Okay, in the latest trailer, "Dynamation" has been replaced with "Super Animotion" or similar, probably to duck legal issues with Columbia. Or enraged fans of the real Dynamation features.
To my eye, it looks part stop motion, part CGI. In a recent publicity still we see the Roc, but there appears to be blurring on the wings which suggests CGI (or perhaps my own trick of shooting through glass with a very thin coating of Vaseline over the appropriate head or limb to create a cheapie 'blur').
I'll reserve judgement until I've seen it whether this is a "homage to Ray Harryhausen" or just an unmitigated rip-off as the latest trailer suggests: we have an evil magician, a 'Parisa', a genie, a giant crab, a swordsman skeleton, a multi-limbed statue, a cyclops, a dragon, a balloon dingus that might be borrowed from Mysterious Island's weather balloon, and on and on and on. It's hard to tell, as some of the scenes look deliberately blurred for the trailer, or else the cinematography is astonishingly bad.
Right now my main motive for wanting to see it is morbid curiosity and little more. I only hope it doesn't morph into outrage. Another famous and blatant Harryhausen rip-job, Jack the Giant Killer (1961), already did that for me.
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gpeltz
10 years ago
Rover,
I am with you most of the way, in the trailer presented here, the Cyclops did not have the facial expression that Harryhausen's skill brought into his, in, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but then again, stop motion is not easy to do do, and Harryhausen was the master.
I do take exception to your put down of, Jack the Giant Killer (1961) I thought that was a well done film, and had many creative touches of it's own.
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rover-774-432340
10 years ago
In the 1960s I was a pen-pal with Jim Danforth, who did a lot of the animation in Jack the Giant Killer. What displeased him the most was that producer Ed Small insisted that the movie be a close clone of Sinbad (Small had turned Harryhausen down when he was hunting a producer for his Sinbad idea and was enraged when it made so much money for Columbia). There were constant screenings of Sinbad for the effects team working on Jack, so that they would mimic the 26-frame cyclops stride, the wing-flap rate of the Roc, etc. They felt tremendously stifled. The schedule was so tight that several extremely jerky takes were included in the film without a chance for a retake. Jim did a beautiful and creative early version of the Cormoran giant which was rejected because it didn't look "cyclops" enough. Crude though the Giant Killer Models were, apparently the foam rubber was applied to the armature and then hand-carved (rather than using molds made from detailed clay models). If this is so, then the quality of the models was exceptionally GOOD!
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Wombstar
10 years ago
But nobody is going to be able to do it better then Ray, this is why they have huge teams putting theses together and, use computers to aid them and this film didn't have the budget that most modern stop-motion films have.
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