The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal 
                                        
Director: Arnold Leibovit
Year: 1985
Rating: 6.0
I have been watching a few of the films of Ray Harryhausen this past week and in looking for some information on him on YouTube I came across this documentary on George Pal. He was really the other special effects master in the 1950s and 60s in creating fantasy films. Born in Hungary, he stayed ahead of Hitler by moving to Paris and then as Hitler invaded Holland to the USA. Growing up he had taken to drawing cartoons which led to him using animation for commercials. When he moved to France he set up a company that produced these short animation films - often a minute or less for companies. He used puppets and stop-motion animation to create these. When he moved to the USA he started this up working for Paramount - they came to be called Puppetoons and a few of them are up on YouTube.  His Tulips Shall Grow is 6 minutes in length and rather wonderful - the Nazis invade Holland but tulips will grow again. Mentally replace Holland with Ukraine and the Nazis with the Nazis from Russia. And Phillips Broadcast of 1938 is a mini-musical. His puppets lived in a world of puppets with no interaction with live action.

 

In 1950 he entered into feature films with a Jimmy Durante Christmas film called The Great Rupert in which he used stop-motion to create Rupert, a squirrel. But that was nothing - he became very ambitious with a series of classic sci-fi films over the next couple of years - Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds and Conquest of Space. The special effects went beyond stop-motion to creating a gigantic canvas. He was now hiring people to do special effects. Fantasy was his other interest - Tom Thumb, The Time Machine, Atlantis: The Lost Continent, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grim and his last film was 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. He also produced the terrific The Naked Jungle about an invasion of ants. He didn't do much after that for some reason - perhaps that sort of film was out of style. He died in 1980.

 

This is 90 minutes and spends a few minutes on each of his feature films though giving only a few seconds to Atlantis - lots of talking heads saying wonderful things about him - Tony Randell, Rod Taylor, Russ Tamblyn. And needless to say a ton of clips.