Here's a nice, long portrait of the titular character in "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms":
I finally filled that gap in my Harryhausen knowledge a few nights ago. As usual, the animation is outstanding, the creature has a lot of personality and is the reason why you should watch the film, and the humans range from "less boring than the others" to "insufferable" and you have to sit through a lot of their BS to get to awesome monster shenanigans.
I'm instead going to recommend the terrific Netflix streaming documentary, "Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan". None of us will ever be as awesome as him.
April is shaping up to be an insane month. I've got a lot of family commitments, including my cousin's wedding, and I'm not even sure if I'll be able to go to Boston Comicon at all! This is the point where I'm going to have to start posting things whenever I can instead of regularly.
So because this may be the last new post for (horrors) a week or two, I've got a special treat. I've talked about this documentary a lot in the past but I do not think I ever sat down to watch it in full to discuss it in detail. Well, it's late at night and I'm bored, so...
When I was about seven years old, this show melted my face off. Now I wasn't keen on the old movie footage (mostly because I didn't know who Ray Harryhausen was yet) or the scenes where Christopher Reeve is walking around in the museum or even the interviews with the paleontologists. Nope, I was AAAAaaaall about Phil Tippet's animation. And hot dog, does it look better than like 70% of the effects in feature films today.
More importantly, this was the first piece of animation I ever saw where the dinosaurs were allowed to act like normal animals in their own environment instead of some kind of fantastic monsters out to kill all humans. This probably doesn't seem like a big deal today. Indeed, around last year, dinosaur-involving media had got to the state where "Dinosaur Revolution" was controversial because -horrors- some of the animation was exaggerated and silly. But it was downright flabbergasting to my young mind and I loved the film for it.
Other fun things to notice:
* - The aforementioned vintage film clips. They run the gamut from stone-cold classics like "The Lost World" and "King Kong" to some of the aforementioned Ray Harryhausen's stranger offerings to... not-so-classic things like the weird remake of "Gertie the Dinosaur", "Baby", and "Caveman".
* - The interviews with all the paleontologists, mostly because everyone is so young!
* - The school group making stop-motion animated films. Holy cow, they are so quotable. "Brontosaurus is a sweet guy". Indeed.
* - Overall, the reminder of what dinosaur popular culture was like in a pre-"Jurassic Park" world. I kind of want to build some fanciful animals out of repurposed scraps of metal, don't you?
* - Most notably, this documentary takes a turn for the very strange in the last twenty minutes or so:
In quick succession, there is a long discussion of cryptozoological animals that MIGHT be dinosaurs but probably aren't, and anyway plesiosaurs aren't dinosaurs and we just heard Bob Bakker explain that sauropods do not work that way so never mind. Then there is the very briefest mention possible of the dinosaur-bird connection. This is ended as swiftly as possible so that Dale Russel can talk about your friends and mine, the Dinosauroid.
So, basically, "Okay there MIGHT be real dinosaurs around today and that would be awesome except that the two ones we're talking about here are probably mythical creatures. Oh wait, yeah, birds are dinosaurs, so there's that. But since nobody could possibly wish for that to be elaborated on here in 1985 when it is still a pretty mind-blowing concept, let's talk to this dude about his deeply embarrassing Human Alien thing!"
A very special quick holiday post, because this was too amazing not to share:
I feel like I have just been shown everything ever all at once.
This is "200 / Bi Centennial" by psychedelic animator Vincent Collins. I only know about it thanks to somebody on Facebook. It's been darn near impossible to find any more information about it other than:
A few more Links of Interest for the road since this post was so short:
* - Want. Want so hard. (Yes, I am a sucker for Dunkin' Donuts and slushy fruity drinks.)
* - The Onion AV Club has been reviewing every episode of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete" for a while now, but this entry caught my fancy because of it's opening. It's really hard to find more than very basic information about television shows from that weird period right before the internet took off; "(all) we’ve got (are) a couple of scanned articles, a cassingle that came in a cereal box, and some orange VHS tapes". Keep this in mind for something I'll be writing hopefully next week.
I have not seen the new "Clash of the Titans". I will admit this up front. Honestly, I don't really want to see the new "Clash of the Titans". But this stupid movie has inadvertently brought up some things that bother me:
1) It turns out some people will take any CGI, even the not-so-good CGI in "Clash", over the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion in the original. This makes me unspeakably sad. So I went to the library and got An Animated Life to read. This is a big, huge book I've salivated over for a while, so I was elated that they had it. I'll review it soon.
2) The 3-D in "Clash" was added as an afterthought. This fact has been wildly reported. It was thought that people wouldn't pay extra for crappy 3-D... but guess what?
3) This plot point. (Deftly illustrated by the wonderful Coelasquid [naughty language warning], who has done an entire series of comics based of ridiculous things in "Clash".)
4) But I think the thing that bugs me more than anything about this remake of "Clash of the Titans" is this: Of all the things they changed from the original "Clash of the Titans", couldn't they have swapped the Kraken out for, I dunno, some scary sea monster out of ***GREEK*** Mythology?!? It isn't like they don't have a surplus of them.
In other movies I have no interest in seeing news, I am sincerely disappointed that the movie entitled "Furry Vengeance" is NOT about "Secret of N.I.M.H." fans out for justice, as the title would suggest. Because I would watch the hell out of that movie and so would you. Admit it. ---- Sketch of the day! How about some happy after all that uncharacteristic vitriol. Yaaaaaaay!!!
1) Yay stop-motion!!!
I like how we're seeing more and more stop-motion these days. Seems that many animated films are avoiding the whole "hand-drawn vs. CGI" debate (which, in case I haven't mentioned it yet, is stupid; especially when it is erroneously called "2D vs. 3D") by taking a third option. So far, they've inadvertently proved that normal people (by which I mean people who are not themselves animators or animation fans) don't care what kind of animation you use as long as the characters are interesting and the story doesn't suck.
And I like how the animation in this movie looks a lot like Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion (go add "Jason and the Argonauts" to your queue if you don't know who Harryhausen is). It's hard to explain; I'm old-fashioned and I really like old-school animation techniques, especially their low-tech hallmarks. (And I'd love to do stop-motion animation myself; sadly God did not see fit to bless me with the 3D design talent, but that is a tale of woe for another day.) The fur on the Furries is messed-up slightly in each frame and it looks all the more awesome for that.
What I'd really love to see at this point is a big, mainstream summer action movie done in live-action/stop-motion a la Harryhausen. (A few years ago, there was a rumor of a "Sinbad" movie with animation by Harryhausen himself... but... yeah...)
2) With all this in mind, however, it makes me very, very sad to see many comments already online to the effect of, "NOT ANOTHER CGI AMINAL MOOVEE!!! >:( "
Sometimes, I hate people.
3) Open letter to people in charge of making trailers for animated movies: Unless, say, George Clooney sculpted the little wire skeletons or manned the camera or sewed the intricate little costumes or, you know, animated the movie himself, he has no business being listed in the credits. (More of my thoughts on the "Will Smith is a fish and he quotes old movie lines LOL" school of animated film voice casting are here.)
