The Thief of Bagdad – 1940 (WINNER)
This film had a lot of special effects that tied in very well with the bright and colorful production design. It was a true fantasy, and after watching it, I now know where Disney got the story for their big animated feature, Aladdin, though some of the characters were changed around a little. This movie had a flying mechanical horse, a magical storm at sea, a giant genie, a flying carpet, a mystical viewing stone, and a giant spider.
Probably the most famous effect was the giant genie coming out of the bottle. Black smoke billows out, and the image of a sixty foot tall man fades in. That was the first proper use of the blue-screen process to create a traveling matte. But in other shots, I must confess a slight disappointment. For example, during two separate close-up shots, when the young man crawled from under a stomping foot or stepped off of the giant hand, the genie’s appendages became slow and clunky animatronics. And the shots where the young man was on the genie’s shoulder, when he is holding onto his hair, just looked incredibly fake. I applaud them for constructing the scale sets, but it was so obvious that I was taken out of the story.
But I liked the flying horse. They showed it being put together in pieces, then a shot of a whole fake horse as it is mounted, and finally, a still shot of a real horse’s head. After that, all they had to do was start the film rolling, and the horse began to move. They were able to blend the blue-screened image with the matte-painted background pretty seamlessly. I’m sure it helped that the sky was blue. The giant spider wasn’t too bad either. Clearly, it was a life-sized puppet, but it had a bit of movement to it, and when Abu cut off one of its legs, there was actually a little blood to make it more real. However, its oversized web looked and behaved too much like common rope covered with fake, cottony Halloween webbing.
And if I’m being honest, I also wanted more in other effects, as well, like when Abu got transformed into a dog. I don’t think they pushed the effect far enough. It was nothing more than a simple image of the man fading away, overlapped with the image of the dog fading in. There weren’t even any transitional images of a half man, half canine to make it more like morphing. And while I’m ranting, too many of the blue-screened shots had the obvious blue halo around the actors. But hey, it was 1940, and such things had never been done before, so I shouldn’t complain!
I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy the film or that it didn’t deserve its Best Special Effects award. I really think it did, and it was a fun movie to watch. It made great use of the new blue-screen technology effects. It helped that the movie was just so full of fanciful visuals, giving audiences things they’d never seen before. The director made the smart choice of filming in Technicolor, making them look even more dazzling to audiences who were still being treated to mostly black and white films. All in all, the Academy had plenty of reason to award this movie its Oscar.