Sunday, 29 March 2015

Jason and the Argonauts 1963


This clip from Don Chaffey's 1963 fantasy greek mythology feature film, "Jason and The Argonauts" shows the scene where an army of skeletons is brought up from the ground to fight. These skeletons were created and manipulated using stop motion animation and then later on incorporated into the live action. Since first seeing this film when I was younger I have always found this scene quite unsettling. One of the main aspects of it which I find so unnerving is when the skeletons begin walking together in formation. The fact that they all move in exactly the same way at the same time, makes it much more intimidating. Eventhough it is easy to tell when watching this now, that this is clearly a use of animation from way back in the day, I still find it really impressive the way the actors would have acted out the fight with only objects to specify where each skeleton would potentially be. Also I think the use of timing and coordination has really paid off, I can see why when this film was released it was such a big success!

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