12/19/2023 0 Comments Corpse party anime frames per second![]() Produced by the Lutheran Church, the preachiness of the series is balanced by how surreal it often seems. On the other end of the moral spectrum resides "Davey and Goliath," a Claymation TV series about an innocent, trouble-prone lad and his talking dog/ conscience. Avian skeletons, animated vegetables, debauched demons and a tough guy who looks just like Willem Dafoe (really!) dance, drink, smoke, assault and kill in this disturbingly beautiful short. In the film, the devil emerges from a bottle of booze and hosts a party for a menagerie of grotesque creatures - and one beautiful girl who is attacked by an amorous monkey. But it's his 1934 short, "The Devil's Ball," that feels really groundbreaking more than 70 years later. The French-Russian-Polish director Wladyslaw Starewicz's 1910 beetle-battle short, "Lucanus Cervus," is generally regarded as the first animated puppet film - Starewicz used genuine beetle carcasses to embody his protagonists - and it spawned a series of stop-motion pictures utilizing insects and animals. While Peter Jackson's new Kong promises to deliver the goods this Christmas, it's more than doubtful that his film's protagonist and its look and feel will have a fraction of the lasting impact of the original "8th Wonder of the World." We moviegoers are so jaded by constantly evolving and improving CGI technology that we're almost never moved anymore to ask, "How did they do that?" And that's a shame. Pioneering stop-motion artist Willis O'Brien's jerky giant ape may seem quaint by today's standards (you can see the manipulators' handprints on Kong's rustling fur), but back in the '30s, audiences had never seen anything so spectacular. When "King Kong" hit the big screen in 1933, it caused a sensation unlike any movie up until that time. The method has been around for as long as cinema has existed, dating back to George Mélies' 1902 silent film, "A Trip to the Moon." In the century since, some really cool films and TV shows have made use of the distinctive process. Between the shooting of each frame, the objects are moved ever so slightly, so that when the film is run at a minimum of 15 frames per second, the illusion of movement is achieved. "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" is not a documentary exposé about the director's necrophilic predilections, but rather another spooky stop-motion feature from the black-clad auteur who brought us "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Burton is perhaps Hollywood's greatest advocate of the art of stop-motion animation, an ancient (in motion picture terms) process in which objects, such as puppets, are filmed by a camera one frame at a time.
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