Willow

Willow (1988) is a fantasy adventure and the place where digital transformation in cinema began. A seer says a child yet to be born will overthrow the evil queen Bavmorda. The baby is set adrift and found by a Nelwyn farmer named Willow. He sets out to get her somewhere safe and meets an unreliable swordsman called Madmartigan on the way. George Lucas devised the story and Ron Howard directed. The film's real legacy is in one scene. A sorceress changes into a succession of animals and finally into a person. New software was written at ILM for those transitions; it was called MORF and Doug Smythe developed it. Separate grids are laid over two images and the program calculates the transition. The effects supervisor Dennis Muren had considered stop motion first and, finding it technically impossible, decided to try this instead. The result was the first convincing morph in cinema. Smythe and Tom Brigham of NYIT received an Academy technical achievement award for it. The same technique appeared shortly afterwards in Terminator 2 and in the music videos of the period. Warwick Davis leads and was seventeen at the time. It underperformed and drew mixed reviews; it became a cult film over the years. James Horner wrote the score. It runs 126 minutes. Good for: fantasy adventure, the eighties, and the history of effects. Less good for: the story stays close to formula and the pace sags in the middle.