Swiss Family Robinson – 1940
The Special Effects in this film were either a hit or a miss. Some were just fine, but others were just plain hokey, or worse, laughable.
The first storm at sea didn’t last very long, and while I suppose it didn’t need to be longer or more detailed for the sake of the story, I would have liked to see a little more of the danger the Robinsons were facing, which would have extended the storm sequence. Maybe we could have been shown the crew of the doomed vessel abandoning the family. There were ominous clouds, wind, and spraying water, everything a good storm needs. There was even a bright lightning flash against a dark sky. But the sequence just seemed too brief.
I noticed two things that caught my attention. As I have seen before in other films, some of the shots of the turbulent water must have been filmed at close range. Water appears to move differently when you try to make a pond look like an ocean. Second, when the camera was in the ship’s hold, the camera was simply tilted to show that the boat was listing. There would have been nothing wrong with that, except that the livestock didn’t seem to react to the severely angled floor at all.
The actual sinking of the ship several days after the initial crash was one of the best effect in the film. There were a few shots of the ship crashing on the rocks that appeared to use a scale model. Then as Jack and Ernst are paddling away from the wreck, they used a bit of rear-projection, so we could see the them on the raft as the ship sank behind them. That was pretty good.
And then there was the incredibly violent storm that destroyed the treehouse. There were a lot of lightning bolts striking the trees. The shot of the falling timber smashing the boat under construction was pretty cool. There was plenty of wind, rain, and flying debris to add some realism. However, they used rear-projection again as William calmly stands in the storm, watching the destruction. He had water splashed on his face and a little wind in his hair, but the gale-force hurricane shown behind him should have been knocking him off his feet.
But the spider… the spider was nothing more than a poorly made stuffed animal literally being bounced on a string to make it look like it was moving down its web. It looked like something you might see on the Muppet Show. Incidentally, we are shown Ernst grabbing the spider and throwing it away from himself, then taking a stick and beating the arachnid at his feet. After the bite, we change to Ernst’s POV. The image on the screen is then blurred and stretched, to show how his vision is being affected. The image suddenly starts spinning like it was on a pinwheel, a technique that was both hokey and effective. The two are not mutually exclusive. By todays standards, the effect is a bit cheesy, but I suppose it was fine for 1940.