Na kometě (Karel Zeman, 1970)

The Czechs do absurdist fantasy unlike anyone else, stamped through like a stick of rock with a tone that often manages a sense of delight without stumbling into inanity and underlying cynicism without turning morose. The darkly comic output of Jan Svankmajer would perhaps be the internationally best-known of the lot, but he's by no means alone. When veteran animator-director Zeman turned to adapt one of Jules Verne's particularly whimsical works for the screen, the outcome was foreseeable, and so it proves. Off on a Comet, featuring an assortment of posturing colonial-era factions making war on each other on a piece of North Africa knocked into space by a comet, is a visual feast, the style Python-era Terry Gilliam laced with Lotte Reiniger arabesque trimmings. It is also utterly daft and throwaway, with scant regard for logic or continuity, plasticine dinosaurs being the least of its follies. Along the way it slips in as many anti-imperialist statements as the communist censor will allow. Decent stuff for kids who can read subtitles, then.

5/10