I watched The Thief of Bagdad (1940) recently, and was kinda shocked at how much I enjoyed it. There’s a whole world of effects, such as using painted backdrops, that don’t look “realistic” but actually do a lot more for creating fantastical vibe than even perfect modern cgi.

It also highlights the main problem with most “effects heavy” movies, in that they often focus on the effects instead of the story. And when that happens, it doesn’t really matter how good they are, because fundamentally they’re distracting from real core of the film. TToB has genies, monsters and flying robot horses, but they’re all used judiciously and reinforce a sense of wonder, even when they look a little janky to modern eyes.

Compared this to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), which was celebrated at the time for it’s Harryhausen stop motion effects. Sure, the effects are pretty cool, and at the time must have been very impressive, but it’s too obvious that the audience is meant to be wowed by them. At one point two animated monster start fighting each other and I just didn’t care. Aside from the novelty of the effect this scene wasn’t building the vibes, they’re weren’t any significant stakes or character growth, it was just “look at what we can do!”. Yawn.