Summary

• The Pagemaster's visual effects combine CGI and hand-drawn animation, creating an impressive moving liquid effect.
• Despite being limited by 1994 technology, The Pagemaster team creatively used their resources to make the film visually appealing.
• The film's charm lies in embracing its unrealistic nature.

The 1994 film The Pagemaster gets a positive review from a group of visual effects artists. Partially animated and partially in live-action, The Pagemaster tells the story of a real-life boy who retreats to a library only to find himself physically transformed into its world, becoming an animated character surrounded by other animated figures. The film is directed by Pixote Hunt and Joe Johnston and features Macaulay Culkin and Christopher Lloyd.

Three decades after the release of The Pagemaster, the film’s effects got a positive review from the Corridor Crew.

Analyzing the scene wherein the library is converted into the animated world, the Corridor Crew explained how The Pagemaster team combined “pretty low-level CGI” with hand-drawn animation to create an effect of moving liquid. They were impressed with how the movie seemed to use physics software to bind together a series of spheres and then have “somebody paint splashes on top of that,” in a style they called “ingenious.” Check out some quotes from the Corridor Crew below:

Wren: Dude, this is so much better than I expected.

Peter: Okay, so they simulated a bunch of spheres. A physics sim of a bunch of spheres, and then they used a meshing software to glue them all together. And then they had somebody paint splashes on top of that.

Niko: Very, very ingenious use of pretty low-level CGI that’s hard to do, and then like how to make this actually look like movie quality, is just like let's go in and animate it by hand on top of it.

Why The Pagemaster Was So Impressive For Its Time

The Pagemaster Had Its Advantages

This scene has an inherent charm that makes The Pagemaster stand the test of time.

Though there is an undeniably dated feel to The Pagemaster, it is vital to understand the era in which it was made. 1994 fell before the rise of 3D computer animation, which arguably began with Pixar’s meteoric success the next year with Toy Story, which further rose as the Disney subgroup created more films. Thus, The Pagemaster was far more limited with its technological access than what a studio could do now. When faced with a lack of technology, The Pagemaster team leaned in to figure out any workaround that they could.

The Corridor Crew describes this well at the end of their video, citing their oft-used phrase of “leaning into the jank.” While they made sure to clarify that The Pagemaster itself is not "janky," or of poor quality, they praised the film for using its technological limitations to its benefit. They did not need to make the scene look photorealistic; rather, they took what they could do logistically to make a colorful entry into the animated universe at the center of the movie.

This scene has an inherent charm that makes The Pagemaster stand the test of time. There is a freshness to it that is akin to something like The Wizard of Oz, which catapulted audiences from black-and-white to technicolor film. The team behind the Culkin film is embracing their world's whimsy, letting its unrealistic nature become their biggest asset rather than a drawback.

Source: Corridor Crew