The Mask – 1994
This was a fun movie, but what do you expect for a movie starring Jim Carrey. He is the man with the elastic face. And the special effects did a fantastic job of utilizing his natural talent for extreme facial expressions, and exaggerated them for the zany plot of the film. My initial reaction was lukewarm, at best, but I spoke to a friend of mine who directed where my research was to go, explaining why the movie’s visual effects earned their nomination.
My first, and I’ll admit, uneducated opinion was that I’d seen these exact kinds of effects before in the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was also nominated for Best Visual Effects. The faces that became Tex Avery-like cartoons, the animated features, the extreme expressions. But here was the difference. Whereas Roger Rabbit was hand drawn animation that was composited into the live action, The Mask was all computer-generated animation.
It is a subtle difference, maybe, but The Mask did things that the former film could not. Often, when we saw the character’s face stretch, bulge, shrink, disassemble, or distort in any way, it was not animation laid over live action, but live action that was computer-manipulated into animation. That’s a pretty significant difference. When he began to spin like the Warner Brother cartoon character, The Tasmanian Devil, the computer once again stepped in. When his landlady tried to shoot him with a shotgun, and he bounced between the ceiling and the floor like Daffy Duck, it was the computer that did it, not hand-drawn animation.
As is becoming more common, the visual effects overlapped with the make-up effects, so we got to see Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey with an over-sized green head. The enlarged teeth enhanced his smile to comic proportions. And his fun and fanciful costume changes were like Superman spinning in a phone-booth. When the gangsters were shooting at him in the nightclub, he found several funny costumes in which to dodge the bullets, each quick-change done with a whirlwind effect. Then, when he spun Cameron Diaz on the dance floor, he really spun her. When he tossed her into the air, she somersaulted so fast and for so long, she was a blurry, spinning ball. I also really enjoyed it when the dog put the mask on and zany hijinks ensued! It was screwball comedy at its best.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie was when he encounters a street full of police officers. His solution is to instantly change into the crazy costume of a Latin dancer reminiscent of Carmen Miranda, complete with maracas, and sing a funny song. There were only few special effects in this dance scene, but the few that were there were done well, like when he leapt from a springboard, grabbed a light pole, and spiraled it down to the ground. It was simple but effective, amusing, and seamlessly executed, much like all the movie’s visual effects. So why didn’t I give the effects a full five stars? Because unfortunately, they just appeared to use the same effects over and over again, impressive though they were.