Journey to the Beginning of Time (, literally "Journey into prehistory") is a 1955 Czechoslovak science fiction adventure directed by Karel Zeman. Produced in color using a combination of 2-D and 3-D models, the film uses a documentary style to show extinct animal species behaving naturally in their own environments. 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 and partly re-filmed, creating the US version, Journey to the Beginning of Time.
Plot
The story involves four teenagers: Petr, the main narrator (Josef Lukáš); Toník, who also narrates (Petr Herrmann); Jenda (Zdeněk Husták); and Jirka (Vladimír Bejval). The teens want to find a living trilobite. During a break from school, they undertake a journey in a rowboat on a "river of time" that flows through a mysterious cave, emerging on a strange, primeval landscape. As they make their way upstream, they realize that they are travelling progressively farther back in time. On their journey, the boys face various perils and learn about prehistoric life.
Comparison to other works
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 pterosaurs, witness a twilight fight between a carnivorous dinosaur and a herbivorous one, encounter a Stegosaurus up close, and see one of their members, Petr, nearly chased down by a Phorusrhacos.
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. Filming took place on the Morava River near Bzenec Town in the Czech Republic at the nature reserve named (in Czech) Osypané břehy, the Slovak river Váh (near Galanta) and on studio sets.
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 some scenes, 2-D 'profile' images of animals originally depicted by Burian were filmed in real time (as in the Styracosaurus sequences), whilst other well-known Burian scenes were recreated in stop-motion using a combination of 2-D and 3-D models (as in the Deinotherium and Uintatherium sequences). Possibly for the sake of continuity, Zeman also used models or 2-D profiles when depicting extant species including bison, a python, flamingoes, vultures, various antelopes, giraffes, and a jaguar (which was briefly spliced with footage of a real animal in one of only three instances of live species footage). In some scenes, miniature models of the actors and their boat/raft were also animated.
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). The use of 2-D profiles and 3-D models animated by concealed means had the advantage of filming in real time without the need for labour-intensive stop-motion. Two of the film's prehistoric species were not based on Burian images; the Stegosaurus and the Ceratosaurus with which it fights in a twilight scene (it remains unclear as to why Zeman did not use Burian images in these instances).