Today marks not only the 20th anniversary of Robert Zemeckis’ Best Picture winner Forrest Gump, but also a banner re-release, placing the blockbuster into IMAX screens for the first time. Forrest Gump was, it must be immediately recalled, the biggest hit of 1994. It was a Summer release, and played for months, earning over $300 million (and that’s in 1994 dollars!), beating out The Lion King and Speed. Only one other film was talked about more that year, and it was Pulp Fiction. I miss the days when noisy sci-fi and action blockbusters weren’t the highest earners.
Forrest Gump not only marked a high point in bold, Hollywood sentimentality, but it was also a watershed moment for film special effects. Forrest, played by Oscar winner Tom Hanks, famously visited several presidents throughout the course of the film, and this was achieved not with lookalikes or stand-ins, but by superimposing Forrest directly into film strips with the late Commanders in Chief, interacting with them, and giving them their own dialogue. These techniques earned Forrest Gump the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, beating True Lies and The Mask.
Check Out: How To Use Special Effects RIGHT, Damn It!
When we think of visual effects these days, we tend to think fantasy; i.e. What filmmaker can create a fantasy environment, fantasy gadget, or fantasy character the best? And while creatures and environment have long been the purview of VFX technicians, it seems to be particularly fantastical in recent years. How strange, then, that something as relatively “straight” as Forrest Gump can blow The Mask out of the water. People may not recall this in 2014, but there was a time when then nation was dazzled – dazzled! – by JFK saying new things.
To commemorate Forrest Gump‘s amazing special effects, we here at CraveOnline have compiled the following list of 22 other essential feature films that presented the world with important watershed moments in visual achievement. These 22 are by no means the only important films in VFX history; there are far too many dazzling and important movies that broke new ground in film visuals. But these are most certainly the 22 best and the most essential – not to mention still the best looking – of effects-based feature films.
Slideshow: The 22 Biggest VFX Milestones
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly Trolling articles here on Crave, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
The 22 Biggest VFX Milestones
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The Blood of a Poet (1932)
Director, artist, and playwright Jean Cocteau operated within the idiom of the poet and the surrealist. His first feature film was a bizarre meditation on how an artist creates and how it seems to alter him. Or something. There are many interpretations. Importantly, Cocteau used special in-camera effects and outright optical illusions to achieve some of the most mind-bending images ever committed to film. Mouths moving into people's hands, people vanishing into mirrors, statues coming to life. It's all some of the most amazing things to come out of the early 1930s.
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King Kong (1933)
Ernest B. Schoedsack's and Merian C. Cooper's King Kong was perhaps the first VFX bonanza as we tend to think of them today. This was a film that lived and died on how convincing the titular giant ape could appear. Thanks to a combination of rear projection, some excellent stop-motion animation, and a few enormous puppets, King Kong comes moving to life. It was perhaps the first case of a non-human creature, never played by an actor in a suit, came to life for an audience.
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The Invisible Man (1933)
H.G. Wells book required no effects beyond the imagination. James Whale, in adapting Wells' book, was faced with the challenge of making a human being disappear on camera. Using early blue screen effects – then, they were black screen effects – and other clever pieces of puppetry and hundreds of other techniques, Whale made it look like pants could dance on their own, that Claude Rains had no head, and that he could slowly reappear from nothing, one layer at a time. Even today, you'll marvel at The Invisible Man.
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The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
Powell/Pressberger's The Thief of Bagdad remains one of the most exciting adventure films ever made. When people refer to old-fashioned swashbuckling, they're usually referring to either The Thief of Bagdad or The Adventures of Robin Hood. And while the film was made in 1940, like many of the films on this list, you'll wonder how they achieved some of the realistic images in this film, including a giant genie that helps our young hero. This is colorful, clear, and astonishing. The film-layering and projection effects are flawless.
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Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
Any and all aficionados of VFX and of animation in general know the name of Ray Harryhausen, the pioneering animator who took stop-motion animation to new heights. While the technique was decades old (King Kong used stop-motion as well), Harryhausen made the movement more fluid, the creatures more interesting, and the fights between monsters and man far more convincing. All of his films are excellent, but his best film is probably Jason and the Argonauts, which features a famous scene with a gigantic bronze warrior protecting the Golden Fleece.
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Stanley Kubrick, by 1968, refused to do anything small. It makes sense, then, that when he tries to make a science fiction movie, he attempt to visualize nothing less than the infinite itself. Using special cameras, new reflective backdrops, models, clever angels, and a famous gigantic rotating set of a lived-in space station, Kubrick created what remains a realistic view into the future of space travel. Plus, there was that whole psychedelic Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite stuff, which is baffling and grand at the same time.
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Star Wars (1977)
After a whole decade of what seemed like nothing but heady, adult, downer dramas (also known as the best epoch of American film), the nation was ready for something dazzling and childish. In waltzed Star Wars, and a cultural touchstone – essentially the new version of pop culture – was created. And while the story is fun and the characters are affable, Star Wars also lives and dies by the amazing special effects on display. Hundreds of models and impeccable camerawork marks the space travel in Star Wars, and – if you can find the original version – it still looks good today.
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Superman (1978)
Still the best of all superhero movies, Richard Donner's Superman laid to rest any of the apprehension over the previously clunky visuals seen in previous Superman shows and shorts. Using cables, blue screens,and clever projection, we all believed that a man could fly. These were bold and colorful effects that took a famous childhood hero, and made him convincingly real.
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An American Werewolf in London and The Howling (both 1981)
Two of the best werewolf movies ever made, An American Werewolf in London and The Howling came out in the same year. It's been said that a werewolf movie is only measured by the quality of its transformation scenes, and these two have some of the best. In London, James Naughton has an awesomely complex transformation that looks terrifying and painful. In The Howling, Robert Picardo scared the bejeesus out of all of us when his eyes went red and his teeth grew. Makeup, prosthetic, models, and other techniques were employed to mutate these men. And we're stills scared to this very day.
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Tron (1982)
While the film was something of a bomb on its initial release, Tron had become a beloved cult hit in the ensuing year. Tron, for those who don't know, is a film about a human being who is transformed into a computer program by a malevolent artificial intelligence. From inside the computer, he sees a vast, blackened landscape constructed of neon blue glowing lights and some of the film world's first computer generated imagery. It may seem primitive to some eyes, but here's the thing: it still looks great.
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The Dark Crystal (1982)
Some of us old-timers, who were alive in the early 1980s, still prefer puppets and rubber suits over any sort of CGI monster, no matter how convincing. If you wonder why some of us have this get-off-my-lawn attitude, watch Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal sometime, and see what can be done with practical effects. The Dark Crystal is nothing short of mind-blowing in the way it creates elaborate sets, costumes, and creatures all with puppets. It's ethereal and, in the truest sense of the word, awesome.
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Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott's film is lazily paced and a bit confusing (seriously, what the heck was the unicorn all about?), but in terms of its outdoor cityscapes and lived-in future environments, it remains the apex. Scott didn't want to create a mere skyline of futuristic buildings for his sci-fi classic, but an entire city, full of billboards, smoke, traffic, and lived-in grime. He made an entire city from the ground up using miniatures and impeccable photography. You really feel like you could live inside of Blade Runner.
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Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)
Other films had been tinkering with CGI as a means of creating visual effects (see Tron), but the form was still very rudimentary, and fully realized CGI character hadn't really been tried yet. Until in 1985, when the infamous bomb Young Sherlock Holmes featured a stained glass window coming to life, and the flattened, glass character depicted thereon confronting our hero. The movie is of dubious quality, but this moment was the first CGI character in film.
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The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Titanic (1989, 1991, and 1997)
I include these three on the same line because they are all the result of the stirring and ambitious imagination of James Cameron. Cameron has always been one to try new technology and use each and every new expensive tool to create some of the best special effects ever. These three films pretty much represent the height of the golden age of special effects, when CGI was a new tool, and was being combined with some of the most elaborate practical effects ever committed to film. Criticize Cameron all you like, he can still dazzle us. He has a fourth film on this list as well...
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Jurassic Park (1993)
No list of important VFX films would be complete without the king of all blockbusters, Steven Spielberg. With films like Jaws and E.T., Spielberg used effects to terrify us in new ways, and tug at our heartstrings in ways that linger with us for the rest of our lives. In comes Jurassic Park, also made during the golden age of special effects, when everything was done carefully, and attention was paid to how convincing something is, rather than just how detailed the filmmakers could make it. As such, we believe a Tyrannosaurs Rex is stomping around in front of our heroes.
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Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
George Lucas' infamous Star Wars prequel may be widely derided these days for its bad dialogue and bad plotting, but it needs to be remembered how extensive the digital effects were. In 1999, the notion of a “digital backlot” had not been conceived of, and it was up to Lucas to pioneer it. These days, many films are made in front of green screens with environs added later. The Phantom Menace was one of the first films to be filmed mostly on a green screen set. Digital effects were given a giant push thanks to The Phantom Menace, and all modern VFX-based films owe an aesthetic debt to it.
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Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Although Peter Jackson's hit fantasy films are frequently noted for their overwhelming busyness and elaborate detail, the real visual boon from the series came in the form of Gollum, a fully-realized CGI character that was far more convincing than any of its technological predecessors. Using a live actor as a template, Jackson was able to make his animated character more expressive and more hefty than ever before. Seeing as how much motion capture has proceeded from this point, this was an important moment. Indeed...
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Avatar (2009)
James Cameron wanted to, once again, achieve special effects that had never been seen before. Say whatever you want about Avatar's plot or simplicity, the special effects are just as awesome as they got credit for. Using even newer motion capture techniques, and even more state-of-the-art CGI, Cameron literally created an entire world, full of alien fauna, monsters, and realistic human-like blue giants called Na'Vi. This may be the first largely animated film that doesn't look like an animated film.
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Gravity (2013)
3-D has been around for decades, but even the recent explosion of the form rarely allows the 3-D format to be anything more than what it's always been: a cheap gimmick. Oh sure, Avatar was shot in 3-D, but the effect was not the dazzling part of that film. Alfonso Cuarón's 2013 film Gravity, however, used the 3-D effect better than it had ever been used before. An astronaut looks truly lost in space, the things around her spin in a dizzying and spectacular fashion.
