page_title: Karel Zeman
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Karel Zeman / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Entrance to the Karel Zeman museum
context_page_description: Karel Zeman was a Czech film director, artist, production designer and animator, best known for directing fantasy films combining live-action footage with animation. Because of his creative use of special effects and animation in his films, he has often been called the "Czech Méliès".
context_section_description: Zeman's works were influential to the Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, as well as to the American filmmaker Terry Gilliam, who said of Zeman: "He did what I'm still trying to do, which is to try and combine live action with animation. His Doré-esque backgrounds were wonderful." The American filmmaker Tim Burton described Zeman's creative process as "extremely inspirational" to his own work, and identified Zeman and the American animator Ray Harryhausen as his influences "in terms of doing stop motion and a more handmade quality … Karel Zeman did that amazingly." Harryhausen himself also spoke in interviews of his admiration for Zeman, and the films of the American director Wes Anderson have included homages to Zeman's works.
  The film historian Georges Sadoul identified Zeman as having "widened the horizons of the eighth art, animation," adding:
  He is justly considered Méliès's successor. He undoubtedly brings the old master to mind, not only because he is an artisan impassioned by art, creating his "innocent inventions" with infinite patience rather than with large budgets, but also because of his ingenuous and always ingenious fantasies. Less intellectual than Trnka, but nonetheless his equal, he has great zest and a marvelous sense of baroque oddities and poetic gags.
  On the occasion of an animation exhibition in 2010, curators at the Barbican Centre said of Zeman: "although his influence outweighs his global fame, he is unarguably one of the greatest animators of all time."
  In 2012 a museum dedicated to Zeman and his work, the Muzeum Karla Zemana, opened near the Charles Bridge in Prague.
caption: Entrance to the Karel Zeman museum
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