| The Magic of Stop-Motion / Saturdays in November |
 "Of all the powers ascribed to ESP, psychokinesis—the ability to move objects by thinking about them—is by far the most powerful, essentially the power of a deity." - Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible
Film is a kind of sorcery, and never more so than in stop-motion animation. On its most primary level, film is based on illusion--the illusion of motion wrought from a series of frozen images, the illusion of life where there is none. Stop-motion is the purest form of this magic; it gives artists the power of telekinesis, granting film's unnatural life and motion to normally inanimate objects, from puppets to paper silhouettes to found detritus. Labor-intensive and exhausting, the painstaking process of producing a stop-motion film never lent itself easily to feature-length or serial projects; their rarity only adds to their value. The films in this series represent these precious times when visionaries were able to harness what essentially amounts to creative OCD, with truly remarkable results. Swoon-worthy visuals mask the painstaking techniques that brought these time-based sculptures into being, but things like a stray fingerprint visible in the fin of a talking fish reminds us who the story's heroes really were.
11/01 @ 6:00pm / SERIES: The Magic of Stop-Motion
 The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
shown with
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
Stop-motion godfather Ray Harryhausen's work dominates this 1970s sword-and-sandal double feature, the second and third respective parts of his "Sinbad" trilogy. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad has John Philip Law (Danger: Diabolik) and Caroline Munro (Star Crash) looking for the mythical fountain-of-youth kingdom of Lemuria--their obstacles include a cyclops centaur, a ship's masthead come to life, freaky animal hybrids and glorious, glorious homonculi. The everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink storyline is dense, but it all becomes sweet and easy once the animated cast starts its attack. Sinbad is later played by Patrick Wayne in the much more lavish Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, the phenomenal animated sequences of which took Harryhausen eighteen months to complete on his own. Once again, the film is littered with stop-motion critters and crawlers (which are reason enough to peep this one), but it's the sabretooth tiger-vs-troglodytre death match that'll surely hit that nostalgia sweet spot 'till you reach full childgasm.
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad Dir. Gordon Hessler, 1974, 35mm, 105 min.
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger Dir. Sam Wanamaker, 1977, 35mm, 113 min.
Tickets - $10
11/15 @ 7:30pm / SERIES: The Magic of Stop-Motion
 Stop-Motion Rarites Night
While the number of full-length stop-motion features is limited due to the incredible man-hours it takes to put one together, plenty of talented artists have worked in the medium on shorter films. Here at the Cinefamily, we've assembled an international list of wonders that span from the earliest days of silent cinema to modern masters who continue working in this intense and rewarding medium. As tonight's divergent selections suggest, the medium, regardless of variations in tone or narrative, taps into our fascination with all things dark and supernatural. This night we celebrate the stop-motion animators who turned--and continue to transform--an already twisted cinematic sub-genre on its head by pulling it deeply into the realm of the surreal. Ladislas Starevich's reanimated insects, Charley Bowers' metal-eating birds, and Svankmajer's microcosmic gargoyles will join a coterie of Dr. Frankensteins (with respective monsters in tow) for this cortex-bending collection of rarely-seen creations.
Tickets - $10
11/22 @ 7:30pm / SERIES: The Magic of Stop-Motion
George Pal's Puppetoons
Special effects pioneer George Pal, the genius behind fantasy classics like War Of The Worlds and The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, started his stateside career with a literal army of wooden puppets. After refining his patented "Pal-Doll" animation techniques for European commercials in the '30s, George Pal wowed American audiences with (and won an honorary 1944 Oscar for) his "Puppetoons", a series of more than 40 shorts made for Paramount during the WWII era. Rather than using puppets with moveable limbs, Pal's "replacement technique" involved carving different puppet parts for every movement, incredibly requiring thousands of puppets for every film--creating a fantastic range of motion unique to Puppetoons, which remain impressive and exciting to this day. The effect of Pal's bouncy, highly-expressive wide-eyed characters, mixed with his brightly-light candy-colored fairy tale background worlds, will warm the heart of even the most hardened cinema cynic.
Tickets - $10
11/29 @ 6pm / SERIES: The Magic of Stop-Motion
 Alice in Wonderland
This ambitious, highly faithful late-'40s Alice adaptation took years to complete, and features an abundance of impressive, meticulous and labor-intensive stop-motion work from pioneer puppeteer Lou Bunin. After a live-action prologue showing the historical inspirations for the major characters, Alice (a decidedly adult Carol Marsh) is quickly launched into surreal realms of design and color. Remarkably, the film stays true to the original novel's anarchic construction, and the inspiration of Victorian illustrator John Tenniel's Alice imaginings. Bunin's handiwork is at its peak during the musical numbers, which dunk you head-first into the film's opium-riddled dreamworld--and in addition, live-action director Dallas Bower comes up with clever, simple solutions to the FX limitations of the day. Originally suppressed by Disney for fear of its potential upstaging of their own animated Alice, Bunin's work comes to you here at the Cinefamily in a rare screening of a beautiful MOMA-restored 35mm print!
Dirs. Dallas Bower & Lou Bunin, 1949, 35mm, 76 min
Tickets - $10
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