1904: THE IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE

Director:  Georges Méliès
Length:  20 minutes

 

   This movie begins with an eccentric gentleman, played by director Georges Méliès, who convinces a room full of stuffy society types to join him on an improbable-sounding journey in an untested experimental vehic—wait, this is sounding familiar.  They don’t go into space in this one too, do they?  They do!?  Oh, goddammit!

   But I kid.  This is “Impossible Voyage”, Méliès’ spiritual successor to “Trip to the Moon”, based on the play of the same name by Jules Verne, and though it borrows heavily from his previous film, it’s not a rehash.  The movie opens with the aforementioned stuffy society types taking a tour of the special locomotive factory, before embarking on their journey.  The first leg of their voyage is not so impossible:  a standard train ride to Switzerland.  But after this they travel into space, flying into the mouth of the sun in a shot taken directly from “Trip”.  It’s okay, though, because they brought along a giant freezer to keep them cool!  After escaping the sun, they end up swimming a submarine through the ocean, watching jellyfish swim by, until a fire in the engine room explodes the vessel out of the sea and back to terra firma.  Along the way they manage to crash at least one vehicle on every single leg of their journey.  Again: must be a French thing.

   This movie is my favorite so far.  I love the set design—the environments are complex, colorful, and multilayered.  I believe they used painted wooden image at different depths, like a giant diorama, but it’s so seamless that it looks more like a live-action/animation hybrid, with characters even interacting with the painted images.  And the sets are not just intricate but dynamic, with rotating pistons on furnaces, steam erupting from moving locomotives in the background while characters act in the foreground, and real water flowing over a waterfall while above it a miniature train travels across a model bridge.

   I could probably write several paragraphs about how almost each and every shot has so much going on in it.  The child in me, who used to love building things with Legos and K’Nex, really wishes he could have taken part in making this movie.  The scenes are so fun to watch that it doesn’t matter at all that this movie's so similar to “Trip to the Moon”, nor that Méliès shows few signs of having borrowed from Porter’s more advanced narrative technique.  I’m gonna miss him after I don’t have any more Georges Méliès movies to watch.