I’m not even sure where to begin with this one.
I suppose it would help if I pointed out that Professor Kleks first appeared in a classic Polish children’s book back in the Forties.
The author, Jan Brzechwa wrote three books about the character, and, in the Eighties, they actually filmed three movies about Professor Kleks.
But for some reason, the third one seems to have gone off in its own strange direction. After all, none of the Pan Klecks stories featured a trip into space.
As far as I know,
The movie starts with Kleks in his fantasy world singing about the world of myths and fairytales and how we no longer think they are important.
But it suddenly changes to an airplane landing in the real world. A brilliant young computer tycoon has returned home for Christmas to the orphanage he grew up in, bearing a gift for the children in a huge steel box.
It proves to be his latest model computer, and late that night it starts making strange noises. The Children all come downstairs and find the computer is on and actually talking (something its creator joked computers could only do once a year on Christmas Eve).
It tells them all a story, which it claims is the sort of story children will be telling in the future.
Which less than a quarter of an hour into this very long film gives us yet another major shift in setting.
In the future, the evil genius Mr. Electronic has developed a matter phantomizer which he uses to steal the cargo from a ship in the mysterious Triangle of Titans. A brave space commander, Max Benson, played by the same actor who played the visiting electronics genius, gets blamed for the loss and summarily dismissed.
His son, Groszek ends up late for school as a result. The school is heavily regimented, mostly taught by robots, with all the kids identified by numbers only, and marching in step to the director’s orders (played, again, by the actor who played the director of the orphanage) as if they were mere cogs in the machine.
And darned inefficient ones at that.
In order to escape the director’s latest petty bit of bureaucratic revenge, the kids decide to put on a play, The Princess and the Pea. Only the young star, Agnieszka, is kidnapped before their rehearsal is over, and she is carried away to the Planet Mango. In order to repay the planet’s governor for all his help, Mr. Electronic has promised him a daughter — whom he got by the simplest and most direct means available: he stole her.
So Groszek decides to go and rescue her, with his class following him. He knows that the one person who can help them is the seemingly ageless Professor Kleks, but getting to his magical forest proves exceedingly difficult. They have to go to an abandoned robot dump and find one of the older model robots who is still capable of helping.
And once they finally reach Kleks’ forest, he, Groszek and his Father, all have to go into space to save Agnieszka.
I almost despair of summing up the plot of this film! There is so much going on and so much of it is important (well mostly), while the story is set up with layer after layer at the beginning just to confuse things further. Everywhere you go, you are tripping over lots of characters, most of them important.
And just to confuse things even further, there is even a flashback to ancient China where another of Pan Kleks’ friends (who appeared in the first two films) gets a bit part.
The story ultimately revolves around a great treasure the aliens gave to the Chinese Emperor, which is placed in Kleks’ keeping for safety. Only Mr. Electronic and his henchman, Colonel Babel have been after it ever since, and may have finally got it.
But I do have to say that I love a lot of the little details the story brings to its future world. The kids’ school backpacks have a helicopter propellor on a shaft (which they leave behind when they enter school at the beginning of the day), while the kids wear identical white uniforms with black piping, which come complete with their number prominently displayed. The robot junkyard looks decidedly post-Apocalyptic and is full of dangerous, Mad Max-style electronics thieves, hoping to find valuable components to sell — and perfectly willing to attack any else who comes there; while hovering in the background for most of the story is the Rock Moon, a big flying saucer carrying a permanent concert tour across the Galaxy.
It’s hard not to see the painfully regimented school life as a comment — mind you, a very cautious one — on life under Communism, particularly as it is thrown into sharp contrast with Mr. Klek’s anarchic magical world, with its forest full of monsters. One of the most intriguing moments comes when the kids finally learn the way to Professor Kleks and in the very next scene, we see them all in colorful outfits of various styles. All the painful conformity is suddenly gone — and without an explanation.
The effects are…variable, tending towards laughable. The spaceships aren’t too bad, although not a lot is asked of them. When we see Groszek flying along with his backpack it is a rather obvious process shot, with the wire holding up the kid showing briefly. The robots aren’t bad, with a strong Sixties toy robot sort of vibe, but they don’t do much and most of them just roll around on wheels (legs are a much bigger problem for a guy in a suit. The monsters in Pan Klek’s forest have interesting designs and several of them would definitely be scary to kids, but they lack detail and the puppets just aren’t very expressive.
However, the worst of these is Kleks’ pal, Melo the Laugher. He looks like a goofy cartoon character mascot from a low-budget theme park. Again, there is no detail to his head and it has no moving parts other than his mouth and eyes. While it is true they made some effort to pad him out to the right shape to match the books, as soon as he starts moving his suit looks more like a suit than ever before. I suppose under the best circumstances it would be hard to pull off.
But then I grew up with the first live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, so it is easy to have higher standards.
Kleks is sometimes called “Professor Inkblots” which would appear to be a more literal translation of the name. He is usually portrayed as liberally spattered with multi-colored inkblots and multicolored hair. Curiously this is rather downplayed here (even though he is described as having multicolored hair), where we see a few discrete bits of color when he is darkhaired, and, when we see him with white hair, there is just the faintest tinge of color here and there, like the blue wash a lot of elderly women used to use.
And then there are the songs. In fact, there are a lot of them, in a remarkably wide selection of styles, served up with marching kids, or a big production number Mango lullaby (“a cross between a mamba and a tango, with a bit of a minuet”) guaranteed to wake any hibernating bear, or a full scale rock concert disco show at the climax.
I’ve compared the plot of this film to the only sources I could find about the third book, Professor Klek’s Triumph, and there is no real similarity, other than people going off on quests. I have no idea why they didn’t adapt the third book instead — or follow this new tale with a version of Professor Klek’s Triumph. It would take thirteen years before they got around to filming it — and then only as a much shorter mostly animated film, with the actor who played Kleks, Piotr Fronczewski, only appearing as the voice of an entirely animated character.
In fact it seems strange to me that Piotr Fronczewski who played Kleks didn’t go on to play him in countless other films. After all, he was only in his Forties at the time. He is still alive and working, mostly in voice overs (He provided the voice of Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible for the Polish version of The Incredibles). He even served as narrator of a recent biopic about Jan Brzechwa and his creation of Professor Kleks. Was this perhaps one of the unexpected consequences of the fall of the Iron Curtain? Or did Professor Kleks fail to gain a big enough audience for this film?
It’s really hard to begin to assess this film. There is so much of it, and so much of it is weird and eccentric. Its story within a story within a story setup is a bit unwieldy, and you have to wonder why some of these things are in here. But it is quite entertaining in its weird sort of way and perhaps it is the sort of film children would love best. I honestly have no idea how it would be received by Western viewers were it ever to get wider exposure.
However, I can’t help noting that the first book was published in English for the first time a few years ago.
You never know, it might stir up a bit of interest in the old Professor again…
rivets on the poster 