Cinema: The Seventh Continent

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The premise of this peculiar Yugoslav-Czech fairy story is the kind of wish that every child makes at least once: to drift away to a parentless, teacherless land.

On a ferry, a little girl's wicker basket is accidentally knocked overboard by a passenger. Like the owl and the pussycat, she and a young boy go to sea in pursuit, navigating their inflated raft by a primer-simple map of the six continents. When they want to go to the Red Sea it turns out to be red; the Black Sea becomes black. At last they arrive at a place where, the girl complains, "they forgot to color the water." An island rises from the clear waves, and the voyagers suddenly find themselves beached in a magical, adult-free paradise.

Plants spring up from pictures. Shells resound with strange and vibrant organ music. Paper sea gulls take flight across a cloudless sky. When the young voyagers peer through holes in the map they spy black and white children from other lands and entice them to walk and bicycle across the water to the seventh continent.

Back home, meanwhile, the parents of the missing children also go off the deep end. Pandemonium breaks out and the film suddenly turns into a satiric moppet's-eye view of adult life. A multilingual U.N.-cooperative group meets to solve the crisis—and babbles into Babel. A Committee to Encourage Optimism is formed, complete with clowns, dwarfs and dancing girls whooping it up convention style. Finally, the children come back for a brief visit and turn away from it all in lofty disdain, leaving their parents to founder in the generation gap forever.

Director Dusan Vukotic's parodies of TV commercials, bureaucracy and the like may be daring back home, but they sink slowly in the West. And the film's whimsy is often as thick as wet sand. Still, Vukotic's insights into child psychology are often ingenious, and his blend of animation and bright, appealing color occasionally makes The Seventh Continent look like a feat of Klee.