Original title: Baron Prásil

Karel Zeman is one of cinema’s great fantasy specialists, a Czech surrealist whose finest work mixes live-action, cut-out animation and object animation to quite startling effect, a director in clear line-of-descent from the pioneering Georges Méliès. He began with short, experimental films where he honed his trademark technique before moving on to create a string of equally offbeat feature films, of which this adaptation of Rudolph Erich Raspe’s stories about that most famous teller of tall tales, Baron Munchausen, was the third. Like all of his work, it’s clearly a fantasy film but beyond that attempts to classify it become a lot harder.

This version of the story begins in the same way that Nathan Juran’s film of H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon would begin two years later, with travellers to the moon – in this case, Tonik (Rudolf Jelínek), or Tony in the English translation, a cosmonaut from an unidentified East European nation – finding to his dismay that he’s not the first to set foot there. He finds that the characters from Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, Cyrano de Bergerac (Karel Höger) and Munchausen (a brilliant performance from Miloš Kopecký) have all beaten him to it and worse still, they initially believe him to be a native of the moon. The Baron hitches a ride back to Earth aboard an airship powered by a herd of winged horses, taking Tonik with him, landing in Constantinople during the 18th-century Ottoman Empire. Tonik falls in love with Princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), a woman being held hostage by the Sultan (Rudolf Hrušínský) which leads to all manner of problems for him and Munchhausen. After a series of episodic adventures in which they fight epic sea and land battles, leap off cliffs aboard horses, Munchausen is carried off by a giant bird and meets a mermaid and all are eventually swallowed by a giant fish that whisks them off to the North Pole it ends, as all good fairy stories must, happily for all involved.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is a wildly imaginative adventure, surprising at every turn and packed with indelible images that have rarely been equalled by anyone else. It’s not hard to see why the likes of Tim Burton, Ray Harryhausen, Wes Anderson, fellow Czech Jan Svankmajer and Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam were so enamoured by Zeman’s work (“He did what I’m still trying to do,” Gilliam is quoted as saying in the book Terry Gilliam: Interviews, “which is to try and combine live action with animation. His Doré-esque backgrounds were wonderful.”) They’re films that look like no other, a dizzying mix of genuinely fantastical imagery with bravura action scenes (one battle scene takes on an almost psychedelic, hallucinatory tone), romance, and even comedy. There are many very funny moments here, from Munchausen and the Sultan interrupting their deadly serious sword fight to sporadically continue their chess game to the Baron and Tonik manfully trying to batter down a door only for Bianca to nonchalantly slide it to one side allowing them to escape.

In keeping with that Méliès influence, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen often feels like a silent film, as much out of time as the character, yet at the same time still remarkably cutting edge and contemporary, It’s fanciful, absurd and even at time nightmarish, as when a swarm of vultures swoops into a ravine to feast – mercifully off-camera – on the body of a fallen rider. Today we take the mix of live-action and animation almost for granted and the use of CGI has further blurred the distinction between the tow. In the 1960s, though it certainly wasn’t unheard of – Disney had been doing it for decades – nothing had ever quite looked or felt like Zeman’s films and The Fabulous Baron Munchausen caused a stir wherever it played, critics falling over themselves to praise its offbeat charms.

Some of those critics hailed it Zeman’s finest work. That honour might instead be afforded to the startling Vynález zkázy/Invention for Destruction/The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958), based on Jules Verne’s 1896 novel Facing the Flag and several of his short stories, though in truth, any one of his feature films (Cesta do praveku/Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), Bláznova kronika/A Jester’s Tale (1964), two further Verne adaptations, Ukradená vzducholod/The Stolen Airship (1966), based on Two Years’ Vacation and The Mysterious Island, and Na komete/On the Comet (1970) based on Hector Servadac, Pohádky tisíce a jedné noci/Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor (1974), Carodejuv ucen/Krabat the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1978) and his final film, Pohádka o Honzíkovi a Marence/The Tale of John and Mary (1980)) could end being someone’s favourite. Zeman frequently used the work of other artists as inspiration – as Gilliam noted, here it was Gustave Doré while other films borrowed from Zdeněk Burian, Matthäus Merian and the Art Nouveau movement. And yet for all his magpie tendencies, his films remain utterly unique, a little nexus of weirdness that continues to inspire and enthral and which, despite the seeming primitiveness of the techniques used, have never grown old. One suspects that they’re going to stand the test of time far better than many modern bloated, CGI-laden fantasy films. Indeed, his influence is such that in his homeland, a museum dedicated to his work, the Muzeum Karla Zemana, opened in Prague in 2012.