a.k.a. Cesta Do Praveku
company: Ceskoslovensky Statni Film
year: 1955
runtime: 93′
country: Czech Republic
director: Karel Zeman
cast: Vladimire Bejval, Petr Herrman,
Zdenek Hustak, Josef Lukas
not on home video in the USA
Back when I was young and well before my mother thought it suitable to subject me to the various video store delights to which I wished to subject myself I was a child of the local public library’s fledgling video selection. Seeing as I was between the ages of four and six at this stage in my development it’s very difficult to remember everything that we might have checked out – even with this handicap two titles stand out quite clearly in my mind.
The first is the film that, more than any other, might have set me on my troubled course to WTF-Filmdom – the positively inimitable KING KONG [1933]. It’s difficult to gauge the impact that Willis O’Brien’s fantastically animated creations had on my mind but one thing was for sure: I was a dinosaur fan for life.
I’m sure that my mother’s library account from that time will attest to the fact that, between the years of 1987 and 1990, the tired old VHS print of KING KONG saw considerable action. It was another video, however, that found its way home with us nearly every time we left the pre-renovation-era Asheboro Public Library. . . one that would do more than play on my childish imagination. . . one that would create such a thirst for additional knowledge that, by the time I was seven years old, my personal library was filled to the brim with dinosaur books and videos that ranged from the highly informative to the useless and trashy.
And it was hosted by, of all things, an omnipotent purple puppet of an owl.
Mr. Know-it Owl, a lovable puppet with a globe and a library, had a number of informative videos out in the late 1980′s, it seems, covering everything from animal life to how to clean your ears. I can’t remember seeing any of the rest of that nonsense, but I know for a fact that a well-worn video cassette in an over-sized plastic case was in my mother and I’s check-out stack more frequently than I could count – the one with the small silhouette of a brontosaurus gracing the center of it’s front cover.
DINOSAURS & STRANGE CREATERS it was called and, as a youngster, I thrived on it. Mr. Know-it Owl himself is almost entirely lost to my memory by this point, but who could forget the assortment of stop-motion animated creatures from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras? For whatever reason, the most prominent of these, in my mind, is a well-rendered giant sloth which may or may not have been attacked by a saber-toothed tiger in the end. Also taking up its share of gray-matter is the lumbering Tyrannosaurus Rex, who spends a large amount of his on-screen time standing over and nibbling on something dead.
Mr. Know-it Owl’s videos are well known for including previously shot material from a variety of sources – I have no way of knowing whether the dinosaur footage I remember was newly produced or not, though I highly suspect the latter. At the time the series was released, much of the information known about dinosaurs had already been or was in the process of being revised in accordance with new discoveries – so by the time I saw these dinosaurs and strange creatures the science behind them was already hopelessly out of date.
Not that I particularly cared at that age.
It’s a real pity, then, that I stumbled upon the film to which this review is devoted so late in my development – I first remember seeing it for sale under the title JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME and on the Goodtimes Family Theatre label very late in my elementary school career. It was on sale for quite some time at the local Wal-Mart but I never had an opportunity to actually buy it. When a friend of mine loaned it to me a couple of years later I was considerably less impressed with it than I would have had the potential to be as a younger child – by this point I had come full circle and was more interested in dinosaur films for the violent (though rarely graphic) fun and the film left me more than a little cold.
Not the least of that version’s problems was the quite-horrendous overdubbing provided by New Trends upon its theatrical release in the United States in 1966. Synchronization problems were, if memory serves, rampant throughout the running time of the feature and, though the stop motion work was amusing enough, the characters and plot provided proved difficult for me to engross myself with. Then there was the obviously tacked-on beginning and end – all in all my one viewing of the US version of the film was a less-than-enjoyable experience that mostly involved my hitting the fast-forward button on the remote.
It’s a pity, really.
A couple of weeks ago – while hunting down my horrendous VHS of PLANET OF DINOSAURS [1978] – this film came to mind again. Being the kind of person who loves to give films that irked me in the past a second go and knowing that I could probably produce an article regarding it for this site – regardless of the critical outcome of another viewing – I began hunting up the various details of the production. It took but a single trip to the IMDB for the unpleasant nature of JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME to start making sense. The moment I discovered that, in its original form, it had been a Czech children’s film from cinema visionary Karel Zeman I was on the prowl.
Before long I was face to face with CESTA DO PRAVEKU (TRIP INTO PREHISTORY) – a film that proved to be much better than my memories had led me to believe.
We begin with a fade in to the leader of the group of four children who will be our only human characters for the duration of the film as he patches up a very worn journal. He introduces us to his three friends via a photograph of them in his journal, though one is only present as a shadow since he was the one taking the photograph, and gives us a brief tour of geologic history and of the stories inspired by the creatures that dwelt in pre-history. Zeman takes this opportunity to give props to the writer who seems to have influenced him considerably – Jules Verne (Zeman would go on to film a number of Verne’s stories) – and to make a sort of parallel between his film and Verne’s novel A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH.
After this short intro, the simple but entertaining story begins to unfold – four friends, complete with camping equipment and a camera, head their boat into a mysterious cave to investigate. Upon exiting it they discover themselves stuck in the middle of the last ice age. After camping for a night on the ice they discover that, the further they follow the river that flows out of the cave, the warmer the weather seems to get. Soon they stumble upon something impossible – a woolly mammoth that’s very much alive and spending its time leisurely munching on the surrounding foliage. After traveling a safe distance the group docks their boat and heads out to explore the land. There they discover the cave dwelling of a primitive man – complete with harvested mammoth tusks and early examples of painting.
After witnessing a sparring match between two fur-covered rhinoceros and nearly losing one of their own to a man-made mammoth trap, the four head back to the river to continue their journey into the earlier half of the Cenozoic age – from the Quaternary period into the Tertiary. The further from the last ice age the group travels, the more life they encounter – the shores of the river are alive with ancient elephants, flamingos, herds of galloping giraffes, and even a saber-toothed tiger. At night the four dock in a swamp to avoid a raging thunderstorm that developed right over their heads and are pestered a bit by a horde of hungry alligators.
The next morning, hurried along by the appearance of a hungry leopard in their camp, the group heads out again. This time they see a number of antelope, more giraffes, and make special note of a rather well-done Unitatherium (some will recognize this as being the same animal that, in considerably more exaggerated proportions, attacked Richard Boone and company at the onset of their hunt for THE LAST DINOSAUR [1977]). Another day is soon expended and the boys dock again for the night, this time taking shelter in a tree who’s branches hang over the river (and their boat). In the morning, the leader of the group heads off to have a look around while the rest of the party loads up the boat and, not surprisingly, gets himself into trouble. He encounters a Phorornacus, a giant land-bound predatory bird, who wastes no time at all in chasing him all the way back to the boat.
Having survived his closest call yet, the boy takes time to ponder whether these giant birds might not have been the inspiration for legendary beasts like dragons and the roc. Not long thereafter it is discovered that the boys have entered the Mesozoic era and Pteranodons fill the sky around them. A brief battle ensues and one boy is knocked into the water – but the Pteranodons are frightened off and the four young adventurers are soon on their way again. They dock the boat once more and take to investigating the Cretaceous period flora, including towering conifers and ground-dwelling cycads, and soon come within safe viewing distance of a grazing Styrakosaurus. At this time in pre-history the galloping giraffes are replaced with herds of Iguanadons and the placid Unitatherium with an equally placid Stegosaurus. Back on the river they are greeted by two grazing Trachodons and a singular massive Brontosaurus.
As evening dawns the four witness a battle between the placid Stegosaurus and the vicious Ceratosaurus. The Stegosaurus emerges as the eventual victor – the clever use of its thagomizer too much for the Ceratosaurus – but has sustained injuries too severe for it to survive. As the sun sets behind it, the Stegosaurus dies. The next morning the boys paddle their boat to the shore where the evening fight took place, dock it, and take the opportunity nature has given them to see a real Stegosaurus up close and personal. They are in for a rude awakening when they return to the boat, however – while they were gone a large animal has wandered over it, cracking it in two and rendering it useless.
The boys take the event in stride, however, and in no time have constructed a raft – they continue their way down the river of time, out of the Mesozoic era and into the Paleozoic. A thick fog surrounds the raft and, upon lifting, reveals a sprawling Carboniferous period forest – awaiting them there are giant dragonflies, primitive amphibians, and a few pesky early reptiles that seem to think that the leader’s journal is their own.
With the river blocked by fallen trees, the boys set off to find the source of it on foot. They’re travels eventually lead them to the very start of the Cambrian period – an ocean from which life is first emerging. The boys discover a living trilobite to accompany the fossil one they’ve brought with them. The film fades out without ever letting us know how the kids manage to get back to civilization (presumably the way they came) and, instead, concludes on the uplifting note of them finding the beginnings of terrestrial life.
Without the distraction of a bumbling and inaccurate English dubbing or a hackneyed pseudo-religious Creation finale, Karel Zeman’s CESTA DO PRAVEKU proves to be a near perfect educational children’s adventure film. Suspense is short, save for a few situations involving various characters coming face to face with potentially dangerous prehistoric life, in this effort and the children never become removed from their civility, leaving them good role models for the youngsters viewing the film from the start. Even better is the zeal with which they investigate the prehistoric world that Zeman has so brilliantly brought to life, leaving viewers with the simple but all-important message that learning is fun.
From a technical standpoint the production is stupendous – Zeman successfully employs all of his tricks of the trade (beautiful and seamlessly integrated matte work, traditional animation, puppetry, and stop-motion animation) to bring a variety of worlds long-since-passed back into tangible reality – the Carboniferous forest is particularly stunning in its scale. Scientific accuracy was obviously important to the production and, aside from the quite forgivable inclusion of the Trachodon (a species created through faulty paleontology that is now known to be non-existent) and the fact that science’s view of dinosaurs has changed so drastically since the film was made in 1955, it holds up remarkably well today.
Critically speaking, Zeman’s stop-motion work is somewhat inferior to that of both Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien – making up for that is the fact that, in almost all respects, the other special effects methods he employs are superior. The aforementioned matte work is a prime example – they are seamlessly incorporated into shots to create a variety of effective illusions. Traditional animation techniques (as well as the cutout animation Terry Gilliam employed to much more absurd effect) are used effectively to represent some animals either at distance or in numbers (the galloping giraffes, for example). While these effects won’t impress anyone who feels that computer generated imagery is the end-all be-all of special effects technology, they hold up remarkably well and certainly won’t put off any less CGI-addicted crowds.
While Karel Zeman would go on to do much more impressive work (his complex compositions for such films as VENALEZ ZKAZY [1958] and BARON PRASIL [1961] are some of the most aesthetically amazing ever to grace a 35mm frame), CESTA DO PRAVEKU remains an innocent, well-intentioned, and remarkably successful edu-adventure film that should serve any parents wishing to keep their children heartily distracted for an hour and a half quite well. While I prefer the Czech version, those who wish to understand the dialogue being bandied about may wish to pick up the US cut of the film. While the inadequacies present in that version may have the ability to test the patience of the most jaded of film goers, the overall experience is still considerably less grueling than sitting through a number of other children’s programs that come to mind (bouncing musically-inclined anthropomorphic purple dinosaurs anyone?) and the kids should love it.
Harmless, entertaining, and educational without being pushy, this one comes highly recommended.
