THE FABULOUS BARON MUNCHAUSEN ***1/2
IDEA: After landing on the moon, Baron Munchausen whisks a cosmonaut away on a series of rollicking earthbound adventures.
BLURB: Building on the giddy old-fashioned fabulism and awe-inspiring artisanship of his prior two films, Karel Zeman crafts The Fabulous Baron Munchausen as a lapidary marvel, fueled by a gamboling imagination as boundless and fanciful as its titular character’s stories. Of course, in Zeman’s vision, the orgulous Munchausen is not a liar, but a raconteur whose yarns are rooted in an existent reality of swimming webbed-foot horses and pipe-smoking frigates, a colorful, shape-shifting storybook world realized before our very eyes. How could one deny it? Ornate landscapes and arabesques; blood-red plumes that overtake an army in hot pursuit; rides on mid-flight cannonballs; a myriad of mythical creatures populating the land, sea, and sky; all are tangible creations, forged through Zeman’s seamless, singular collage of live action, animation, and puppetry. Fastidiously composed and musically edited, the spectacle utterly shames most contemporary computer effects work, its intricate, handcrafted tactility an assertion of infinite material possibility. While the narrative of The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is inevitably but a trifling pretext for its visual bewitchments, the film does manage to make valuable points about the need for imagination, not merely as a form of aesthetic play, but as a practical complement of reason, as a necessary component of social and scientific progress. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen unleashes its often illogical fantasia as a kind of resistance, and, with childlike wonder and willfulness, continues to dream.
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