Breaking News: Stop-Motion Monster Movies Are Awesome

Ray Harryhausen. You know the name.

If you don't, then:
1) shame on you.
2) watch the video above.

If you love big dumb monster movies, then you have a lot to thank him for. His work is the quintessential stop-motion magic, and has influenced a lot of my favourite monster-based entertainment, including Army Of Darkness, God Of War, Jurassic Park, Robocop, and a ton of Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro films. He was also a damn fine illustrator, as seen here.
 
Of his massive filmography, I own two - Jason And The Argonauts and Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger. By the way, when I reference Harryhausen's films, I don't mean as a director but as the stop-motion artist. The FX in both of these have really stood the test of time, and most of Jason still works incredibly well from a film-making perspective. They both fall short, however, once the main female character suddenly falls in love with the hero for no reason, and does very little to advance the plot. Older films tend to drag around this point in their story.



But there's no denying that there's a certain charm about the use of those effects. For starters, we the audience knows that the creatures we are watching actually exist. They look like a physical thing that was filmed with a real camera be
cause it WAS a physical thing filmed with a real camera. Therefore, it'll always have that going for it over CGI. Good CGI is almost invisible to the audience as they engage with the story and characters, but bad CGI takes us right out of a film like nothing else.

For example, The Incredible Hulk (2008) is a decent film for the first 40 mins, but as soon as Hulk turns up on the campus scene, it's like watching Ace Lightning. Not to shit all over the hard work of the Rhythm & Hues FX team, CG artists get little to no acknowledgement outside of the industry, and there are some good shots, but overall it moved too cartoony for me, and the transitions between live action and CG shots were too distracting and obvious. I always thought the animation on the Ang Lee Hulk looked a lot better, even though the rendering and overall design really let it down.
But that's a whole other post.
I mean rant.
I mean waste of everyone's time.

(The director, of The Incredible Hulk, Louis Leterrier, also directed the remake of Harryhausen's Clash Of The Titans, and the same problems arise: too many Hollywood filmmaking cliches like shaky cam and blue/orange lighting that take you out of the time period, and overuse of CGI where it wasn't needed. Plus it was a pointless remake where a Greek character was played by a white guy with a shaved head and a thick Australian accent.)

But if they were to ever use stop motion and animatronics to create the Hulk, then at least there would be a handmade charm about his screen presence if it went wrong. Look at Mr Wink from Hellboy II: The Golden Army for a good example of using the appropriate methods.

It's hard to think of any examples of bad stop-motion because even Harryhausen's best works have imperfect frames - it's just a consequence of that process of FX. Perhaps, given the relatively simple film-making techniques of the 40's - 80's in terms of storytelling and camerawork, it was easier to mix stop motion with live action. Since the majority of Jason is made of a variety of wide to closeup still shots, the lack of camerawork on the stop motion segments blends into the film easier, helping the illusion. When the 'camera' is held onto bad CGI for too long the illusion is broken, and the same when the CGI camera holding onto even good CGI starts moving around like a video game, it's also broken.

Of course, the process is incredibly time-consuming compared to CGI so it's naive to think that a big American adventure epic will ever use stop-motion again. But imagine if a Hollywood film used stop-motion with modern green screen and camera technology. I think that it would work incredibly well! Companies like Aardman are still investing talent, time and money into the art form. New camera setups and filming techniques are always being developed, and 3D printing has made the model-making process a lot more efficient than it was half a century ago. Who knows what projects await us in the future...