Journey to the Beginning of Time

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)

Cesta do pravěku

Four boys living the excitement every boy dreams about!

Four schoolboys go on an awe-inspiring expedition back through time, where they behold landscapes and creatures that have long since vanished from the earth.

Date of release
1955-08-05
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (83)
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Adventure, Fantasy, Family, Science Fiction
Director
Karel Zeman

Casting

Interesting facts

Journey to the Beginning of Time is a 1955 Czechoslovak science fiction adventure directed by Karel Zeman, produced in colour using a combination of 2-D and 3-D models. It was the first of Zeman's productions to include actors in conjunction with stop-motion and special effects. It won awards at the International Film Festivals of Venice and Mannheim. In 1966, Cesta do pravěku was dubbed into English, creating a modified US version, Journey to the Beginning of Time.

Production

Zeman's use of unorthodox and seamless production techniques ensured that the film was free of jerky stop-motion sequences and grainy splicing of stop-motion with real-time footage that characterised Hollywood's animated films until the advent of computer-generated imagery.

Zeman was heavily influenced by the palaeo-art of the celebrated Czech artist Zdeněk Burian (1905-1981), and much of the film's imagery was inspired by Burian reconstructions that had been painted under the guidance of Czech palaeontologist Josef Augusta (1903-1968).

In addition to numerous miniature animal models and 2-D 'profiles', Zeman also used larger models of heads and bodies of animals (including a full-sized 'dead' Stegosaurus and swimming woolly rhinoceros, Brontosaurus and Trachodon models), as well as life-sized model plants (as in the Carboniferous forest sequence, and the encounter with the Styracosaurus).

Cesta do pravěku was made on what would be considered a small budget by Western film-makers. It discussed the various time epochs as defined by palaeontologists and the types of animals typical of those periods, using information known in the 1950s.

In 1966, another version of the film was released in the U.S. by William Cayton whose company had been marketing Russian animated cartoons and feature films from the 1940s and 1950s, especially those of the famous Soyuzmultfilm studios (well known titles included The Firebird, The Frog Prince, Beauty & the Beast, The Space Explorers, and The Twelve Months).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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