1967 – Doctor Dolittle (WINNER)
Sigh… I’ll make no bones about the fact that I don’t like the film. Test audiences in the 1960s didn’t like the film either. This movie was geared towards a target audience between two and six years old. That being said, I’m trying to be as objective as possible about the quality of the special effects. But even then, I can find few things about the effects that were done well. And yet it won the Award. It won. If you ask me, it was a ridiculous win, and here’s why.
First of all, I have to assume that the academy considered trained animals to be a special effect, though I don’t. But aside from that, there was a brief storm at sea that supposedly destroyed a ship without hurting, or even inconveniencing, the passengers, a two-headed llama with four shapely human legs, a whale that pushed a very fake looking scale model of an island across the ocean to rejoin it with the coast of Africa like a puzzle piece, and a giant moth. The trained animals was really all the movie had. Oh, and I almost forgot about the Giant Pink Sea Snail, made of what appeared to be paper machete over a wire frame.
So, let’s focus on that snail for a moment. One of the things that has always bothered be about it was that it was so much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. I’m attributing this glaring flaw directly to the special effects team. He looked pitifully fake from the outside, and about the size of a large truck or minivan, not nearly big enough to house four people, each with their own separate sleeping chamber. But this made no sense. They could have easily made it appear big enough with green-screening, just like they did with the giant whale earlier in the movie, when he was talking to Dr. Dolittle. All they had to do is apply the same technique to the snail. But no, the small Sea Snail was a colossal disappointment.
This movie originally had a budget of $6 million. By the time the film was completed, it had inflated to around $18 million, which was a lot of money in the mid-60s. The animatronic snail was supposed to be the driving force behind the film’s entire plot, as Doctor Dolittle was on a mission to find the mythical creature. You’d think that some of that budget could have been devoted to the fantastical creature when he is finally shown at the end of the movie. But no. And as far as the rest of the animatronics used in the movie are concerned, mechanical creatures like the whale with the slow-moving tail, the giant moth with the slowly beating wings, , the cartoonish octopus, or the fox that looked alright, but moved like something in an old Disneyland attraction, they were pretty poorly done.
The fact that this movie won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects was almost a joke. The effects were as bad as the plot and the acting. But I suppose the trained animals were cool enough. I mean, in what other movies do we get to see a man riding a giraffe? And I guess that the trained chimp and the parrot were fun enough, though nothing I’d consider impressive enough to earn the film its nomination, let alone its win. I just don’t get it.