Category: Best Visual Effects

I Wanted Wings – 1941 (WINNER)

This was a war propaganda movie was the winner of the Best Visual Effects Award.  It being the first movie from that year I have watched, I’m not able to say whether or not the award was deserved, or if some other film got robbed.  What I can say is that the special effects in this movie relied heavily on stunts and stunt flying.

Now, I have to admit that when it came to that, the stunt pilots really knew what they were doing.  They really performed some incredible low altitude flying, great dives, and they made it all look easy, even fun.  There were a few airplane crashes that looked a little bit too much like miniature models on fields that looked like they belonged on a vintage train set in someone’s basement.

In fact, there was one scene in which a pilot has landed in a rough field full of trees and brush.  He must turn his B-17 Bomber around in order to have enough room in which to lift off.  Unfortunately, when the tail hits a small tree, it just pops out of the ground as if it had no roots.

But that’s not to say that there weren’t some great effects.  There were some wonderful composited shots that were masterfully constructed and very impressive.  The first one that comes to mind was the crash in which the airplane catches on fire.  The great effect was that one of the actors appeared to rush into the burning wreckage and pull the unconscious pilot out of the cockpit.  I’m sure they wouldn’t really have the stunt man run into a blazing fire, but the image was put together so seamlessly, it looked completely real.

And there was a little effect that was mildly comedic, and had me chuckling.  As an instructor is trying to teach a cadet how to perform a slow roll, in which the plane goes up-side-down, the goofy trainee has neglected to fasten his safety belt.  And of course they are flying with the plane’s canopy open.  The cadet tumbles out of the aircraft and has to deploy his parachute.  It was pretty silly, but the effect was cute enough.

I’d also like to make mention of the film’s opening sequence.  They showed a lot of Bombers flying in formation.  They were clearly small models, but what I found impressive was the way they were moving through the clouds.  In fact, the movie’s opening shot was of these airplanes emerging from a fluffy white cloud bank.  It was a really cool shot!  The whole sequence ended with the planes disappearing into another cloud.  Very impressive!

Other than that, the movie was really character driven.  It was about the training to which the United States Army Air Corps cadets were subjected, coupled with a pair of romantic sub-plots.  The special effects weren’t the driving force of the narrative.  As I said, the bulk of the award winning effects was made up of the aerial stunt piloting.  And that, in itself was pretty spectacular.  But were the stunts good enough to earn the film its effects award?  I guess the Academy Voters thought so.

Flight Command – 1941

The special effects for this movie were, I’m sorry to say, nothing better than average.  That’s because there just weren’t  that many to critique.  Most of what we  were given were fighter pilots doing some fancy stunt flying.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, except that we’ve seen it all before.  This movie was a simple war propaganda film with a bit of drama, a bit of romance, and not much else.

So how was the stunt flying?  It wasn’t bad.  There was a lot of nifty formation flying that made everything look very organized and military, like a new Navy uniform. In an impressive little sequence, the film’s protagonist, played by Robert Taylor, nearly gets himself killed during a training competition.  He flies into a giant wind sock, blinding himself as it wraps around his head in the cockpit.  His plane goes into a spinning nosedive, which was cool.  The pilot POV shots were intense as you could see the approaching surface of the water below him spinning wildly!  Except… in one of the pulled back shots of the spinning plane, I could clearly see the wires holding up the mock-up of the airplane as it fell.  There was even a little mini jet-pack attached to the tail to make the hanging craft spin.  At least the wide shots were real, and thus pretty impressive. 

And to be fair, there were some really cool shots where the fighter pilots were taking off from an aircraft carrier.  But really, all they did was attach cameras to different parts of the planes as they took to the air.  Yes, those were some pretty stunning visuals, but they were neither innovative nor creative. 

There were also two interesting plane crashes in the film.  However, the first of those sequences was flawed.  The crash showed the plane hitting the ground and bursting into flames.  Then the un-burned the pilot is showed being lifted into an ambulance.  Nope!  Not buying that one!  Not with how that plane crashed!  That pilot is dead, and his mangled body is being incinerated.  And there was no way for the rescuers to get to the incapacitated pilot because of the flames!  The crash effect went too far overboard for the purpose of the story.  At least the second crash appeared survivable.  Still, the crashes were both competent special effects. 

Either way, that was about it for the visual effects: fancy formation flying, some very skilled stunt pilots, and lots of rear-projected close-ups of the flying pilots.  And lest I forget, one of the film’s sub-plots was a man trying to develop a radio-based method of landing in extreme fog conditions.  The final climax showed five planes flying through fog so thick, they couldn’t see more than a few feet.  Some of those shots were pretty exciting to watch.  I’m just not really sure why this movie was nominated for Best Visual Effects, though.  Not only have we seen it all before, we’ve seen it done better.  For me, the impressive stunt flying just wasn’t enough.

Aloma of the South Seas – 1941

This movie’s visual effects was a case of too little, too late.  The movie was an hour and eighteen minutes long, and there were literally no visual effects at all in the entire film until the last five minutes, aside from a couple of minor visuals like a smoking mountain in the background or hot, dirty bubbles coming up in a spring of water.  Nothing.  No notable rear-projection shots, no composite shots, no falling rocks, nothing at all worth noting for the first seventy-three minutes of the seventy eight minute movie.  I kept waiting for something to happen, some reason for the Oscar nomination, but there was just nothing.  But then those last five minutes… they really went over-the-top.

That’s when the volcano erupted and we get flowing lava, falling rocks, an earthquake, fires, floods, debris, crumbling mountains, and before that all started, a psychotic guy with a machine gun, firing on a crowd of screaming people.  They let us have it all.  So let’s start with the automatic weapon that didn’t really seem to kill anyone.  We could see the little puffs of dirt where the flying bullets struck the rocks and the ground, but that was about it.  No big deal.

But then the fire goddess grew angry and unleashed her fury.  There were several shots of flowing lava that were incredible.  It looked deadly with smoke rising from the molten earth.  The vegetation that it passed caught fire and began to burn.  It was visually stunning and looked incredible.  There were also some great shots of wildfire spreading through the jungle that looked like the fire was alive.  It was like a ravenous monster, consuming the green in an aggressive feast of destruction. 

There was one fantastic composite shot that combined a river of flowing lava, live actors, and a fantastic set that literally crumbled beneath them.  There was a stone bridge over the gorge that our heroes had to cross.  Aloma makes it to the other side, but her man, Tanoa, sees the bridge collapsing, and doesn’t allow anyone else to cross.  When it falls, in spectacular fashion, Aloma is trapped alone on the other side.  Tanoa, finds a convenient vine to swing over the river of lava, grab his girl, and swing back to the rest of the group.  It was a great sequence!

And then the earthquake caused a tsunami and the entire beachfront sank into the sea.  The ocean water flooded in and met the fire in the jungle with explosive results.  The raging water met the conflagration, and a massive bout of steam rose into the air, hissing and sputtering.  I tell you, that last five minutes of the movie was visually stunning, and I’d say, yes, they earned their nomination.  But I’m also glad they didn’t win.  Like I said, too little, too late.  An Oscar winner in this category needs more than just a few minutes of smoky orange water and falling rocks.  They were great, but they waited too long, and it was over way too quickly. 

1940 – Women in War

This movie seemed like nothing more than a hastily made propaganda film.  The visual effects were not particularly good, the story was dull, and the film quality has not aged well.  I mean, the film always seemed to be really out of focus, as if the only existing copies have not been cared for, let alone carefully restored.  Unfortunately, this didn’t help me as I was watching specifically for the visual effects.  I have a feeling that the effects might have looked better and might have been more impressive if the picture were just sharper.

But that only accounts for part of my problem with the effects.  The rest is that there weren’t many effects to even speak of.  Most of the film focused on the soap-opera-like relationships within a group of Army nurses.  But there were two scenes where visual effects were required.  One was near the beginning, where an enemy airplane was dropping bombs, attempting to sink the transport ship with the nurses aboard.  The second was the bombing of a village where some of the nurses become trapped. 

So first, let me talk about the air raid.  The effects looked… cheap.  For the most part, it was just the obligatory water explosions.  The transport ship was never hit, and all they had to do was spray some water up into the air.  There was one mildly interesting shot where the camera was in the sky, looking down on the ship.  We can see the airplane fly across the screen, the water explosion next to the boat.  But both the airplane and the boat looked like toy models.  And the water explosion, as seen from above, looked like it was composited into the image, and not very well.  Other movies in 1940 did it better.

And then there was the bombing of the village.  This was a little more impressive, but only a little.  From what I can tell, yes, they did actually blow up a few buildings. But those explosions seemed to be accompanied by common, garden variety fireworks.  Really, the looked like 4^th of July fireworks with shooting sparks.  It just looked bad.  And again, I have to compare these effects with other films that were nominated the same year, and these effects just weren’t as good.  Consider the effects of movies like Foreign Correspondent and the is no real competition.

The only other effects I can think of that are of note are a simple stunt of a man falling through a balcony railing, and then later, some falling debris in a cellar that doesn’t land on anyone.  There wasn’t anything to really write home about, and with a total of fourteen films nominated for Best Visual Effects in 1940, I think I would have just left this one out of the running.  True, the sound effects were also considered part of the same category, but again, the sound effects didn’t really stand out to me either.  I don’t know… Maybe I’m missing something.

1940 – Typhoon

I’ll start this off by saying that this was a pretty short movie, only coming in at seventy minutes.  And most of the movie was spent following the love story between Robert Preston and Dorothy Lamour.  There were really only two big scenes that featured any big-budget visual effects.  The opening scene showed a shim going down in a violent storm at sea.  And then there were the last eight minutes or so that had two great effects.  One is the jungle as it is set on fire by the bad guys.  The other is the sudden typhoon that nearly submerges half the island and douses the conflagration. 

These were great effects, but before I comment on them, I want to mention a couple of other effect that was used quite effectively and showed up in a lot of shots in the rest of the movie.  They did a pretty great job using rear projection.  The movie was in Technicolor, and they did a fantastic job of matching the lighting and color saturation of the background to that of the actors.  It was pretty seamless.  The other little effect they did well was depicting the interior of a rocking ship at sea.  The camera had plenty of swaying motion, and things that were hanging in the cabin actually moved along with the rocking.  And the actors reacted to the motion of the ship in the waving waters. 

But as I said, I bet most of the effects budget went to the beginning and the ending of the film.  The former scene showed violent wind and waves.  There was water and spray everywhere, and you could see it being whipped about the thrown onto the actors.  It was like a real high-powered gale.  It was a great effect and ir really drew you in to the opening scene of the movie.

And then there was the big climax.  So the bad guys set an oil fire in the jungle and our two lovers, along with the friendly Skipper, flee into the jungle.  The fire was everywhere.  It was shown in the rear projection, but there were also real flames in the foreground with the actors, showing how they were surrounded by the life-threatening flames.  You knew the romantic leads were going to survive, but I kept expecting the Skipper to die under a burning branch falling from a tree.

But then the Typhoon showed up as quickly as a white squall.  The seas rise up high enough to kill all the bad guys as they attempt to get back to their ship.  When our heroes see it coming they fight to make their way back to Dea’s tree house. They struggled through wind and flood-level water to reach it.  There was an exciting shot of the three of them grabbing a sturdy tree and holding on for dear life as they are submerged in water for a few seconds.  There were also some great wide shots of the island as the massive waves rolled in and covered the burning trees, dousing the flames.  The effects were pretty powerful, and made even more so because it was in Technicolor.  It may have been a short film, but it really pulled out a lot of stops when it came to the visual effects.  Kudos to both the filmmakers, and the actors who had to do their jobs in the midst of the over-the-top effects.

Spawn of the North – 1938 (HONORARY AWARD)

This was the very first movie to be given an award for best visual effects.  Granted, it wasn’t even a category then, and it was an honorary award, but I still count it as the first.  I also acknowledge that the effects were as pretty much nothing compared to the first actual winner of the newly made category, the very next year, Gone With the Wind.  And it is important to remember that at the time, achievements in sound were all part of the same category as visual effects.  But let’s take a look at what it was that caused the Academy in 1938 to stop and take special notice.

By the following year’s standards, there really wasn’t much going on.  There was some rear-projection going on, but by this time, most movies were making use of this technique.  However, I will say that here, it was remarkably well-done.  In a few shots, I’d venture to say that it was as well-done, or in a few cases, even better than Gone With the Wind.

I think that some of the failings of Rear Projection in the 1930s were twofold.  First, lighting the actors to match the projected background was either a hit or miss.   Sometimes it worked very well, and sometimes it just didn’t.  Second, was when the background was in motion, like when the actors are driving in a car, and we see the road moving away behind them.  That one rarely held up to close scrutiny. Spawn of the North was able to avoid these two tell-tale signs.  The projections when people are on boats were done well, as the actors moved up and down believably with the waves.  And the lighting effects were always perfectly executed.

Then there was the breaking of the ice-flows.  There were two scenes in the movie in which icebergs and falling sheets of ice affected the small fishing boats.  In one case, the boat was critically damaged, and in the other case, the boat was completely demolished.  The ice breaking from the glacier was simply filmed in the real world.  Then miniature models were used to show the boats being damaged or destroyed. All of this was just fine except for one thing.  There was a shot in which the ice was supposed to shift, but not fall.  Unfortunately, this was achieved by simply freezing the film while a sheet of ice was falling.  That one shot made it painfully obvious.  Then, when it was time for the ice to fall, they restarted the film.  But the mini boat models floating in front of the falling ice were pretty good. And the sound of the ice crashing into the water was appropriately loud, thunderous, and chaotic.  No problems there.  When it comes down to it, I think it was a worthy start to the category, and while it was not perfect, it was good enough to catch the Academy’s attention.  And it wasn’t that they were particularly innovative, but they executed the standard techniques flawlessly… except for that one frozen shot.  Very well-done and congratulations to everyone involved!

1940 – One Million B. C.

I was actually very pleasantly surprised by the incredibly good visual effects in this movie.  I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting much, but boy, was I wrong.  They produced a wide variety of effects, from miniature models, to composite shots, to practical effects, elaborate sets, and animal cruelty.  Wait… what??  Yes, we’ll get there in a bit.  But nearly everything looked great on the screen.  And just as a disclaimer: No, I cannot claim a cave-girl with coiffed hair, sculpted eyebrows, and a dress with spaghetti straps as visual effects

So obviously this is a film that takes place in a prehistoric era, so we have dinosaurs, lush tropic jungles, and an erupting volcano.  And let me just comment on that fantastic effect.  The spouting fire and smoke, the sparks and the river of molten rock were amazing!  Not to mention the burning lava flow that claims the life of a woman trying to save her son, accomplished by some clever compositing.  And the accompanying earthquake was great, as well, with falling rocks and people getting buried in a collapsing cave.  It was a thrilling sequence.

But the real reason we’ve come to see the movie is the dinosaurs.  How were they depicted?  How good did they look?  How realistic were they?  Well, there were really three classes of dinosaurs, two of which worked, and one that didn’t in the most pathetic way.  According to Wikipedia, “The “dinosaurs” and “prehistoric mammals” seen in the film include a pig in a rubber Triceratops suit, a man in an Allosaurus suit, Asian elephants with fake tusks and fur made to look like mastodonts, two dogs, Brahman cattle with fake horns and fur made to look like muskoxen, a sun bear cub, a six-banded armadillo with horns glued on, a young alligator with a Dimetrodon-like sail glued on its back, a rhinoceros iguana, a snake, a coati, a monitor lizard, and anole, and an Argentine black and white tegu.

At one point our prehistoric hero, Victor Mature, fights a guy in a really bad rubber suit.  It was so bad that even without pausing the video, I could see the clear line where the rubber head was set on top of the rubber body.  It walked like a human in a bad costume.  And its head was a hard piece of plastic with no movement in the mouth or eyes.  It looked comically bad.  It’s why I give these effects a four star rating instead of five.  Why, I ask, when everything else looked so good?

The second kind of dinosaur was the unaltered animal.  They just filmed an iguana close up and composited it onto the screen with the actors.  But it was the third kind of dinosaur that constituted animal cruelty.  Actually gluing the prosthetics onto live animals, and then making them actually fight each other, crossed the line, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals banned such practices in filmmaking.  It was a little difficult to enjoy that scene because it was clearly real.

The Long Voyage Home – 1940

This was a good movie with some competent special effects, for the most part, though there were a few little details that I noticed, which could have been done better.  It is a film about tough sailors, at sea, docked in port, and on shore leave.  All the real special effects happened when the ship was out at sea.

As you might imagine, there were rough waters and a bit of a storm.  This is where we have things like battering winds, cold ocean spray, rocking waves, and slippery decks.  It was all pretty well done.  The composite shots were put together well enough.  They had a pretty good mix of rear-projection and real water to make the effects look real.

But here is where I had my problems.  It was the actors.  It was pretty clear they were standing on a motionless set.  I’ve actually been on a boat before, and you can always feel the rocking of the waves.  There was always that slight sway, though my voyages have always been on calm water. In the movie, just watch the background whenever the ocean is shown behind the actors.  The horizon is moving back and forth, up and down, but the actors aren’t reacting to it at all.

One scene in which this little flaw really stood out to me was Yank’s funeral. Sure, there was a wind blowing and a little spray could be seen.  But as the background on the rear-projection screen kept moving significantly, the actors were standing absolutely still, not reacting to the motion at all.

There was even a scene in which the ship is weathering a violent storm.  Gigantic waves are crashing over the sides of the ship, and the people on the deck are having trouble staying on their feet.  But then we cut to the men in the crew cabin as they stare out a porthole.  They, and everything in the tiny room, are as steady as rocks while thy deliver their dialogue.

But aside from that, everything was good.  Not great, but good.  There just weren’t that many effects in the film to speak of.  So why was this film nominated for Best Special Effects?  I’m not really sure on this one.  I mean, what few effects we had were done well enough, but I guess I was expecting more, especially when I compare it to the other films nominated for the same category that year.

The only other thing I can think of is that maybe the stunts and fight choreography were being looked at as part of the film’s special effects.  There was a little fight on the deck of the docked ship, near the beginning of the film, but even that little scene was nothing to write home about.  There was nothing that looked too dangerous or difficult.  Just a bunch of men throwing punches at each other amid the screaming women.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m missing something.

The Invisible Man Returns – 1940

This movie had some pretty spectacular and innovative special effects, especially since the film came out in 1940.  Yes, it was a special effects driven film, but it was, unfortunately, on a much smaller scale than some of its competitors.  When it comes down to it, I think Academy voters were just more dazzled by the bright Technicolor effects of other films.  And really, there’s nothing wrong with that.

1940 was the first year that blue-screen technology was really used in film, though the process had actually been developed in the 1930s.  However, not many people know that the effect that preceded blue-screen was called double exposure, in which two separate images were filmed on the same film.

In The Invisible Man Returns, Vincent Price wore a black mask or body suit so that the first exposure would appear to have nothing in black areas.  Objects appeared to be moving by themselves.  The second exposure was the background image which would show through the black areas of the first exposure.  Pretty clever!  There was one scene in particular, in which he removes the clothing from a scarecrow and puts them on.  It was very well done, and unless you know what to watch for, it makes for an amazing effect.  Notice how he grabs everything from behind.  Otherwise parts of the clothing would have disappeared as he blocked them from the camera.  It’s the kind of thing you don’t even notice when you are engrossed in the story.

There were a few shots that impressed me though they were pretty simple to accomplish.  As an invisible guinea pig is injected with a serum to make it visible again, it comes back in stages.  First we see its skeleton, and then his body.  Making it appear in those two stages as opposed to just fading the creature back in one stage was smart.  Then at the end of the movie, as Vincent Price undergoes the same process, with a revised serum, his veins and arteries become visible first, then his muscles, and then his skin.

Then there were the double exposed images that were wonderfully creepy, as the invisible man became barely visible when exposed to smoke or rain.  Not the easiest effects, and so effective when done right.  Director, Joe May, really did a fantastic job of staging the scenes perfectly to make use of these techniques. 

However, there was one effect that I believe was ruined by the modern medium of my big-screen TV.  There was a scene in which the invisible man is holding someone at gun-point.  If I looked closely enough, I could see the wires that were holding the gun in place.  There were two going up to the left, two going up to the right, and one going straight down to keep it all steady.  But I’m sure the 1940 audiences didn’t have the chance to see the image that clearly.  Still, well done!