Batman Returns – 1992
This movie was a very dark movie, not simply in its story content, but in its overall visual aesthetic. I’m hard pressed to remember more than one scene that took place in the daytime. Everything was in dim shades of white, black, gray, and blue, but mostly black. There was a single scene in golds and yellows, but that was brief. There were very few other colors used. As such, the visual effects took place in images that were so physically dark, they were sometimes difficult to see.
A lot of this movie’s special effects overlapped with the production design. Back then, Tim Burton had a very specific look to his films, like Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Nowhere was this more evident than in the sweeping shots where the camera panned through an abandoned World’s Fair park at night while a gentle snow is falling. The crumbling and decaying structures resembled the skeletons of animals. As far as I could tell, the park, and a lot of Gotham, for that matter, was a miniature model. The climactic scene where the park was blown up by hundreds of rockets was cool.
Many of the special effects in the film were of the stunt variety. As you might expect in a super-hero movie, there were fights, explosions, cool cars, penguins, and more explosions. Penguins, you might ask? Why yes, there were three main kinds of penguins used, four if you count Danny DeVito. There were live birds, animatronic ones, and then there were small people dressed in mostly convincing emperor penguin costumes. They all looked good when they were standing still, but when they moved, it was pretty obvious which of the three varieties they were.
Then there were the bats, all of which were animation, but not bad for all that. There was a sequence in which Batman extends a magically appearing hang-glider apparatus from within his cape, and dives off the top of one of those high Gotham skyscrapers, the implication being that his cape could transform into the hang-glider. It was big and bulky, and would have severely hampered his movement during hand to hand combat, but never-mind that. A flock of bats are harassing the onlookers as Batman flies among them. However, as I was pausing the scene, looking for screen captures, I happened to pause the movie right as the Caped Crusader was flying past the camera. For that split-second shot, the animators cut his feet off at the ankles, though you’d never know it without using a pause button.
But the one effect that caught my attention was the part where the Batmobile went into armored mode. This was the first example I have seen in a Best Visual Effects nominated film that used the magical, physically impossible CGI telescopic armor that has since become a standard visual effect, especially in super-hero movies like Iron Man. They explain the unbelievable effect away as nano-technology, like in a few Star Trek episodes, where the armor plating seems to spring into existence from nothing. It is an effect which has always bugged me, but I guess it looks cool enough, and ultimately, it is a fantasy movie, so why not?