During the war he worked as a head of advertisement at Dům služeb in Brno. Film director Elmar Klos came to Brno to film a newsreel about window-dressing competition, which Zeman won. Klos offered Zeman a job at Zlín's animation studio.[9] After some consideration (his wife and children were already established in Brno), Zeman accepted the job in 1943.[8] At the studio, Zeman worked as an assistant to the pioneering animator Hermína Týrlová, and in 1945 he became the director of the stop-motion animation production group.[11] The same year, in collaboration with Bořivoj Zeman, he made his first short film, Vánoční sen ("A Christmas Dream"). The short, which combined animated puppets with live-action footage, marked the beginning of Zeman's experiments with new techniques and genres.[12]
Zeman then went on to solo work, including a series of satirical cartoon shorts starring a puppet called Mr. Prokouk; the series was a wide success and the character became a Czech favorite.[2] A bet Zeman accepted, challenging him to discover a method of working with glass in animation,[12] led to the unusual short Inspirace ("Inspiration," 1948), which tells a wordless, poetic love story using animated glass figurines.[8] Zeman then went on to the half-hour film Král Lávra (1950), based on the satirical poem by Karel Havlíček Borovský;[11] the film won a National Award.[8] In 1952, Zeman completed his first feature film, Poklad ptačího ostrova ("The Treasure of Bird Island," 1952). It was based on a Persian fairy tale and took its visual inspiration from Persian paintings,[11] combining multiple animation techniques in two- and three-dimensional space.[12]
It was in 1955, however, that Zeman began the work for which he is best known: six feature films designed artistically to combine live-action and animation techniques.[4] These were:
Zeman died in Gottwaldov (present-day Zlín) on 5 April 1989,[2] a few months before the Velvet Revolution.
Legacy
Zeman's works were influential to the Czech animator Jan Švankmajer,[18] as well as to the filmmaker Terry Gilliam,[19] who said of Zeman: "He did what I'm still trying to do, which is to try and combine live action with animation. His Doré-esque backgrounds were wonderful."[20] The filmmaker Tim Burton described Zeman's creative process as "extremely inspirational" to his own work, and identified Zeman and the animator Ray Harryhausen as his influences "in terms of doing stop motion and a more handmade quality … Karel Zeman did that amazingly."[21] Harryhausen himself also spoke in interviews of his admiration for Zeman,[22] and the films of the director Wes Anderson have included homages to Zeman's works.[23]
The film historian Georges Sadoul identified Zeman as having "widened the horizons of the eighth art, animation," adding:
He is justly considered Méliès's successor. He undoubtedly brings the old master to mind, not only because he is an artisan impassioned by art, creating his "innocent inventions" with infinite patience rather than with large budgets, but also because of his ingenuous and always ingenious fantasies. Less intellectual than Trnka, but nonetheless his equal, he has great zest and a marvelous sense of baroque oddities and poetic gags.[12]
On the occasion of an animation exhibition in 2010, curators at the Barbican Centre said of Zeman: "although his influence outweighs his global fame, he is unarguably one of the greatest animators of all time."[23]
Entrance to the Karel Zeman museum
In 2012 a museum dedicated to Zeman and his work, the Muzeum Karla Zemana, opened near the Charles Bridge in Prague.[24]
^ abHames, Peter (2009). Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. p. 188.
^Wellner-Pospisil, Michael (2002). "Le Méliès tchèque" (in French). Festival International du Film de la Rochelle. Archived from the original on 8 December 2015. Retrieved 15 June 2013.
^ abcdeNováková, Markéta (March–April 2001). "The Fabulous World of Karel Zeman". Ahoy: Newsletter of the Czech Center New York. 6 (2). Published online: "The Fabulous World of Karel Zeman". Jules Verne: Andreas Fehrmann's Collection. Retrieved 2 September 2012.
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