Journey to the Beginning of Time
| Journey to the Beginning of Time | |
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| Directed by | Karel Zeman |
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Running time
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93 minutes |
| Country | Czechoslovakia |
| Language | Czech |
Journey to the Beginning of Time (Czech: Cesta do pravěku, literally "Journey into prehistory") is a 1955 Czechoslovak children's science fiction feature film directed by Karel Zeman. Produced 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, and won awards at the International Film Festivals of Venice and Mannheim. The documentary-type nature of the film showing extinct animal species behaving naturally in their own environments was most unusual for its era and foreshadowed many later TV productions that would depict prehistoric life for educational rather than purely entertainment purposes. Cesta do pravěku should not be confused with a dubbed and partly re-filmed US version of the film that was released in 1966 under the title Journey to the Beginning of Time.
Journey to the Beginning of Time is according to server Kinobox the best Czech science fiction film of all time.
The story involves four teenage friends who take a rowboat along a "river of time" that flows into a mysterious cave and emerges on the other side onto a strange, primeval landscape. The boy actors were Josef Lukáš (Petr, the main narrator), Petr Herrmann (Toník, who also narrates in part), Zdeněk Husták (Jenda), and Vladimír Bejval (Jirka). As they make their way upstream, they realise that they are travelling progressively farther back in time, and face various perils as they do so (but learn much about prehistoric life in the process). The animals depicted in Cesta do pravěku were never shown interacting with animals of other periods and it is assumed that different parts of the river represented distinct time periods. The plot is somewhat similar to that of the novel Plutonia (1915) by the Russian palaeontologist Vladimir Obruchev, in which a team of Russian explorers enter the Earth's crust via an Arctic portal (a huge depression in the Earth surface created many millions of years previously by the impact of a giant asteroid, into which prehistoric animals had entered), and follow a river that leads them through a sequence of past geological eras and associated animal life. Some scenes in Cesta do pravěku recall Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World, with four male protagonists exploring a prehistoric world where they find evidence of native human habitation, are attacked by a group of enraged pterodactyls, witness a twilight fight between a carnivorous dinosaur and a herbivorous one, encounter a Stegosaurus up-close, and see one of their members (Petr) pursued by a Phorusrhacos.
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