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A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Fantasy works best in cinema because film is fantasy - nothing we're seeing is actually real, so why pretend it is?  Let's do away with that altogether, and embrace the possibilities of crazy costumes and sets and camera tricks.

I was surprised over and over again that things that appeared to be matte paintings actually had dimension - like the rocket itself.  The fun of a certain kind of movie is trying to figure out what's real and what's a camera trick.  And a camera trick is just like a magic trick - we should be wondering and guessing, "how did they do that?"  Nowadays, there's none of that left.  The answer is just "CGI. They did it on a computer."  It's all animation.  Nobody ever wonders how Bugs Bunny did that.

Movies have stopped being magic shows, and that's a shame.

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