1.) Very little is the same as “Claymation”, which is actually a trademark term that Will Vinton productions came up with any used. Aardman animation (Wallace and Gromet, The Pirates, Band of Misfits, Chicken Run) don’t do Claymation – they animate plasticine.
Even in Will Vinton’s Claymation, they use armatures. It gives the figures stability and reproducibility. Sometiomes they dispense with it, but a lot of those human-shaped figures have metal armature cores. Will Vinton productions even made a short that showed this.
Jack the Giant Killer was deliberately made as a direct imitation of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. It not only has the same star (Kerwin Matthews), but the same Villan (Torin Thatcher*) and the Screenwriter for Seventh Voyage was the director for Jack. The animator was Jim Danforth, who did the effects for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao, and many other films, including When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (arguably his best film), a sequel to Harryhausen’s One Million Years B.C.. Danforth, I think, got a creputation as the “cut-rate Harryhausen”. The fan magazine FXRH did a piece comparing Jack with Seventh Voyage, much to Danforth’s detriment. The guy deserves more respect. He reportedly did finally work with Harryhausen on his last film, Clash of the Titans, although I don’t think he got any screen credit.
I loved Jack the Giant Killer when I was a kid. I finally got a copy on VHS several years ago, and saw it as an adult. It hasn’t aged well. The effects look goofier than I remember (The Dragon at the end looks less fearsome, and more like a mischievaous puppy dog), especially the cel-animated effects sparkles, while Seventh Voyage still looks awesome to me.
One that is missed was the 1932 German film The Mistress of Atlantis, starring Brigitte Helm of Metropolis fame. Although not a true retelling of H. Ridder Haggard’s She, it is an adaptation of Pierre Benoit’s novel L"Atlantide (or as I call it “She with the serial numbers filed”), where Atlantis is located in the middle of the Sahara and is found by French Foreign Legionnaires.
Another lesser known movie is the 1925 Italian silent movie Maciste in Hell where the Italian strong man goes to the Christian Hell.
There are a number of versions of this (including two filmed simultaneously with this one with most of the same cast, but in different languages). I haven’t seen any of them. Others have remarked on the similarities to She (and one clsaims that Benoit’s book rips off another of Haggard’s novels, The God of Gold). Film version of l’Atlantide apparently make a show of the Hall of Petrified Lovers, just as versions of She featured the Flame of Life and Ayesha’s dissolving her former lover with acid.
To my credit, I have read Benoit’s book it’s all based on.
Never saw any old Maciste films, although Og knows I saw enough of the 1960s ones.
Very different from the 60s peplum movies. You can find both the Mistress of Atlantis and the Maciste movie in this pack of 50 movies : Nightmare Worlds
To add to the list of little known movies : Stake Land. A 2010 vampire movies, where vampires and fundies “ally” to bring Armageddon.
The dragon was not CGI. If I recall correctly, it was stop-motion or animatronics. And (production) quality-wise, it should be good. It is a Disney movie after all.
Vermithrax Pejorative (the name of the dragon in Dragonslayer) was stop-motion animated, but its movement was computer-blurred in another of those permutations of “Go Motion”. Harryhausen reportedly said, on seeing it, “Nice Moves.” Of course, for some scenes they built full-size claws, head, etc. And even a full-size babny dragon. But most of the scenes were processed stop-motion.
And, though it was a Disney film, much of the effects work was handled by LucasFilm.
Just to clarify, though I’m sure Cal is aware of this, when he said computer blurred that also wasn’t CGI. They connected the armature to computer controlled servos so that there would be movement when the image was photographed, creating motion blur.
It was a technique subsequently used for Return of the Jedi AT-ST Scout Walkers sequences. I’m not sure if it was very successful as the finished films still have a jerkiness, and it sure sounds like a complicated procedure.
The most lesser known of my favorite films in this genre is The Boy Who Could Fly, a gentle love story with a light touch of fantasy. I am still in love with Lucy Deakins, and always will be. Anyone else know this movie?
Jay Underwood freaked me out when he played a robot in some other thing (looks it up, it was Not Quite Human) with this dead-eyed look on his face, so that bothered me as I watched The Boy Who Could Fly the first time.
I’m a big fan of the movie Mirrormask, written by Neil Gaiman and directed by his longtime cover artist / collaborator Dave McKean, produced by The Henson Company.
It’s a variation on the classic Through the Looking Glass format, and bears a few similarities to Labrynth (it was rumored that it was first drafted a Labrynth sequal, but Gaiman has said that’s not exactly true).
It’s creepy, trippy, and has a look and feel unlike anything before or since. It’s not perfect – the plot’s thin in a few points and some of the CGI is pretty rough around the edges – but it’s very, very worth checking out if you like movies like Labrynth, Dark Crystal, or The Neverending Story.
1.) There were several iterations of that “go-motion”. In some cases it was controlled motion (they did this with the miniature “flying bicycles” in E.T. – betcha didn’t know some shots were of miniatures. The spokes were properly blurred without the “strobing*” that gives a lot of stop motion its jerkiness.
2.) I don’t think they did this with the AT-ATs in Empire Strikes Back – the jerkiness that the “strobing” of stop motion gives to them adds a sense of verisimilitude to their mechanical motion. Ray Harryhausen wanted to do The War of the Worlds in the 1950s, back before George al did. If he had, his stop-motion tripods would’ve looked perfect.
3.) You don’t need computer control to give that blurring effect. David Allen did it with his winged demons in Equinox by just pulling on wires connected to the wings, and it worked fine.
4.) I believe that the computer blurring in dragonslayer and in mpire Strikes Back (for non-AT-AT scenes, like the long shots of the running tantaun) really were done by processing of the image, not by computer controlling of wires connected to the models, but it’s possibl that I’m wrong. That, however, has been my understanding of the situation.
*strobing is the jerky effect you get when you perform stop-motion animation of things moving rapidly. If you were recording an actual fast motion on film, it would blur. But when you photograph a still model, there’s no blur, and the image is unnaturally clear and sharp, something your mind is able to pick up on, even though the images are rushing by at 24 frames a second. It’s as if the motion had been stopped by a strobe light, like dancers at a disco, and you get the same sense of eerie dreaminess about the scene.
as noted, you can blur this by moving the item during the shot, or by image processing afterwards. (If you look at old Disney cartoons from the 30s and 40s, they wrre blurring individual drawings to eliminate the effet). Some, like Harryhausen, didn’t try to do anything about it. The wings on his pterosaurs, harpies, homunculi, and other things strobe to beat the band, and he never really cared. I think he liked the look of it.
One of my favorites is Six-String Samurai, an alternative history post-apocalyptic quest movie with a katana-wielding Buddy Holly and music by the Red Elvises.
