In 1977 Karel Zeman made his darkest film, Krabat, a cutout-animated tale of a hungry orphan who follows a raven to a sorcerer’s mill.
Krabat, also known as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, is an animated fairy tale. The orphan joins 11 other boys who work at the mill and learn magic. Shelter and knowledge come with the master’s control over life at the mill.
The animation gives that bargain an uncanny physical presence. Zeman built his paper characters from photographs of sculpted modurit models. Around these flat figures, actual flames flicker, water flows and a working mill wheel turns.
The materials make the mill feel like a place with weight and machinery, even as its inhabitants belong to a fairy tale.
Watch Krabat for the unease that builds as you settle into the mill’s routines. Shelter and the chance to learn magic bind the boy to an apprenticeship under the master’s control, and the handmade animation makes the comforts of belonging feel inseparable from that dependence.
