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Movies & TV

No School Like The Old School

A quarter-century of CGI has left us a little jaded. Now that it’s possible to seamlessly integrate rampaging dinosaurs, raging elf armies and rock-em-sock-em giant robots into live-action footage – or even supplant reality entirely with photorealistic simulations – we’re no longer dazzled by the possibilities of photographic trickery.

Part of that is that the cinematic language of visual effects is no longer as obvious as it once was: inserting a stop-motion effect used to require an additional step in processing the film image, creating a slight increase in grain in shots that employed such an optical. (James Cameron once told me that by the late 80s, audiences had conditioned themselves to brace for something at any change in a movie’s visual texture digital film printing eliminated that tell, to his delight.)

But there’s also a seamlessness to CG creations that sometimes makes us long for the old ways, when monsters and spaceships were clearly crafted by hand. Sure, stop-motion effects could look cheap and clunky – but when they were done well, they were things of beauty, often showing more character than the actors sharing the screen with them. The first King Kong, as Peter O’Toole reminded us in The Stunt Man, was just “three foot six inches” … but he had more character than the blank-faced animatronic designed for the 1976 remake.

Starting this weekend, TIFF Cinematheque would like you to reach back to those more open years – and salute a lost art form – with the impressive new series Magic Motion: The Art Of Stop Motion Animation, running to New Year’s weekend.

Covering a century of stop-motion storytelling, the series kicks off tonight (Friday, November 27) with a celebration of Willis O’Brien’s gorgeous work in the original productions of The Lost World and King Kong.

As you’d expect, the program is heavy on the work of Ray Harryhausen, whose inventive artistry on projects like Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (January 3) and One Million Years B.C. helped to define the pulpy sci-fi of the 50s before he moved into more fantastical creature work on projects like The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad (December 5).

Director John Landis, who grew up loving Harryhausen’s work, will be at the Lightbox to present a master class on Jason And The Argonauts Wednesday (December 2) and introduce 20 Million Miles To Earth Thursday (December 3). Those should be a blast.

The European tradition gets its due from the jump, with German pioneer Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adventures Of Prince Achmed – the first feature-length animated production – screening tomorrow (Saturday, November 28, 4 pm) in a hand-tinted 35mm print. And towards the end of the series, Czech visionaries Jiri Trnka and Jan Svankmajer are saluted with screenings of their work: Trnka’s The Hand is paired with Svankmajer’s Alice In Wonderland December 29, followed by Svankmajer’s freaky Faust and Trnka’s The Emperor’s Nightingale back to back December 30.

And the innovative work done right here at the National Film Board is showcased in a pair of programs: NFB Animation After Dark (December 27) programs work with more mature themes, while NFB Family Fun (December 28) is safer for the littler ones.

A few minutes of lovingly animated footage justifies the inclusion of Cameron’s The Terminator (screening on Christmas Night, which is an absolutely genius programming decision), Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (December 31) and Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (December 19), which also lets those of you who missed those films in their previous Lightbox engagements catch up to them now.

As stop-motion lost favour as an element of live-action filmmaking, it was given a jolt of new life from the British stop-motion house Aardman, where the mad genius of animator Nick Park was given free reign. The result was the magnificent Wallace and Gromit trilogy – A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, all screening together December 21 – and it led to a run of terrific feature films, including Chicken Run (December 22), Wallace And Gromit In The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit (December 21) and The Pirates! Band Of Misfits (December 23), all packed with delightful voice performances, genuinely inspired set pieces and awful, awful puns.

And over in America, the rise of Portland’s inspired Laika is celebrated with screenings of that production house’s wonderful features: Coraline (December 12), a terrific adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel by the gifted animator Henry Selick Christopher Butler and Sam Fell’s terrific ParaNorman (December 13) and Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable’s The Boxtrolls, which screens December 11 with an introduction by Mark Shapiro, Laika’s Head of Marketing, and repeats December 23.

Wes Anderson’s fully animated adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox (December 24) is always welcome on a big screen, though I’m surprised his first experiment with the form – the Selick-animated underwater creatures of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou – isn’t here as well. And while it’s great to see Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (December 22) included, the absence of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach – both directed by Selick – and Burton’s own feature remake of Frankenweenie. (All of those are Disney releases – as was The Life Aquatic. So, hmm.)

Still, there’s no use crabbing over what’s missing when we can celebrate what’s been included. And this is a terrific series, bursting with endless delights. You can always pick up those other movies on Blu-ray next year, anyway.

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