Category: Best Visual Effects

Fantastic Voyage – 1966 (WINNER)

The fact that this movie won its Oscar in the middle of the 60s is not lost on me.  It was full of bright colors that really looked great on the screen.  The world had really never seen anything like it.  The effects for this worthy winner were bold, inventive, and innovative.  In short, they were fantastic!

To save a man’s life, a submarine with five passengers is shrunk down to microscopic size and injected into the injured man’s body.  They have to navigate his circulatory system until they reach to his brain, where they will use a laser gun to remove a blood clot.  Once inside the body, we are treated to an almost psychedelic panorama of floating blood cells, bizarre environments, and dangerous biological defense systems.  It was really fascinating!

But was it realistic?  In some ways, yes, and in other ways, no.  For example, the bright and colorful walls of the arteries and veins, the interior landscape of an alveoli, or the beautiful tunnel of the inner ear, were amazingly created.  But I kept thinking that realistically, the only light source inside the human body should be the submarine’s floodlights.  But I suppose darkness would have been pretty boring up on the screen.  As it was, the first strange environment we saw looked like the inside of a pink lava lamp.  After that, every landscape we are shown is perfectly lit to show the viewers all the wonderful details of the inside of the human body.

The alveoli of the lungs was a spotty purple, dotted with bits of carbon and dust that looked like rock crystals.  The inner ear was a structured blue-green cavern with a patch of yellowish cilia in which Raquel Welch becomes trapped.  Once she is freed, she is attacked by crystalline antibodies which nearly kill her.  Each area of the body through which they pass, from the jugular vein to the heart, from capillaries to a tear duct, is a unique environment, keeping everything visually interesting.  Even the brain tissue was a blue and white mass of hanging sheets that looked very cool with electrical impulses sparkling through them.

Also, the scene where Donald Pleasance was killed by a white blood cell was pretty cool.  They just covered his head with a big white mass of slime, which must have been a lot of fun for the actor.  Ah, the things they have to do for their craft.

The one effect I didn’t care for was not the fault of the effects artists.  The shrinking process scene just took way too long.  But that might be the fault of the director and the script writer.  And even though the movie was highly enjoyable to watch, I had problems with a few plot holes.  Incidentally, the famous science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov was hired to write the novelization of the film, and he fixed several of those pesky plot holes. But as far as the special effects for the movie went, they were pretty darn good… for the 1960s. 

Thunderball – 1965 (WINNER)

The award winning effects in this movie were very stunt-based.  I often have to remind myself that stunts are considered special effects, and while Thunderball certainly had its share of physical stunts, there were even more examples of underwater filming.  Underwater filming isn’t exactly a special effect, and it isn’t exactly a stunt, but as far as that goes, it was actually pretty cool to watch.

And when I think about it, that was this movie’s big thing.  James Bond films are always big on the action and intrigue.  He is a super spy who is known for his physical prowess and his gadgets, both of which are prominently displayed in this film.  And then there is his ability to seduce any woman he needs to in the course of his duties to Queen and country, which, alas, cannot be counted as a special effect.  But it was the underwater sequences that made this movie unique. 

There was a cool effect where a fighter jet landed on the surface of the water, where it immediately sank to the bottom of the sea.  A group of divers with a large open submersible craft approach the downed jet and stole its nuclear armaments.  Later on in the movie, right before the big climax, which I’ll get to in a bit, there was a very cool underwater battle in which bad guys in black and good guys in orange, armed with spear-guns and knives, fought like soldiers on a battlefield.

But that wasn’t all this movie had.  Even before the opening credits roll, we get to see James fly with a portable jet pack, which looked great in the wide shots, but was badly green-screened in the close-up shot.  Never-mind that he was only given about two seconds to put the whole thing on, straps and all, before rocketing into the air.  Then we had water jets shooting out of the back of the infamous Aston Martin, the evil villain’s death chair. and a couple of nice explosions, the climactic one even being accomplished using experimental rocket fuel.

And that is why this movie took home the Oscar for Best Special Effects.  Nearly everything was real!  The jet pack was real.  All the sharks were real, though they were mostly behind plexiglass.  The underwater battle was real.  The yacht that split in two, the front half becoming a hydrofoil, was real.  The sky-hook that pulled Bond out of a recessed cavern was real.  The underwater jet pack was real.  Even the nude girls swimming in the opening credits were real, or at least, their silhouettes were.  Bond’s only gadget that wasn’t real was the tiny rebreather that Bond used several times in the film, but that one’s easy to forgive.

Unfortunately, it was the movie’s more common effects that were disappointing.  Two things caught my attention.  First, the bad green-screening looked cheap.  Whenever the actors were in an artificial environment, it was painfully obvious.  Second, there was the final fight between Bond and the villain, Emilio Largo, and his henchmen.  To make the fight look faster and more dangerous aboard the out of control hydrofoil, they simply sped up the film, Benny-Hill style.  It looked ridiculous, almost comical, and I don’t think it was supposed to. 

The Greatest Story Ever Told – 1965

Ok, so why am I giving this big epic film a two-star rating for its special effects?  Because it was a big-budget movie that could have been spectacular, but was just dull and visually uninteresting.  The bible stories which tell of the life of Jesus of Nazareth are packed full of things that should have inspired some pretty phenomenal special effects, and none of them were taken advantage of.

You see, the miracles of Jesus were many and varied.  There was so much they could have attempted to show.  But they habitually told us about them rather than showing them to us.  For example, we could have been shown Jesus walking on the water, or calming a storm, or being transfigured.  But these miracles, which could have been cinematically interesting, were only mentioned in passing.

And even the miracles they did show could have been more visually interesting, like Jesus’ baptism.  According to the New King James Bible, Mark 1:10-11, “And immediately coming up from the water, He saw the heavens parting and the Spirit descending upon Him like a dove.  Then a voice came from heaven, ‘You are My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’”  To me, it sounds like an opportunity for some great effects.  A little glory perhaps, or maybe a floating light, or a booming voice?  But there was nothing.  He was dunked under the water and came back up without any visual indication that it was a significant event.

And then came the climax of the film, the crucifixion.  According to Matthew 27:51-52, “And behold, the veil in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”  But again, there was nothing.  All we got was a random yet highly publicized cameo of John Wayne, playing a Roman Centurion, saying, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

So what miracles did the movie show?  We saw Jesus make a crippled man walk, he restored sight to a blind man, and he raised Lazarus from the dead.  But none of these things required any special effects at all.  Then what effects earned the movie its Best Visual Effects nomination?  Well, there were some fantastic matte paintings of skies and landscapes, and the little epilogue scene of Christ’s ascension had some cloud-like smoke, and an overlay of a close-up of Jesus, combined with images of his followers sitting and looking up to the sky.  But even then, we are never shown anything interesting, like Jesus floating up off the ground.

So why were all the special effects opportunities missed?  As near as I can guess, the film was based not so much on the Bible itself, as on the original book with which it shares its name, written by Fulton Oursler.  The book tells the Nazarene’s  story faithfully, but focus more on the historical, cultural, and societal anthropology of the times in which Jesus lived, rather than on the mysticism of Jesus and his miracles.  Unfortunately, that made it a visually dull film when it didn’t have to be.

Mary Poppins – 1964 (WINNER)

As silly and as fanciful as the plot of this movie might be, there is no doubt that the special effects are something spectacular.  Nearly every shot in the film contains some kind of special effect, whether it was obvious like hand-drawn animation or animatronics, or more subtle like the fantastic matte-paintings that made up most of the backgrounds that appear on the screen.  And like the title character herself, the visual effects were practically perfect in every way… almost. 

For me, the most notable effects were the use of invisible wires to make people float off the ground, and the combination of cartoon animation with live actors.  The former, was used prolifically, sprinkled throughout the entire film.  People seemed to float and fly as a matter of course.  And I never saw a single wire on the screen, not even in the sequence where all the poor prospective nannys were blown away by the mysterious powers of Mary Poppins.  And then, of course, there was the tea party on the ceiling which held five actors and a fully set table suspended in the air.

As for the latter, the use of the sodium vapor matte process was key, especially for the “Jolly Holiday” sequence, in which the actors wander through a cartoon fantasy world.  According to my research, they used special sodium vapor lights to illuminate a pure white screen which was behind the actors.  Because of the light’s unique color, it would not register on the red, green, or blue layers of the color film in which the movie was shot.  Something called a beam-splitter was used to record a duplicate image on black and white film, which was extremely sensitive to the sodium vapor light.  The result was a matte which allowed the actors to wear any color costumes they liked, something which would not have been possible using the traditional blue and green-screen technologies.

But it is important to note that though this process was beautifully used in the iconic “Jolly Holiday” sequence, it was also used throughout the rest of the film to provide the more realistic backdrops of the city of London, both on the ground level, and in the sequences which required a rooftop perspective.  It was really an impressive feat since the movie was filmed entirely on Disney sound stages.  These realistic mattes are not as noticeable, but they were not supposed to be.  And as always, the invisible effects are the most effective, and thus impressive ones of all.

I also liked the brief but fun sequence in which a gathering of dancing chimney sweeps are fired upon by a barrage of hand-drawn fireworks in comic fashion.  It was a delightful way to end the dark twilight sequence with some bright and eye-catching color.  But that isn’t to say that the effects were flawless.  Though the sodium vapor process was pretty remarkable, they still hadn’t gotten the lighting right.  There are still a number of shots in which the actors seemed to be lit from behind or from the side, where no light source seemed to exist.  But these were minor flaws.  All in all, the effects were pretty top notch.  Well… except for the really bad animatronic birds.  They just moved and looked so fake.  Oh well.

1964 – 7 Faces of Dr. Lao

This was just a really fun movie with a lot of fanciful special effects.  It was a true fantasy with a definite magical element.  To achieve these effects, a number of different techniques were used.  Now, I understand that many of them were accomplished through specific directing choices, great sets and costumes, and incredible makeup, in addition to the traditional visual effects methods.  But it all combined to make a film that was simply fun to watch.

There was so much going on.  There was a man changing his face from one actor to another, a woman being turned to stone by Medusa,  a magician creating flowers out of thin air, a talking snake with an all too human head, animated fireworks, and the movie’s climax, a fish that turns into a giant sea serpent.  And those were just the highlights!  It was really a feast for the eyes.  Now, all that being said, the effects, though done well-enough, were very dated.  By today’s standards, the Claymation, the hand-drawn animation, and the puppets, were pretty obvious.

For example, there was a scene in which Merlin the Magician was creating flowers.  In a wide shot, he waved his wand and real flowers began to climb up the sides of the proscenium.  It seemed to be accomplished by covering the flowers with a blue-screen, and then lifting it, allowing them to smoothly appear.  But then they cut to a close-up of the magically manifesting plants, and they changed to Claymation.  The stop-motion animation was a little clunky and looked completely different than what was on the screen only a second before.

But the scene where the woman turned to stone actually looked pretty good.  When the lady looked into the Gorgon’s eyes, the actress went stiff.  They threw up some half-way convincing hand-drawn animation on the screen that covered the actress, as she transformed, and then cut to a wide shot which contained a mock-stone figure.  For the 1960’s it was not a bad effect.

But it was the film’s big finish that really used the Claymation and blue-screening together for some pretty cool effects.  Not only did the giant sea-serpent visibly grow and grow, but it picked up people in its mouth and swiftly crawled across the ground, knocking over tent poles and shredding canvas.  It chased the witless thugs across the field and nearly devoured Dr. Lao, himself.  At one point it even sprouted six extra heads resembling the various faces of the enigmatic Chinaman.  Then, to recapture the beast, a magical rain machine was used which sent a hand-drawn shower of rainbow sparks shooting up into the sky.  Did the film’s climax look way too much like clay figures and cartoons?  Absolutely.  Was it a lot of fun to watch?  Again, absolutely.

But I have to roll my eyes at one effect.  During the scene when Dr. Lao tells the story of Woldercan, the film’s director, George Pal, took volcano and lava effects footage that he created for and used in a previous film, The Time Machine, and blatantly inserted them here.  Come on, Mr. Pal!  Did you think we wouldn’t notice?

Cleopatra – 1963 (WINNER)

Sometimes it seems as if the academy voters are confusing production design with visual effects.  Cleopatra didn’t seem to do anything innovative or creative, especially when compared to its competition, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.  This epic had some stunning visuals, but that was mostly due to the set and prop design, and the beautiful but terribly ridiculous costume design.  In that regard, it beat Hitchcock, hands down.  But its compositing, its blue-screen effects, its scale models, its matte paintings, its battles, and yes, even its grandeur were all old hat.

Now, that being said, once again, I’ll concede that the blue-screening very good.  It continued to improve as the technique was perfected.  The dark lines around the actors are pretty much gone by this point, making the illusion pretty seamless.  Also, they seemed to be getting better at matching the lighting between the actors and the backgrounds, making them appear to actually be in the different environments.  That’s not to say it was perfect.  There were a few shots that literally stood out, making the two images appear to be separate.  But for the most part, they were pretty good.

But as for the spectacle, it was pretty… well, spectacular.  There was a grandness that, at times, matched other pseudo-historical dramas like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments.  It was all part of that MGM formula for film success.  Make everything big and make it all epic.  Spare no expense in the sets and costumes.  Make everything out to be larger than life, including the acting, and you’ll have a successful film.  And darn if it didn’t work.

There were a few visual effects that were noteworthy, though nothing new or overly inventive.  The burning of the Library of Alexandria was nice, and was followed by a short battle sequence that displayed the Roman Turtle tactic.  But again, I would credit that to production design, not visual effects.  The fires were good, but ultimately unimpressive.  There was some mildly creative use of overlapping images during the scene where Cesar was assassinated, but those are directorial decisions, not special effects.

And then there was the naval battle.  There were a few good shots of the ships using catapults to hurl flaming projectiles at each other, and as the fighting came to a close, there were a few burning ships sinking into the water.  But again, it was nothing to write home about.  Just look at some of the previous films nominated for Best Special Effects.  The Sea Wolf, The Black Swan, That Hamilton Woman, and Ben-Hur all had comparable, if not better, battles at sea.

But Cleopatra took home the Oscar, so I must be missing something.  I even spent several hours doing research on the internet, trying to find the reason for this win.  However, every article I read either focused on the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton affaire, or the film’s skyrocketing budget, neither of which is a special effect.

Mutiny on the Bounty – 1962

I have two things to say about the special effects for this movie.  First is that they were very good in a number of ways.  Second is that they were not as good as they thought they were.  Nothing says that both of those statements cannot be true.  And to be sure, there were a lot of special effects on which to comment.  But the movie had a sense of self-importance that I cannot get out of my head.  The film seemed to think it was the best movie ever made, and while it was indeed good, It wasn’t flawless.

The bad effects were few, so I’ll cover them quickly, and then go on to the good ones.  I didn’t care for the quality of a few of the blue-screen shots.  Some of them looked really obvious.  A few of the scale models looked a little too fake.  And lastly, there was, for the most part, nothing new or innovative about the visuals.  But that was about it.  Still, even those things were never really terrible.

There were two big scenes when it came to the movie’s money shots.  There was the storm that threatened to sink the ship when they tried to go around Cape Horn, and the second was the fire that destroyed the Bounty at the movie’s climax.  They were both incredibly intense, and the effects artists really earned their paychecks.

The storm was utterly relentless.  The close-up shots of the actors on the deck of the ship were full of slanted floors, spraying water, wind, rain, and an out of control barrel crashing around the hold.  There were men up in the ship’s rigging who were holding on to the ropes for their lives.  Then there were the wide shots where a miniature model was being mercilessly tossed around in the water.  The violence of the storm was so great that it looked as though the boat would surely be blown on its side.  There were also a few really great shots of waves that appeared as big as the merchant vessel, itself.

The fire at the end of the film was pretty spectacular.  There were actors that had to run amidst the flames, and while many of those dangerous-looking shots were clearly composited, not all of them were.  There were great fires below the deck and above it.  There were some really cool shots of the sails burning on the masts.

Other than that there was a gruesome scene where a man is taking twenty-four lashes with a flail, and another where a poor sailor is keel-hauled.  And there was another great blue-screened shot where a man falls from the rigging onto the deck.  They must have filmed that stuntman falling onto a giant blue air mat.  I have to mention that while some of the blue-screened shots were not perfect, overall, they were better in this movie than they were in most other films that came before it.  Obviously, filmmakers were continuing to perfect the effect technique.  But too bad for Mutiny on the Bounty.  It was up against The Longest Day. tentStyles

The Longest Day – 1962 (WINNER)

I have to say, right off the bat, that this is one of the best war films ever made.  The historical accuracy, the drama, the casting, the acting, the directing, the cinematography, and yes, the special effects, were all top notch.  Of course, there was nothing new in the explosions or the gunfire.  So why would I call this a five-star Oscar winner?  For me, it was the sheer volume of the effects.  That might not sound like a great reason for my praise of the film’s achievements, but I’ll explain.

A single explosion is common, unimpressive.  If you have ten, they are a little harder to coordinate.  But when you have hundreds, as this film did, it would be a massive logistical undertaking.  Likewise, a single battle sequence in a movie might be the film’s focal point, or maybe its climax.  But The Longest Day had one complex battle sequence after another.  The complete chaos of the machinegun fire, exploding shells, smoke, sand, and screams all had to be specifically choreographed, and they did a fantastic job from beginning to end.

The movie was just over three hours long, and the phenomenal battles began around the half-way mark.  The rest of the film was almost constant scenes of horrific and heroic war.  It was nearly sensory overload.  Fortunately, the intense battle sequences were punctuated with important dramatic scenes that were kept brief and to the point.  The combination of drama and action was perfectly balanced to keep me on the edge of my seat, making the run-time of the film go by quickly.

Of course, the film was about June 6, 1944, D-day, and I think that one thing many people, myself included, sometimes tend to forget is that the beach assaults were not the only parts of the Allied invasion of France.  There were many different facets to the overall plan, and they were each supposed to work in tandem with each other to achieve victory.  The film covered most of them, and they each had their own unique elements which directed what visual effects would be required.

For example, in the fields inland from the beaches, there were paratroopers who were shot down as they descended to the ground.  Their objective was to derail a train  on a bridge over the Douve River.  At Pointe du Hoc, they needed to scale a cliff with grappling hooks, ropes, and ladders.  At Omaha Beach, there were two German airplanes that riddled the Allied soldiers with bullets.  At Sword Beach, there was a tank that was used to demolish a casino.  And, of course also on Omaha beach, there were explosives that blew a hole in the German defense wall, allowing American troops to escape the beach where they were being slaughtered.

Just the logistics of coordinating the entire film must have been a nightmare, and it was all spearheaded by producer, Darryl F. Zanuck and a team of different directors.  The visual effects artist who took home a well-deserved Oscar was Robert MacDonald, while the man behind the audio effects was Jacques Maumont.  They all deserve recognition because they really did a fantastic job!

The Guns of Navarone – 1961 (WINNER)

This was a really great movie, but I had to ask whether the special effects deserve the Oscar they won, or not.  And first my answer was:  Sure, I guess.  Why not?  It was up against Disney’s The Absent Minded Professor, and while this was, without a doubt, a better movie, the visual effects were no better or worse than its competitor.  And to be honest, I wanted a little something more from a winner.

The problem is that we’ve seen them all before.  So were they done better than other films?  Maybe.  I’m not saying the visual effects were done poorly.  On the contrary, they were done very well.  But come on Hollywood!  How many exploding scale models can we watch before they become just more exploding models, and is this what wins the award for Best Special Effects?  Where was the innovation?  Where was the creativity?  Where was the inventiveness?  Well, to give the movie proper credit, they were all there, though they were sometimes hard to spot.

The first really big effect we see is a storm that destroys a fishing boat and smashes it against the rocks.  Until that point, all we had were some matte-paintings, a few blue-screened backgrounds, a bit of gunfire, and an exploding ship that sinks beneath the waves.  Nothing new, right?  But the storm was wonderfully violent, and I applaud the effects artists for a job well-done.  The wind, the rain, the waves!  They even had the elements blurring the overall image on the screen, adding to the storm’s realism.  Then there was an interestingly shot sequence where the heroes had to do some rock-climbing up a sheer cliff in the rain.

After that there isn’t much, just a short sequence in which they are shot at by a couple of German planes, another in which a city is burned, and another in which a truck is set on fire and pushed into a ravine.  That is, until the film’s explosive climax, the actual guns of Navarone!  When they fired their massive shells, fire shot out of the giant barrels.  And then when they, and the citadel in which they were housed, was destroyed, the explosions were magnificent!  The scale models looked great as they were demolished and burned.  It was all very impressive, even though it was really nothing new. 

So where was that elusive inventiveness I mentioned?  What caught my attention was the improved use of the blue-screen, a technology which had not yet been perfected, though they made the effect as invisible as they could.  They blue-screened rain.  They had actors wear dark clothing to help hide the telltale black outlines that surrounded them.  They did a fantastic job of matching the lighting between the actors and the superimposed backgrounds.  There were only a few shots in which the actors didn’t really look like they were part of their surroundings.  But I suppose those imperfections were pretty easy to overlook.

The Absent Minded Professor – 1961

At first, I was unimpressed with the special effects in this Disney movie.  Some of them looked incomplete, while others looked ridiculously simple.  But the more I think about the movie, the more I think I might have been mistaken.  So while the effects may have been silly, repetitive, and ultimately not worthy of an Oscar win, they were at least deserving of their nomination.  Let me explain.

The word of the day is flubber, a fictional substance that, when striking a surface, does not lose energy, but gains it.  Thus, when a flubber ball bounces, it continually bounces higher and higher. It allowed a car to fly, a basketball team to bounce over the heads of their opponents, and… well, really, that was about it.  All the effects in the movie were simply variants on those two things.

It is important to note that this movie was geared towards children, so silly and repetitive was what Disney wanted.  But that was one of the problems.  Not so much the silliness, but the way the same effect was used over and over again.  For example, the basketball scene was fun and amusing.  But later on in the movie, we see a man with flubber on the soles of his shoes bouncing over his dance partner’s head, just like the basketball players.  Later we see a man bouncing out of control in his front yard.  It was all the same effect, just dressed differently.  And the flying car effect was also treated the same way.  Here is the car flying at night.  Here it is flying above another car.  Here it is flying over Washington D.C. 

That being said, I really had to get past my own prejudices over the childish nature of the film, and look at the effects based on their own merits.  When I saw the basketball players bouncing up to the ceiling, I had to wonder.  How did they do it?

My first notion was that they were all on wires, but a friend pointed out to me that if that was the case, they didn’t have the technology in the 1960s to digitally remove the wires from the final image.  Then I thought that they had to have blue-screened all the athletes, and then manually moved them within the frame of the picture.  But despite this being filmed in black and white, there were no telltale discolored outlines around the basketball players.  They were expertly composited into the scenes.  I could find nothing on the internet specifically saying how they achieved all the bouncing people, but I have come to believe that they were, in fact, suspended on wires.  They moved as if they were.  But I also found that while blue-screening was not used, they did use a similar technique called sodium vapor processing, which, in a black and white film, might virtually erase the discolored outlines around composited images.  The flying car was indeed on wires, suspended from a rectangular platform, which was lifted up by using a one hundred fifty foot crane, though I never saw a single wire.  Ok, Disney.  I am grudgingly impressed.