The Stop-Motion Filmography: A Critical Guide to 297 Features Using Puppet Animation

Rating:
Summary: Book is not so great.....
Review: Actually I found this book to be very tedious to read. As the movie listings show, Stop Motion Anmation (the process of building models with moveable parts and then photographing them one frame at a time, then speeding up the frames so that they can move on a three dimesnional fashion) has been around since the silent film era. But as the book shows, it has been mostly used for B-Level Movies; Planet of the Dinosaurs,Howard The Duck and the list goes on. The process is very crude and unless the work was raally good, You could often tell that it was a model because the movement was often jerky and uneven, It still had a cartoonish/two dimensional look to it. Where I disagree with the book is that the book tends to list Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen as the best stop motion animators, and I think the title belongs more to George Pal. Pal, who came from a background in both cartoons and puppetry, was able to give his stop motion work more detail and more humanity to the work. That's seen in the puppet toons and his later live action movies like The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. The other major difference is that George Pal ueually worked with a large enough budget to give his work the kind of planning and building to scale that it needed. Where as O'Brien and Ray useually worked with less money and had to pretty much throw things together with fewer resources to draw upon. It's not really that well known that much later when Ray did Jason and the Argonauts in 1963, the budget that he had for it was not very large. Anyway; I think that the title of the best movie maker in Stop Motion Animaion was and still is George Pal.

Rating:
Summary: The ultimate sourcebook....almost
Review: This HUGE (almost 850 pages) tome is the ultimate reference guide to the motion pictures that utilize the fine art of stop-motion photography. From the obvious (King Kong, Jason and The Argonauts) to the obscure (Winterbeast, Frostbiter), this covers them all. Almost. I did notice a few omissions, most notably the Lou Ferrigno HERCULES movies from the early 80's, both of which I believe employed this process. Also missing was Godzilla Vs. Destroyah, which used the process briefly, and Godzilla Vs. Biollante, which had test footage in this process (the book covers other films that stop-motion was only used as test footage for). It also misses a couple of movies that utilized footage from Planet of Dinosaurs (Galaxy of Dinosaurs and Time Tracers). But other than these minor gripes, the book is fascinating, full of great pictures of all the monsters you forgot about (remember the stop-motion creatures from Coneheads? Howard the Duck? Didn't think so. But you SHOULD.). A great buy at it's high price tag, and well worth every penny.