To cut a long story short, several months ago, something reawakened my long, long-dormant interest in cinema. Among many detours I’ve taken recently into everything from sleaze to horror to softcore to noir to indie to award-winning, I pulled up Wikipedia’s page that lists the Criteron Collection’s releases, started at the top, and read about many movies I’d never noticed before. Spine numbers 1015-1017 caught my eyes, and this morning, spine number 1017 made them pop out of my skull.
Criterion’s set for those numbers is called Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman and it’s a collection of Journey to the Beginning of Time, Invention of Destruction, and the blissfully weird and wonderful Fabulous Baron Munchausen. I picked this one for no other reason that it’s in color and thought it might be a little safer to avoid very old stop-motion brontosaurs and keep an increasingly skeptical ten year-old kid from scoffing. Now, though, I’m sure any of the three would have been fine. Zeman is quoted in the box art as saying “I have only one wish: to delight the eyes and heart of every child.” The child in our house was completely delighted by this silly old movie. He laughed out loud throughout it and said “That was FUN!” when it finished.
It’s true that the kid was more pleased by the movie than the grownups, but that doesn’t mean we were disappointed. This is a weird, weird movie, and made with a sense of anything-goes whimsy. It’s like watching a dream unfold, with camera tricks and such a curious mix of live action, animation, and miniature work. I’m so glad that we’ve introduced our kid to old movies and old special effect tech before that preteen seriousness and skepticism kicks in, because it’s the sort of mix of playful images that I can easily, easily imagine some too-cool-for-school classmate of his responding with an eyerolled “That’s not REAL!” It’s not, not even remotely, but it’s strange and beautiful and so pleasant to see that even though the story is so slight that the Baron’s tall tales seem perfectly natural within it, it didn’t matter. It’s not about the narrative, it’s about the experience.
I don’t want to oversell this in a world where special effects have made everything possible, but this mix of visuals just kept surprising me at every turn, especially when a shot looks like the actors are in front of an animated background, and then when they move, we see that some of it is actually the foreground. Imagine the Yellow Submarine film, with all of its tricks, only with the actual Beatles in it. That could be a little bit like this.
The plot doesn’t really matter much, but in something that might be the modern day, an astronaut visits the moon and finds Munchausen living there with four famous friends from literature. Munchausen insists that this astronaut must be a moon-man and returns him to Earth on a ship carried by winged horses, only Earth’s not yet in the modern day. It’s the time of gunpowder cannons, Turkish tobacco, ship-eating leviathans, and giant birds. Munchausen and the moon-man both fall for the charms of a captive princess and enjoy a friendly rivalry to win her favor. It’s an unpredictable movie with sight gags and slapstick and harmless villains. Most of it is told visually. There’s not quite as much dialogue as there is narration, but much of it, like a silent film, just unfolds to music.
I’m glad that I chose Criterion’s box, because it comes with two other movies that I’m sure we will enjoy when we get some time next year. However, I have to note that the box is one of Criterion’s sillier presentations. It’s in a thin and probably fragile cardboard contraption that unfolds to reveal pop-up artwork. It really captures the spirit of Karel Zeman’s visuals, but I’d honestly prefer a more minimally-designed plastic clamshell to better protect the three Blu-rays. If you’re interested in just this movie, don’t need quite all of Criterion’s bells and whistles, and would like a simpler and much less expensive package, then Second Run has released Munchausen alone on region-free DVD and Blu-ray, and you can order it from them here. I won’t claim that I loved this film, but I liked it enough to want to give it a big hug when it finished for being so odd, and Second Run’s release would stand up to that kind of treatment.
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 