This is exactly what a fantasy dragon film should be.
The puppetry and stop frame animation were excellent. The design of the dragon, costumes, sets, and props are excellent. The story has a great arc.
Then there's the locations and scenery. It's gorgeous.
Check this out. It has a bit of gore but it's proper in the context of the story.
I've never even heard of this movie. The cover/poster looks familiar. I will add this to the watch list.
shareI purchased it on Amazon Prime. I'm sure it's one some streaming service for free. I hope you enjoy.
shareIt was rental staple back when the fantasy section of video stores was just two shelves. It does seem to have slipped into obscurity.
shareThat one scene, where Galen is crouched on the rock outcropping in the cave, and Vermithrax is living her head slowly, menacingly towards him, feels the most real of the entire dragon interaction scenes.
I've actually played games where, when I'm fighting dragons, they make the exact same sound when drawing in breath before letting flame loose as Vermithrax does in this film. Cool, huh?
It is cool. I love how that sound was established with the first virgin. The gradual reveal of Vermithrax was handle very well.
shareIt is, I'm amazed at how daring and innovative movie-makers were before the 2010s, even in the days when all they had were practical effects.
shareIt's a real shame that these days, with rare exceptions, filmmakers automatically turn to CGI. While I think that sometimes CGI does make the most sense, there are other occasions were practical effects will yield a vastly superior result.
One of my classic examples if Independence Day and Independence Day: Resurgence. Many of the destruction scenes and other effects in Independence Day still look awesome, while pretty much all of Resurgence is just a CGI mess.
It's one of the things I found fascinating when looking in the BTS of Guillermo del Toro's better films: he would mostly use practical effects until it wasn't possible to make something look real without help from CGI. Good examples would be his "Hellboy" films and "Pan's Labyrinth," where much of what you see in the scenes was actually there in front of the camera, save for a few items that couldn't be made with practical effects. It's what makes his style of story-telling unique because he doesn't settle for the lazy CGI cop-out a lot of films have these days.
shareThat makes sense. It seems that, largely, the people keeping practical effects alive are older filmmakers who came up in earlier eras and want to preserve practical forms of the FX craft.
I hope that younger filmmakers also figure out that it's often the best way to go about things as well.
I overheard from some YouTube people I listen to that one reason CGI doesn't look as realistic as it did 20 years ago is because of the framerate they use when filming these days. Evidently the human eye registers 25 frames per minute, whereas movies are now running at 35 frames per minute, similar to your average computer game, which is one reason CGI in general looks more video game-like in film today than it did in times past. In times past they worked really hard to make it look real, and nowadays they're barely trying.
shareMmm, I would say that requires some clarification and fact-checking. The standard framerate for films basically for the entire history of moviemaking has been 24 frames per second. There have been a few films that have been shot at higher framerates, like The Hobbit and Avatar 2 (48 fps) and Gemini Man (60 fps) but this is quite rare.
I think the only reason that CGI (sometimes) look worse now than in the past is because it's often rushed. But certainly there is a lot of CGI today that looks excellent to the point of perhaps not even realizing that what you're looking at is something computer-generated rather than something real.
Overall, CGI is a tool and it's a good one, but in many cases something practical would work better because it provides a visual that is actually tangible and therefore feels more real to the viewer.
One thing that helps a lot is if the actors have a physical point of reference when talking to a character that is fully CGI. A good example of this was the movie "John Carter," where the title character was working with a Green Man of Mars called Tars Tarkas, played by Willem Dafoe. I saw in the behind-the-scenes that Willem would walk around on stilts and do body-acting [and his lines] when doing scenes where he interacted directly with Taylor Kitsch (the star). This made it much easier for Taylor (and other actors playing the more "human-looking" characters) to interact with "Tars Tarkas."
Another good example are mock-ups, where they make just pieces of some machine, or alien, or dinosaur, or supernatural creature the actors have to interact with physically, and they can then add in more details in post-production with CGI and marry the two images together. (However, the concept of mock-up puppets has been around since as early as the 70s, but honestly, I really wish they'd bring it back sometimes). These days, half the mock-ups are plastic/rubber pieces that are painted blue/green with pips on them, or the others are realistic-looking pieces of the object, but only partially made. It's actually easier on the actors than just a ball on a stick.
The CGI you speak of includes backgrounds, which are "easier" than something the actors must interact with. Animators have gotten really good with those. A fine example is "The Shape of Water," (I watched a BTS youtube video on it) where they recreated a realistic view of 1960s Baltimore in the background, and it looks so real the audience is completely fooled.
The one form of special-effects I do not miss is stop-motion animation when used in live-action films. That looked fake to me, even as a kid. Horrendous examples included "Clash of the Titans."
I'm seeing this soon. Can't wait.
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