraving. Hatching lines were added by hand to nearly every surface, and that is how the illusion was completed. The film won the grand prize of the film competition held at the 1958 world exposition in Brussels. The matter it treats is the responsibility of the scientist; the professor wants no harm and makes the weapon all the same. Zeman does not stay in one technique; puppets, drawing, models and live action stand in the same frame. The narrative keeps a young audience in mind and does not show violence. Its limit is the acting; the characters are not finely drawn, the dialogue is simple, and the story stays dim beside the images. Who it is for: viewers who like old adventure films and handmade visual effects. Who it is not for: the characters are weak, the pace dated, and it ends in an explosion.