The Golden Compass – 2007 (WINNER)
The effects for this movie were great for their time, far surpassing other attempts at creating realistic CGI. The movie’s big effect was the daemons, which were animal representations of the characters’ souls. They were in nearly every scene in the film. Where there was a person, there was an animal. There were close to 1,200 CGI shots in the movie, and for the most part they were incredibly well-done.
All sorts of animals were portrayed and in 2007, CGI creatures were still hard to create. But here, they seemed to have gotten it right. All the daemons in the movie were completely CGI, but they didn’t move stiffly or stilted like many previous attempts in other films, nor were they so perfect they looked fake. The main character’s daemon was a shape-shifter, taking the form of many different kinds of animals throughout the film. It was a ferret, a wood mouse, a cobra, a wildcat, a moth, and a bird. The only one that really caught my attention in a bad way was Mrs. Coulter’s golden monkey, and even that was only in a few shots, and it was because his design looked a little strange, not like a real monkey. But I learned that the effects artists made him from three different species of monkey.
Something else the film did a great job of was the way that the live actors interacted with the CGI animals. If an actor has no physical object to work with when filming, the placement of their hands or their movements are difficult to match to the animation that is added in post-production. So the filmmakers used all sorts of objects for the cast to act with that were later replaced with the CGI daemons. The result was more realistic interaction between the two mediums.
Whenever a character was killed, their daemon would immediately evaporate in a cool burst of golden sparks and dust. Dust was a mystical element that, among other things, was supposed to connect alternate dimensions with each other. It was an effect that was also used whenever Lyra would get psychic visions from her alethiometer. The animated swirling dust and shadowy images were captivating.
And finally, there was the race of talking polar bears. They were integral to the story, so their design had to be handled with care, and the effects animators did some fine work. In their big scene, two of the bears had an epic battle that was completely CGI and incredibly realistic. It was a fight to the death that was exciting to watch, and it was a bit of a shock when Iroek Byrnison clawed his opponent’s lower jaw off, ending the battle.
Aside from that, the half-real and half-fantasy London city-scape was awesome. Also, the flying witches were interesting, though sometimes they looked too much like they were strung up on wires. And the final shot of the movie in which an air-ship flies off into the shining Aurora Borealis was pretty spectacular.