A few of mine are related to naval scenes. First off is “Sink The Bismarck”(1960) with some clips from the Bismarck’s first and last battle. Very impressive model work and the explosions seem pretty realistic, especially when the HMS Hood blows up. Not that I’ve ever seen a naval battle so just my opinion of course:
Next is the 1962 version of “Mutiny on the Bounty” and the attempt of the HMS Bounty and crew to battle it’s way around Cape Horn. Just a brilliant job with the model work and affects of heavy weather to really give you a great appreciation of the conditions those men had to endure. “Iron men” indeed. Much better effects than the 1984 version or “The Caine Mutiny” storm scene. Unfortunately there’s no full clip I could find for the whole sequence that I think lasted about 10 mins in the movie. Here is a short clip that does show you some of it however:
Battle of Endor from the Return of the Jedi. Really for me, the peak of the use of models for big effects sequences. Ten years later, we’d get Jurassic Park and its initial use of CG(though a lot of it was practical as well).
While it was indeed a spectacular opening - and I speak as one fortunate and old enough to have seen it in the theater in 1977 - is it really pre-CGI? I say that because I remember hearing after the movie came about about all the great special effects in it from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM).
Yup, all of the ship effects in the original trilogy were all done with practical effects (models, actual explosions, etc.) ILM did a lot of pioneering work for the first Star Wars film, but that pioneering was mostly in the realm of developing computerized motion control for the cameras, to allow a camera to exactly repeat a tracking shot. They revolutionized what could be done with SFX, but it was still all practical effects at that time.
The first fully CGI sequence which ILM did was the film of the “Genesis Effect” in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
The hang-glider part of Escape From New York. It looks like Kurt Russell is flying referencing a wire frame model of New York on a display. Actually it was an actual model of New York filmed in the dark with the outlines of the building made to glow (I forget how. Black light I think, but would that work?) Perfect hidden surface removal, real time rendering, 24 fps.
And of course, the amazing latex masks in Mission Impossible. Not the masks obviously, but the way you just have one actor play another and then cut to having the original actor peeling off latex, showing it was him all the time.
Just for reference, the two films which were seen as really pioneering CGI for use in special effects were Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984). Both were revolutionary for their times, but both of them, even back then, clearly looked computer-generated.
Everything Ray Harryhausen has done should also count in my favorites.
And Buster Keaton, does that count? He did a lot by simply filming it. He would be swept over a waterfall by jumping into a river and getting swept over a waterfall. The General shows a train passing about 1000 men and later falling off a railroad bridge, done by filming it as it passes about 1000 men and then having it fall off a railroad bridge. If that isn’t a special effect, Sherlock Jr. has scenes where Keaton plays the entire cast of a music hall show and all of the orchestra, done by re-shooting onto the same bit of film with different bits of the frame masked off. (A trick which I think Kubrick used in 2001 as well.)
Computer animation was incredibly primitive at the time. A top-of-the-line supercomputer at the time was capable of 160 MegaFLOPS, had 8 MB of RAM, and cost 5 million dollars. (A top-of-the-line video card today can do over 100,000,000 MegaFLOPS, has 32,000 MB of RAM, and costs 3 thousand dollars.)
(But there was some CGI in ANH–here is a video on how it was made.)
Frederick March, transforming from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. In the beginning of the transformation, he wore makeup that looked different depending on the color of light shining on it. By changing the color of the key-light, the black-and-white camera saw him change shape.
Lon Chaney, Jr., transforming from Larry Talbot to the Wolf Man. As time passed, the sequels got worse and worse, but the transformation sequences got better.
Two from Ray Harryhousen: the homonculus from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and the baboon and the troglodyte from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.
Mind-boggling opening shot; they didn’t really pull it off, but it is nonetheless audacious - https://youtu.be/m6vRzyM2wxM?t=138 King Kong (1933) The Big Clock (1948) - The opening shot starts on a pan of real skyscrapers at night, transitions to a miniature building, then pushes in to the live-action interior. Alas, there is no clip of it on YT. The Ten Commandments (1956)
If ‘not really before CGI, but not using CGI’ counts, I’ll add the Lord of The Rings hobbit with Wizard and Dwarf with Human shots, which use forced perspective and other tricks to make the hobbits and Dwarves look small, but no CGI that I’m aware of.