Fascination with science-fiction worlds is baked deeply into the origins of film history. Beginning with Georges Méliès’ groundbreaking wizardry in 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, the genre’s possibilities expanded wildly over subsequent decades. In 1925’s The Lost World, Willis H. O’Brien used split-screens and innovations in stop-motion animation to put actors onscreen with dinosaurs, while Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis gave us class struggle, robots, and gorgeous scale. Early science fiction fueled pioneering horror, including Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933). But the genre truly kicked into high gear in the aftermath of the world wars. Social factors like the atom bomb paved the way for the 1950s’ golden age of science fiction cinema. That genre-defining science fiction wave was sparked 75 years ago by the most influential animator you likely never heard of, George Pal, and his classic of realist space-race cinema, Destination Moon.
George Pal made a name for himself in Hollywood through his pioneering use of “replacement animation” stop-motion in what he called “Puppetoons,” beginning in 1930s Europe before leaving for the U.S to make them for Paramount in the 1940s (for which he won an honorary Oscar in 1943). Instead of using a single, movable puppet (think Willis H. O’Brien’s King Kong or Ray Harryhausen), characters “move” in replacement animation via the substitution of intricate replacement parts (in Pal’s case, a massive array of hand-card wooden pieces). The traditionally painstaking technique went on to be adopted by gifted animators like Henry Selick (A Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline), the team at Laika Studios (Kubo and the Two Strings), and used to animate Pinocchio himself in the Oscar-winning Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.
