With Anomalisa (co-directed by Charlie Kauffman and Duke Johnson) about to wow everyone on discerning screens everywhere, now seems like a pretty sensible time to look back at one of the touchstones of movie visual trickery.
Stop-motion, as you may know, involves moving joints on models or otherwise manipulating images frame by frame to create an animated effect. It has been a backbone of creature features and sci-fi films going all the way back to the silent era. To this day, there are more than a few of us who yearn for the tactility of those effects over today's CGI — although maybe we're just being luddites.
TIFF's new programme "Magic Motion" is a lot to cover but it starts near the beginning of the form with ex-newspaper cartoonist Willis O'Brien's effects work on the 1926 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. That picture was a huge hit and was the first significant use of stop-motion, at least how we commonly think of it. The same year German director Lotte Reiniger made use of stop-motion in another sense to create a gorgeous silhouette effect in The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The hand-tinted 35mm print of that film, Nov. 28 at 4:00 p.m., is no doubt a highlight of the whole programme.
Back state-side, O'Brien took more sophisticated versions of the dino's he brought to life in The Lost World — the 90 min version runs tonight at 6:30 p.m. — and added the most famous monster in movie history for a little ditty called King Kong (also tonight at 9:00 p.m.).
It was another ape movie, Mighty Joe Young (Nov. 29 at 3:30 p.m.), that brought O'Brien an Oscar for Best Special Effects in 1950 and into collaboration with a young man named Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen is THE name in stop-animation and is maybe the most beloved visual effect artist in all of film this side of Douglas Trumbull.
Harryhausen's work is represented in a slew of B-movies in this retrospective. I can't say that most of them are worth sitting through in their entirety, but you won't forget his monsters.
20 Million Miles to Earth (Dec. 3 at 6:30 p.m.), as an example of how B we're talking here, never leaves Earth at all. In fact it only gets as far as Italy. Really the whole thing is just a low-rent remounting of Kong, where a sensitive monster is brought to ragin' by man's inability to relate. This time it's a space lizard and, case in point, Harryhausen's Ymir is remarkably sympathetic.
The master himself thought the best picture he ever worked on was Jason and the Argonauts. That's tough to argue, and TIFF has brought in An American Werewolf in London director John Landis to do a Master Class on the film Dec. 2 at 7:00 p.m.
It should be noted, if you're working on a check-list, Harryhausen's most famous monster, The Cyclops, is in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Dec. 5 6:00 p.m.), not Jason and the Argonauts.
There are many more films to chew on in this retrospective, including Nick Park's dynamic duo of Wallace and Gromit in their first three shorts — which is claymation in shop terms — Dec. 30 at 1:30 p.m. You can also check out 80's blockbusters like The Terminator (Dec. 25 at 8:45 p.m.) and Beetlejuice (Dec. 19 at 3:30 p.m.), just to show how essential these techniques are to movie magic.
Another great treat is also René Laloux's La Planète sauvage (Dec. 26 at 6:00 p.m.) about a race of giant aliens that enslave the primitive version of our own species, only to eventually fall victim to humanity's insurrection. The look of that film suggests Terry Gilliam's more well-known stuff for Monty Python as seen in Monty Python's Life of Brian (Dec. 24 at 6:30 p.m.).
Also be sure to check out the collection of National Film Board animated shorts, including Norman McLaren's famous Neighbours (Sunday, Dec. 27 at 6:30 p.m.) as evidence we're not just talking about monsters and aliens.
The full slate is available here.
Screening Roundup
One of the very best films noir, Otto Preminger's Laura, is screening at the Revue as their Classics Revue of the month. It stars Dana Andrews as a weary gum-shoe who falls in love with a dead woman while unravelling the mystery of her demise. Clifton Webb steals the show, along with one of the great film scores, and Dana Andrews would mumble his way to a long career sporting a wet trench coat and fedora. Nov. 30 at 7:00 p.m.
Proof of that last statement is in Jacques Tourneur's phenomenal horror film Night of the Demon, playing Saturday Nov. 28 at 8:30 p.m. at TIFF Bell Lightbox, where Andrews plays a professional sceptic who arrives in London to put holes in the claims of a Satanic cultist. It's one of my favourite films, and is still one of the best supernatural thrillers, even if the producers toyed with Tourneur's vision in ways I can't discuss for fear of spoilers.
Toronto Screengrab of the Week
I wasn't expecting anyone to get last week's entry, unless any massive fans of the late Bob Clark clicked-through, but the correct answer is Breaking Point from 1976.
This week we go to what is surely one of the trashier entries in the Toronto-shot film cannon. A low-rent 80s horror flick about a cab-driving vampire…
