Shazam 2’s CGI Monsters Make Us Miss The Days Of Stop-Motion

Stop-motion is an animated process in which filmmakers take real objects and models, photograph them, move them slightly, and then photograph them again. When these photographs are put together in a motion picture, the motionless objects appear to move on their own. When done well, the effect is uncanny, creating images that should be impossible to photograph on camera, with real-life texture and weight. 

While many animators use stop-motion to create entire animated worlds, in films ranging from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” to “My Life as a Zucchini” to “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” filmmakers have long used stop-motion to create visual effects in otherwise live-action motion pictures. This technique dates all the way back to the silent era, in various short films from filmmakers like Georges Méliès, and features like “The Lost World” (1925), which featured dinosaurs seemingly interacting with real actors in an adaptation of the classic adventure by “Sherlock Holmes” creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The stop-motion effects in “The Lost World” came courtesy of Willis O’Brien, who would later use those techniques to create one of cinema’s most enduring icons: the gigantic gorilla “King Kong,” in 1933. The visual effects spectacular, a heightened version of then-popular safari pictures, found a crew of explorers on an uncharted island full of dinosaurs and other unspeakable monsters. When the island’s undisputed ruler, King Kong, falls in love with one of the explorers, he’s captured and taken back to New York City and treated like a spectacle, only to run amok, climb the Empire State Building, fight off a swarm of biplanes, and fall to his tragic death, misunderstood as any of the great movie monsters.

“King Kong” may not be entirely convincing to modern eyes, but there’s a magic to his existence, at once very real yet totally dreamlike. King Kong truly existed, even if in reality he was only 18 inches tall.