Hey! This isn’t an animated movie, what gives? Well, I wanted to spend some time to talk about a side of animation that is often overlooked by animation reviewers, special effects. For the next four reviews, I am going to talk about movies that are most notable for their special effects, starting with the movie that quite possibly pioneered the entire special effects industry, the film that changed cinema as we know it, and without it, there would be no Jurassic Park, no Ray Harryhausen, probably not even computer effects as we know them. Today, I will be looking at 1933's King Kong.
Planning on making a picture, Carl Denham wants to shoot on a mysterious island, and brings along his crew, including the First Mate Jack Driscoll, and a struggling actress named Ann Darrow. While there, Ann is kidnapped and offered as a sacrifice to the mighty ape, Kong. The crew, mostly the first mate, rescue her and Carl has the idea to bring Kong back to New York as "The Eighth Wonder of the World". The plot moves along quite nicely, though it does take a little while to actually get to Kong. I feel like the slower pace is just a thing with older movies, but to be fair, it does build up to Kong quite nicely. The introduction of Kong was super cool, with the music and Kong ripping away at the trees. The plot does take a little bit to get going, but overall the plot is well done. They also place in a romance subplot, though it is kind of quick and rushed. Jack just kind of admits he likes Ann and that's really it. I did buy that they liked each other, but a little bit more time developing the relationship would have been nice. Then again, that also could have meant we'd take even longer to get to Kong, but I did enjoy spending time with the characters.
The characters were quite fun, Carl is great in a very blunt and somewhat blunt and direct kind of way. He’s a little like Scrooge McDuck in a sense, where you like him, but you’re also aware that he’s a bit of a cad and probably not the best guy to be around. Ann is also a nice character, she starts the adventure full of excitement and joy, and as the movie carries on, she becomes more afraid of the beasts around her, to the point that she is practically traumatized by the end. I also really like Kong, he has the curiosity and mannerisms of a young kid. He plays with the broken jaw of a dinosaur and peels away Anne’s clothes like she’s a Barbie doll, you can’t help but feel that Kong is just an oversized child at points, which of course makes us sympathize with him when he is taken from his home and shot down at the end. That being said, not all of the characters were great, Jack was a bit of a bland character, just a hard-ass with a soft spot, this could have also been why the romance angle was fairly weak. Then we get Charlie the cook and the Natives. To be fair, there are worse portrayals of Chinese and Black people in film, but this is definitely a 1930s production. So, viewer be warned.
One thing I really want to point out is the soundtrack by Max Steiner. The music in this movie is excellent, it hits the right tone of exciting and tense. I’m really hoping they put this soundtrack on vinyl or CD because it is fantastic. Perfectly fits the mood and compliments each scene it backs.
And of course, we have to talk about the special effects. These were groundbreaking effects for the time, and they have inspired so many animators and filmmakers. Peter Jackson, Ray Harryhausen, even Tomoyuki Tanaka who created Godzilla. These effects inspired so many big things, and in many respects they still hold up. The stop motion looks fluid and the little details they add make the puppets look so much more real. The ground moving under Kong as he falls down, and the wind blowing through his fur are just the perfect little touches. Plus, when they had to build a giant Kong model for close up shots, it looks fantastic, the model work for the head, hand and foot, looks fantastic great, it's kind of impressive to think they would build massive props like that back then. On top of that, the matte paintings were so good, I could barely tell they were there, and when they had a live actor in the background of a stop motion scene, the way they achieved the effect of having the actor move naturally was ingenious, projecting the frames onto a miniature while they animated everything around it. That being said, some of the rear projectioning has not held up well. The scene where the crew walk passed the dinosaur they just drugged and shot reminded me a bit of Blue’s Clues, with how Steve would just kind of faux-walk and the panning camera would make it look like he was moving. Still, that is to be expected with old effects, someday our insanely produced Marvel movies will not hold up to snuff, it is just how effects work, and that lesson can also be applied to video games, but now I’m getting ahead of myself. It's easy to think that it was only mind-blowing back in the 30s, but these effects are still pretty great. While it's true that this movie would have been even more mind-blowing back then, I'd argue that it's still kind of mind-blowing today.
Overall, a lot of people will say this is one of the greatest movies ever made, and quite frankly, I could not agree more. The movie was exciting and thrilling and when we think about the influence it had in our modern effects and how much of a cultural impact this movie had, I think King Kong is a movie that everyone needs to see, filmmakers, artists, animators, special effects crew, moviegoers in general. King Kong is one of the greatest movies ever made and I’m glad I decided to kick off this Special Effects Movie Marathon with it. Even if some of it has aged poorly, the stuff that has held up still holds up really well. If we think about all of the mind blowing movies that came out after it, Godzilla, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Night at the Museum, all of them owe quite a bit to this movie. It pioneered special effects, it's a fantastic movie on it's own, quite frankly I don’t think I can recommend this movie enough.
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