Moviecut—A Journey to the Beginning of Time

source: A Journey to the Beginning of Time

I saw this film years nearly 40 years ago both as a serial and a feature - and loved it both times. In the interim, I studied paleontology and did some work at the American Museum of Natural History. And in this age of digital dinos, it still manages to hold your attention. Quaint and sometimes corny, the fact that there are no adults involved in the film - and no caveman - keeps the endeavor from looking too campy. Let me tell you what strikes me about this film: I cannot, for the life of me, figure out whose idea this was. Was it Clayton's? The Museum's? Zeman's? The animated creatures in the film are very well designed (animated crudely but that was the state of the art). The detail of the animals as well as the detail of the backgrounds (most notably in the plant life) shows that someone very knowledgeable in geology was involved. I could say it was the Czechs, and that the American Museum tacked on its footage as an afterthought, but the prehistoric animals in the film are, for the most part, uniquely North American - most notably the Uintatherium which is named for a mountain range in Wyoming and the saber-toothed cat (not "tiger" mind you, because it's not related to tigers). Adding to the mystery is the fact that Edwin Colbert is credited with overseeing the film. In addition to being (at the time) the chairman of the geology and paleontology departments at the AMNH, Dr. Colbert was a very prominent name in paleontology in his own right, having put out some very well-written books on the subject. Though the movie is clearly a Czech film, he must have been involved from the very beginning, because the end result hints at input that could only have come from the model-makers and the curating staff of a major museum (the mammoth tusks and the Irish elk antlers which the boys find are clearly real specimens - no museum would lend out such material to a two-bit film outfit). To top it all off, the actor playing "Doc" in the 60s inserts looks like it's the same actor who played the role in 1955, only the kid is older as would be expected. Any ideas???

*CONTAINS SPOILER* I wish I could have seen this Czech fantasy film when I was a kid, because I know I would have loved it. A group of boys under the age of 16 find themselves on an unexpected journey by rowboat down a river of time that takes them deeper and deeper into "deep time" the more they row upstream. The boys are portrayed in a refreshing way and not as either a bunch of precocious smart-asses or total dweebs. In fact, they all seem to have been in the Czech equivalent of the Boy Scouts, because they handle their situation well. The viewer really gets a feel for what it would be like to be the only human beings around during the Tertiary period, the Carboniferous, etc. The environments are as difficult to traverse as any real-life wild place would be. In addition they are neither paradise nor horrifying. We have learned a lot since the 50s about the ancient Earth and know now that the boys would not be able to breathe the early Precambrian air. That's a minor problem.

I think I was probably about 8 or 9 when this film came thru White Bear Lake Minnesota. It seemed to have been ceaselessly promoted on local television and my friends and I had been playing out the scenes we saw in the commercial for weeks beforehand in the wooded vacant lot next to my house. Dinosaurs, mastodons, Pterodactyls... this movie had it all. When we finally saw it in the theater we loved it and it remained one of the top 2 or 3 pictures that really stand out from those years. But I only saw it that once. I often wondered about it over the years, but was never sure of the title. Maybe I just dreamed it? Finally seeing "Journey" again on DVD 40 years later, I'm aware of many lapses and shortcomings in the film that I never noticed when I was 8. The grafting of the New York City bookends onto the original Czech film is a marvel of economy and Ed Wood style film-making, but what the hey... it worked for me when I was 8. I have no idea what a child today would think of this film. I would hope they'd enjoy it. I would hope they would find excitement in identifying with the boys in the film. But I don't know... you can't count on today's kids to make allowances for the production standards of 1950's Czech film making. My biggest complaint is that the (pirate?) DVD i watched has a whole scene with the dialog wildly out of sync. Not just careless dubbing out of sync, but WAYYY out of sync.

I can honestly say with some certainty that this is the first movie I ever saw in my life. My family pretty much *never* went to the movies when I was a kid, but when I was about 8 years old my dad dropped us off at the theater on a Saturday afternoon to see this film. That was about 42 years ago, yet I still remember the scenes in the museum, and especially the passage through the tunnel from Central Park to the Ice Age. The movie was far more impressive back then of course, and I'm sure I never noticed the horrible voice-overs or even the fact that the actor's faces weren't even visible until after they emerged from the tunnel. To an eight-year-old that was not yet jaded by Hollywood, this was simply spectacular.

Digging into the pile of Czech flicks waiting to be viewed,I decided to look for a title with a short and sweet run time. Recently viewing his The Deadly Invention (1958-also reviewed) I was pleased to find another Karel Zeman title,which led to me travelling to the beginning of time. View on the film: Flickering illustrations of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth over the opening,co-writer(with William Cayton and J.A. Novotný)/directing auteur Karel Zeman continues the distinctive blending of live action with animation,in this case well designed,detailed stop-motion animation of dinosaurs. Whilst the animation is smoothly done, the blending of live action/animation never fully clicks,partly due to the camera being angled to place the dinosaurs on the corner of the screen to the cast, and also Zeman giving the live action elements a flatness,highlighting the interest solely being in the stop-motion. Leaving Jules Verne from the opening to go for a Boys Own Adventure, the writers disappointingly give little to make each boy stand out,or to spend time building the relationships, instead going for dry read-outs of facts relating to dinosaurs encountered on this uneventful journey to the beginning of time.

I remember the film well. It was an annual event on our local station, and, as far as my friends and I were concerned, a big one. It is amazing how the other comments from the Chicago area identify the series with the show "Garfield Goose." As far as I am concerned, the two are inseparable. For those of you not from the area, you don't know what you missed!

I recently saw the American version of this film, which makes the odd choice of having the four adventurers fall asleep in front of a display of a war canoe manned by a wooden depiction of a shaman, and then somehow finding a magical hole through time in a Manhattan lakeside park. It's an unneeded framing sequence which puts the story on hold for several minutes and tries to ground the movie in reality before the fantasy takes over. You can tell where the Czech part of the movie takes over because the "real" movie doesn't bother to explain anything, including how the kids are able to somehow move to the beginning of time from the edge of the ocean they come down to at movie's end, or exactly how they get back from the Big Bang. It's as if the Western importers didn't trust American ability to just accept a child's adventure fantasy at face value. Still, the dinosaur models in the museum are awesome even now and I didn't really mind all that much as a result. Now, on to the movie proper: there's a wonderfully organic feel to "Journey" as the director uses anything and everything in the way of special effects to immerse the audience into the boys' adventure - stop motion, puppets, animation, matte paintings, sculpture, and once in a while even some stock footage. Although the effects are somewhat primitive by today's standards (especially some of the animation), the story and sense of wonder are so well depicted that it just doesn't matter. For an "adventure" story, not a lot really happens, although the kids do have a couple of close brushes with various animals (there's a genuinely startling moment with a jaguar perched in a tree and a chase scene with a prehistoric killer ostrich that is both funny and exciting). And the four characters are almost complete ciphers - aside from determination,resolve,and a certain amount of all-pull-together camaraderie there's not a lot of actual human emotion or personality on display here. (And no one seems to ever be worried about the effect their unexplained absence must be having on their parents!) The journey's the thing in this movie, but it works for that very reason. One choice that firmly convinces me of the strength of the director's vision is the couple minutes at the end of the film that depict the actual "beginning of time" - instead of trying to blow the audiences mind with some titanic depiction of a Creator or the Big Bang, the Beginning is depicted with soft, indistinct, glittering shapes that leave almost everything up to the imagination. Brilliant. I had never heard of this film before I saw it as part of a research project, and now I want to see everything this director has done.

I do remember seeing this as a little kid sometime in the 1960s. And a good thing, too, as I was in the middle of the dinosaur kick that most little kids go through. I really only remember two things. A great dinosaur fight, after which I asked my dad how they made the dinosaurs bleed so realistically, to which he replied that there were men inside the models with buckets of red paint. I also remember the end, where the boys wake up in the Museum of Natural History, and we're supposed to wonder with them whether it was all a dream. I'm happy to know about this film again, and to know others remember it, too. And I just read an article in a fanzine called Prehistoric Times that rates the dino fight as one of the top 10 dino fights ever filmed!