The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is a Glorious Ode to Absurd Animation

As a lover of all things animated, it was a total joy to discover the 1962 Karel Zeman directorial effort The Fabulous Baron Munchausen. Hailing from Czechoslovakia, this highly off-the-wall motion picture beautifully merges live-action and hand-drawn animation in a fluid manner decades before the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? fine-tuned American cinema's approach to this same technique. Though nearly sixty years old at this point, many modern-day movies could stand to take more than a few cues from The Fabulous Baron Munchausen in terms of both merging animation and live-action seamlessly as well as how to take advantage of the stylized opportunities afforded by the medium of animation.


The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is primarily a visual exercise, with the two primary lead characters, the brash Baron Munchausen (Milos Kopecky) and his companion Tony (Rudolf Jelinek), going on a journey across various locations on Earth as a means to explore wacky imagery more than anything else. Their journey takes them to Turkey, the stomach of a whale and even to the Moon as well as to a competition for the romantic infatuation of Princess Bianca (Jana Brejchova). She's a figure Baron Munchausen is convinced he should easily be able to win over but who actually constantly defers her affections towards Tony.

All across these escapades, Munchausen, Tony and Bianca encounter a whole bevy of animated environments and objects that throw away any sense of reality with a wild and delightful abandon that provides a welcome contrast to modern era computer-animations insistence on emulating reality. Though we get the occasional Inside Out or Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that find beauty in using animation to create sights intentionally removed from the real world, far too much of our advanced animation technology in 2019 is used to simply recreate sights we can see in the real world already. Just look at images or footage from Jon Favreau's upcoming The Lion King remake, which uses ultra-realistic animation to zap all the color and personality from the original hand-drawn animated characters. Portly hand-drawn animated Pumbaa may not have been realistic but at least he was cuddly looking instead of realistically terrifying!

This means The Fabulous Baron Munchausen constantly finding new ways to use animation to emphasize the absurdities of its character antics is joyous to watch, especially since the script has a charming fairy tale logic to it that, rightfully, doesn't feel need to have every plot development grounded in an explanation. Castles can just turn into rockets if a match gets lit properly and why wouldn't they? The whole point of this movie is to create the dazzling animated sight of a castle soaring across the sky rather than provide some detailed belabored explanation as to how that would even be possible. I don't need explanations for absurdity, just give me the absurdity, please and thank you!

It's also a nice touch how many different genres of stories this singular story is able to cover in just 85 minutes. We get a high seas tale, a classic adventure story set in Turkey, a Jules Verne-inspired science-fiction opening sequence set on the Moon, the boundless visual imagination of The Fabulous Baron Munchausen cannot be contained to just one genre domain and this means we get to see its splendid visual sensibilities interpreted in a myriad of different ways. Clearly, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen constantly uses its surreal story to create some truly fascinating pieces of gloriously ludicrous imagery that could truly be only be accomplished in the medium of animation, and thankfully, all of the tiniest details of that imagery can be appreciated now more than ever!

As a cherry on top of this scrumptious visual sundae, modern-day video restoration technology now allows first-time viewers (like myself!) of this highly impactful feature to truly soak in all the beauty in display throughout The Fabulous Baron Munchausen. I managed to watch this movie on The Criterion Channel and the impeccable video quality of The Fabulous Baron Munchausen on this streaming service is truly exceptional-looking, whoever was in charge of polishing it up to look this good deserves a medal! With this digital restoration, the crispness of every frame is absolutely stunning and allows the colors of each vibrantly-realized locale to truly flourish. It's the ideal way to watch The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, an exquisite testament to the gorgeous imaginative possibilities of animation!