Krabat

After fifteen years spent in the genre of feature (or combined) film, the world-renowned director Karel Zeman returned to animation. With the advent of normalisation, the domestic film scene lost its creative freedom. After the historical feature film On the Comet (1970), the artist found a new space for self-expression in the "apolitical" fairy-tale sphere. After a series of stories about the sailor Sinbad, based on the Thousand and One Nights, Zeman made the haunting fairy tale horror The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1977), inspired by a book by the German writer (and Liberec native) Otfried Preußler, and co-produced with the then West Germany (NSR). The seventy-six-year-old filmmaker realized an uncompromisingly personal narrative, valorizing the Slavic roots of Preußler's story (it is a Lusatian-Serbian tale from the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, probably inspired by Indian influences). The duel between the witch master and his apprentice has deeper, mythological roots. Its protagonist is the abandoned orphan Krabat, who wanders through the winter wilderness and reaches a mysterious mill. There, along with eleven other boys, he studies the art of witchcraft under an old wizard master. However, Krabat breaks the rule of life in isolation: he falls in love with a village girl. She must then rescue her beloved and his friends from the power of the usurping, vengeful sorcerer... The balladic narrative is distinguished by its impressive, poetically gloomy atmosphere. It tells of the good and evil powers that the human heart can harbour. In The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Karel Zeman used a classic form of animated film: the flat technique augmented by the techniques of so-called three-dimensional animation. The film won numerous awards on the international scene and is still one of the best films made for children and young people in the 1970s and 1980s.