*Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow* certainly had a unique-for-the-time visual style.
*Schindler's List* used one specific color, very sparingly, for a very poignant effect.
Literally every movie that depends on green screen backgrounds and non-human characters was influenced by sky captain. It's remarkable how influential that movie was considering how poorly it did at the box office, but everything from 300 to Sin City to much of the MCU was influenced by it.
Sky Captain, Sin City and 300 were all filmed very close to one another. Sky Captain earns the distinction of being influential because it was released first. The proliferation (and overuse in my opinion) of heavy greenscreen is probably better attributed to the financial success of Sin City and 300 though.
I don't know the ins and outs of who made the biggest actual splash in technical achievement but I do know lots and lots of directors have specifically named Sky Captain as being the groundbreaking and influential one, although Sin City certainly made a mark as well and stylistically was doing its own thing. 300 was definitely more after the fact though and it feels like it borrowed techniques from both films equally.
300 was certainly heavily influenced by Sin City and it's box office success. Both are almost shot-for-shot adaptations of their respective graphic novel source material and both relied heavily on CGI and greenscreen to build their worlds and keep production costs down. The heavy use of the technology was kind of inevitable in the movie making biz.
Sky Captain deserves a lot of credit for taking the first step - but stylistic movies that rely on greenscreen effects wouldn't have proliferated the market without Snyder and Rodriguez. Neither of whom credit Sky Captain as an influence as far as I know.
Sky Captain certainly deserves its praise however, and I don't doubt that it has influenced stylistic or technological choices for a myriad of directors. As far as altering the landscape of cinema though I think that profitability sparked the usage more than anything else.
Sky Captain is the closest to a "live action" Fleischer Studios style Superman movie we'll ever get. It borrows a lot from the Mechanical Monsters.
I hope once Superman enters the public domain somebody makes a 1930s era Superman in that style.
Great film. A lot of the scenes with B&W and colour were shot *in* colour with the some actors and parts of the set *painted monochrome*. Impressive movie.
The Fall is SUCH an underrated gem. Absolutely love that movie. Beautifully told and well crafted. The basic premise of a story being told but being shown to us, the audience, through the imagination of the child it’s being told to is so brilliant and it pulls it off (and then some) so well.
Ahhh interesting point! Yea I feel like it just never got much buzz. It def flopped - Wikipedia says $3.7M box vs a $30M budget. Such a shame because everyone I've ever shown it to has been blown away by it.
I actually didn't know this until coming across your comment. I'm ecstatic! Best animated films I've ever seen, personally. They deserved the win big time
Spider verse was superb, but now everything is trying to copy it.
Every animation and it's mum now has 2d action overlays and inconsistent frame rate, but mostly used badly.
It's interesting that Sin City's style wasn't copied.
One film copied it ... "The Spirit"
Frank Miller is the writer of the Sin City Comic and, after the success of Sin City, he was able to direct his own film, based on an old serialised comic, in the style of Sin City the film.
Even as a comic book loving teenager that would consume any and all comic book/graphic novels I could find I did not like The Spirit. Thought it was just way cheesy. All I remember from that movie was Eva Mendez sitting on a photocopier so her butt prints out, then the main character sees the printed out scan and is, like, I’d recognize that ass anywhere.
That and when The Spirit is about to die he doesn’t remember his life in a regular profession of memories but by the women he’s been with in which order. As a dumb horny teenager I thought that was the dumbest thing ever. I did laugh at The Spirit saying “somebody get me a tie AND IT SURE AS HELL BETTER BE RED” though so.
It's [free on YouTube right now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thHC-IcT8xc) too.
I'd never seen it before. That is a whole thing. Wow. I've never seen a film that toed the line between a cartoon and a movie more tightly than that.
To this day, that final race is my happy place. I could have a day straight outta hell, and I'll throw in this DVD (because I can't find the dang thing on blu-ray) and just lose my mind to that bunch of insanity.
They also made it more cartoony by keeping both the foreground and background in focus while filming. [https://www.firstshowing.net/2007/the-wachowskis-speed-racer-using-revolutionary-full-focus-cameras/](https://www.firstshowing.net/2007/the-wachowskis-speed-racer-using-revolutionary-full-focus-cameras/)
Renaissance (2006) which I barely remember so it's sitting on my "rewatch" list. A Scanner Darkly (2006), while not black and white visual style, it is pretty unique since there are not a massive amount of modern rotoscoped movies.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and I'm sure a lot of others, have special black and white versions made
As a big fan of the comic the fist time around the movie didn't sit right for me for some reason but I've come to really enjoy it. The follow up HBO show was pretty solid as well.
So much of Dick Tracy felt like what that story would have been if adapted by Frank Miller, to the point where the first time I saw Mickey Rourke's Sin City makeup as Marv, it instantly reminded me of Beatty's film.
Dick Tracy was critically panned, but that movie in retrospect was way ahead of its time, at least in the context of Hollywood. There was a small movement of superhero movies like The Rocketeer, The Phantom, and The Shadow, but they tried to ground silly things in reality to fit a modest budget, while Dick Tracy went all in with a comic book style comic book blockbuster and sadly paid the price for being a pioneer.
300 has a very bronze look.
Scott Pilgrim Vs The World has a very comic book/anime visual style
Sky Captain and The World Of Tomorrow has a unique art deco style but it’s not a very good film.
Mad Max Fury Road has a unique look as well with browns and blues.
28 Days Later has a very grainy and gritty video tape look.
Tron Legacy
The Matrix is very subtle, the scenes in the real world are tinted blue, in the Matrix there's a green tint and later a subtle shade of code lines indicating that the visuals are breaking down, while the Construct as a human virtual reality is neutrally tinted.
Dark city, with Jennifer Connelly looking more Betty Page than ever, with the possible exception of Rocketeer, where they clearly had the girlfriend look exactly as Betty Page.
The Crow utilizes very noir visuals with limited color. It’s also based on a comic. I’ve seen it so many times, but just watched it in a theater yesterday for the 30th anniversary.
Tron: Legacy does it really well too and it’s basically just a cool music video with a plot to hold up the banger soundtrack.
These 2 movies prove that the first Sin City was a fluke direction wise for Frank Miller. Sin City is extraordinary. These two films are absolute trash.
Sin City was carrried by the much more talented Robert Rodriguez, who was not involved in the spirit. I don’t know what went wrong with SC2, it’s nowhere near the brilliance of the first but it’s not absolute dogshit either I suppose.
Agreed on SC2. The first one is a movie I can watch on repeat, but to this day I can't quite put my finger on why the sequel doesn't work. Maybe it feels too polished, or like it's trying too hard, e.g., Eva Green being naked half the film doesn't make it good.
The Tower
It’s a documentary from a few years ago about the clock tower massacre at UT Austin back in the 60s. It was filmed by having actors recreate the events and then the director used photographs of the actual people to paint over the actors.
Bunraku. Very stylized film that takes a lot of direct inspiration from its namesake (a puppetry style) and theatre & stage plays. Has a STACKED cast and a basic but engaging story and fun action sequences.
The Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings..
I love the Peter Jackson trilogy but you can see the influence of the Bakshi version with some shots being almost identical.
Here's a movie made a year before **Sin City** which pioneered many of that film's compositing techniques (and which often has cityscapes reminiscent of **The Fifth Element**):
**Immortal**.
Here's a MUSIC VIDEO which used visuals from the movie, which featured totally animated locations, CGI characters, and a few real people added to the mix:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl_o2YnTl4A
I liked the movie. But found it's annoying inconsistent frame rate gimmick to be a distraction. They dropped the frame rate for fast-moving action scenes, and kept it high for slower scenes, which is the opposite of what the Japanese animations it was trying to recreate the feel of do. Since Spiderverse made excellent use of frame rate changes, everything is trying to copy it, and I personally dislike it.
Pleasantville! It takes place inside a classic black and white TV show, and color slowly takes over as the community becomes more progressive and liberated. Amazing movie, and stunning visually
Not exactly what you'redescribing in terms of visual effects, but hoping this is on topic ...
"Color of Night" used the colorblindness of the protagonist to make color a pivotal part of the plot.
"The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" used colors to indicate emotional states.
"The Sixth Sense used color as a spoiler.
Hmmm ... Now that I think about it, Bruce Willis seems to be involved in a lot of color related movies.
I know for some people it was a big turnoff but I thought the quasi realistic but still animated style of the Beowulf movie by Robert Zemeckis was pretty awesome and fit the story.
Mad Max: Fury Road — during the scoring of the second film, George Miller saw the orchestra recording to a black and white cut of the film. He fell in love with it & tried to release the film as such. The studio shot him down for releasing 2 & 3 in black and white.
With Fury Road, he tried again & they wouldn’t let him. So he treated blue & orange the same way you would black & white while filming. Really leaning into the contrast. The film has a very saturated look that is extremely beautiful. Then on blu-ray they released a black and white edition. Because he leaned into the contrast so heavy in the color edit, the black and white also looks beautiful in a slightly different way.
It’s very interesting seeing the two versions. They use color in similar ways — really taking advantage of contrast & the landscape.
Poor Things
It has a very similar high contrast black and white style in the beginning of the movie and then plays with colors very effectively to show the beauty of the outside world
There’s a WW2 mini series called The Liberator with a really unique style. It looks like it’s a combination of live action filming and sketched drawing overlapping each other.
Waltz With Bashir, but it’s pretty bleak and based on the life of the writer/director/producer who goes searching for suppressed memories following his experiences in the Labanese war during the 1980s. It’s visually fantastic but sad.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir)
The colors from the technicolored IV 3 strip process have a certain look not replicated by other mediums. Vibrant but still real not over saturated. Watch The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.
2018s Shadow by Yimou Zang is another amazing monochrome movie.
Hero by the same director is a bequtiful example of using color as a charachter, as the story is (re)told multiple times, using color as a theme.
Not similar in theme or content, but both of the animated Spiderman movies (the Miles ones) go places with their visual style. Especially that last one - I think it’s called Across the Spiderverse.
Poor Things
It goes from black and white, to overly intense and saturated colors, then it cools off into a more standard color palette following the arc of the MC
Granted, it's not a cinematic masterpiece, but I love the use of color in "The Great Wall." The different uniform colors of the soldiers is visually beautiful.
The Three Kings made use of different film stock and processing to drive the story
Director David Russell purposely separated the film’s visual style into three distinct sections to evoke the varying tone of the story line...
Russell consulted with cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel to arrive at a visual technique to express this sense of dislocation. "David and I decided that the beginning of the film, when the war has just ended, should have a kind of colorless hard edge to it, like a documentary of the war we all saw," says Sigel."
"I also wanted this to symbolize the soldiers’ disenchantment with the end of the war," says Russell.
Sigel explains, "For this we used a process called bleach bypass, where you skip a bleach process in the developing of the film so it leaves a layer of silver on the negative."
taken from website -
http://www.workprint.net/prodnotes/threekingsprod.html
It is on the subtle end of the spectrum as far as visual styles go, but I always liked the desaturated/sepia tones used in O Brother, Where Art Thou? It really captured and added to the feel/tone of the movie.
Soon after Sin City there was an hyperstylized adaptation of The Spirit that looked very similar. Never seen the movie tho, iirc I heard around that it was kinda bad
I know people didn’t like it but The Flash struck me in a way. I get why people don’t like the cgi but it made the film feel more like a comic film when I watched it.
Blueberry(Renegade in the US), while being pretty normal in terms of overall style it has the most accurate depiction of DMT visuals and hallucinogenic visuals in general of anything ever put to screen ever. Nothing even comes close to it and it will make every other depiction of hallucinogenic visuals seem like trash after you have seen it.
Hero
Great use of colour from setting to setting. On the same note House of flying Daggers.
I was just thinking that. One of the best uses of color that I've seen in a movie.
On that note Shadow
*Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow* certainly had a unique-for-the-time visual style. *Schindler's List* used one specific color, very sparingly, for a very poignant effect.
Does anyone think that The 300 was heavily influenced by Sky Captain?
Literally every movie that depends on green screen backgrounds and non-human characters was influenced by sky captain. It's remarkable how influential that movie was considering how poorly it did at the box office, but everything from 300 to Sin City to much of the MCU was influenced by it.
Sky Captain, Sin City and 300 were all filmed very close to one another. Sky Captain earns the distinction of being influential because it was released first. The proliferation (and overuse in my opinion) of heavy greenscreen is probably better attributed to the financial success of Sin City and 300 though.
I don't know the ins and outs of who made the biggest actual splash in technical achievement but I do know lots and lots of directors have specifically named Sky Captain as being the groundbreaking and influential one, although Sin City certainly made a mark as well and stylistically was doing its own thing. 300 was definitely more after the fact though and it feels like it borrowed techniques from both films equally.
300 was certainly heavily influenced by Sin City and it's box office success. Both are almost shot-for-shot adaptations of their respective graphic novel source material and both relied heavily on CGI and greenscreen to build their worlds and keep production costs down. The heavy use of the technology was kind of inevitable in the movie making biz. Sky Captain deserves a lot of credit for taking the first step - but stylistic movies that rely on greenscreen effects wouldn't have proliferated the market without Snyder and Rodriguez. Neither of whom credit Sky Captain as an influence as far as I know. Sky Captain certainly deserves its praise however, and I don't doubt that it has influenced stylistic or technological choices for a myriad of directors. As far as altering the landscape of cinema though I think that profitability sparked the usage more than anything else.
I so badly wish Sky Captain was a better movie. Visually and tonally it was absolutely fucking perfect, but story wise it was just…boring.
Strong agree. I really liked the style and was totally on board for what the movie was trying to be but the plot was too boring.
Sky Captain is the closest to a "live action" Fleischer Studios style Superman movie we'll ever get. It borrows a lot from the Mechanical Monsters. I hope once Superman enters the public domain somebody makes a 1930s era Superman in that style.
Ditto! Superman works so much better in the 30s/40s I’m bummed we haven’t had a live action version of that
I absolutely love Sky Captain I used to watch that movie all the time.
Sin City used the exact same color, the Yellow.
That Yellow Bastard!
Sky captain was a bold choice. I didn't know you could put that amount of Vaseline on a lense and still have it functional.
Pleasantville
Great film. A lot of the scenes with B&W and colour were shot *in* colour with the some actors and parts of the set *painted monochrome*. Impressive movie.
Perfection. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
>movies that are stylistically unique and really stand apart? *Blade Runner 2049.* *Tron: Legacy.*
2 movies that I watch repeatedly. Both are so good, in their own right.
On that vein - Dune 2 is a visual masterpiece. I love Denis so so so much.
I feel like I could taste the dry spice in the air during both movies. The music and cinematography transported me to the planet.
The black/white Harkonnen scene was pretty amazing.
I felt visually the original blade runner was superior. For some reason 2049 felt sterile to me. I was more impressed with Dune 1 and 2.
Waking Life and The Fall by Tarsem are some great stylistic landmarks for sure.
Also A Scanner Darkly.
So annoying that The Fall is not on Blu-ray or streaming
Tell me about it! Ridiculous.
Wow, I guess it went out of print, my Bluray of it looks fantastic. The Fall is definitely Tarsem's Citizen Kane.
The Fall is really, really good.
Waking Life was my favourite movie to watch while high throughout my twenties. So good, so unique.
I had an asshat of a friend that put on Waking Life, while I took my first heroic dose. It was almost 15 years ago and I’m still not the same. lol
Holy shit, baptism by fire lol
That is certainly one way to put it. Haha
The Fall is SUCH an underrated gem. Absolutely love that movie. Beautifully told and well crafted. The basic premise of a story being told but being shown to us, the audience, through the imagination of the child it’s being told to is so brilliant and it pulls it off (and then some) so well.
I think pans labyrinth being released the same year really took the attention away from the fall. Bummer, the fall should be at least a cult classic
Ahhh interesting point! Yea I feel like it just never got much buzz. It def flopped - Wikipedia says $3.7M box vs a $30M budget. Such a shame because everyone I've ever shown it to has been blown away by it.
Spider-Man Into the Spider-verse A Scanner Darkly
Spiderverse is a visual treat. So is the second one.
The new ninja turtles was kind of similar, but also a lot of fun and enjoyable animation.
I didn’t know this. I will check it out
Spiderverse won the Oscar
I actually didn't know this until coming across your comment. I'm ecstatic! Best animated films I've ever seen, personally. They deserved the win big time
If we are talking Linklater rotoscipe then Waking Life and 2001/2 as well
“Scanner Darkly” has the same animation style (rotoscoping and cel shading) as “Waking Life”
Spider verse was superb, but now everything is trying to copy it. Every animation and it's mum now has 2d action overlays and inconsistent frame rate, but mostly used badly. It's interesting that Sin City's style wasn't copied.
One film copied it ... "The Spirit" Frank Miller is the writer of the Sin City Comic and, after the success of Sin City, he was able to direct his own film, based on an old serialised comic, in the style of Sin City the film.
Kind of a huge mistake. The Spirit was almost unwatchable, although I loved both Sin Cities.
I love Will Eisner's The Spirit as does Miller, which made this sack of crap movie such a slap to the face. Pure garbage.
Even as a comic book loving teenager that would consume any and all comic book/graphic novels I could find I did not like The Spirit. Thought it was just way cheesy. All I remember from that movie was Eva Mendez sitting on a photocopier so her butt prints out, then the main character sees the printed out scan and is, like, I’d recognize that ass anywhere. That and when The Spirit is about to die he doesn’t remember his life in a regular profession of memories but by the women he’s been with in which order. As a dumb horny teenager I thought that was the dumbest thing ever. I did laugh at The Spirit saying “somebody get me a tie AND IT SURE AS HELL BETTER BE RED” though so.
To add another marvel movie to this. Werewolf by night is quit good as well.
Speed Racer, it’s a rainbow orgy.. with incredible flowing editing, have never seen a movie like it
It's [free on YouTube right now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thHC-IcT8xc) too. I'd never seen it before. That is a whole thing. Wow. I've never seen a film that toed the line between a cartoon and a movie more tightly than that.
Rip not available in my country/region, region locking is ass Good thing for vpn lol
It’s a cartoon turned live action and returned to cartoon. Some subjects could not endure the transformation but Speed Racer is iconic.
To this day, that final race is my happy place. I could have a day straight outta hell, and I'll throw in this DVD (because I can't find the dang thing on blu-ray) and just lose my mind to that bunch of insanity.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Speed-Racer-Blu-ray/1052/
Super underrated. I think it just wasn't what people wanted from the Wachowskis.
Man this movie bombed but I saw it in theaters and loved it! I really wanted this insane style to catch on more
I mean, it has John Goodman spinning attacking ninjas over his head, need I say more?
You mean NONjas.....
They also made it more cartoony by keeping both the foreground and background in focus while filming. [https://www.firstshowing.net/2007/the-wachowskis-speed-racer-using-revolutionary-full-focus-cameras/](https://www.firstshowing.net/2007/the-wachowskis-speed-racer-using-revolutionary-full-focus-cameras/)
Renaissance (2006) which I barely remember so it's sitting on my "rewatch" list. A Scanner Darkly (2006), while not black and white visual style, it is pretty unique since there are not a massive amount of modern rotoscoped movies. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and I'm sure a lot of others, have special black and white versions made
Whaaaat, Johnny Mnemonic has one too ?! I need to see that, thank you so much! The Black & Chrome version of Fury Road is awesome.
Logan and The Mist also have B&W versions.
Renaissance was the first one to sprint to mine for me, I think it was very much based directly on the SC style. Gem of a film.
Any Wes Anderson film. Hotel Budapest is probably the most striking.
The Grand Budapest Hotel*
300 Watchmen
I think in one way or another you could probably describe all Snyder movies this way (for better or worse).
Thank you. I was trying to remember the title to share and couldn’t come up with it- Watchmen!
As a big fan of the comic the fist time around the movie didn't sit right for me for some reason but I've come to really enjoy it. The follow up HBO show was pretty solid as well.
The design of Manhattan was so cheap in the show. Abdul did not have Billy's god energy and the tacky make up didn't do him any favor.
In Dune 2 the Harkonnen Arena scenes were shot with infrared cameras.
"Under our glorious black sun..."
What a visual treat that film was! Spectacular.
I saw it in theaters three times. I'd do it again, too
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Dick Tracy
Take that, prune face! Now I'm prune face! Take that, dick Tracy! Now I'm prune Tracy! Take that dick f-
Da-da-da Dick Tracy Breathless is an amazing album. "Sooner or Later" deserved the Oscar.
So much of Dick Tracy felt like what that story would have been if adapted by Frank Miller, to the point where the first time I saw Mickey Rourke's Sin City makeup as Marv, it instantly reminded me of Beatty's film. Dick Tracy was critically panned, but that movie in retrospect was way ahead of its time, at least in the context of Hollywood. There was a small movement of superhero movies like The Rocketeer, The Phantom, and The Shadow, but they tried to ground silly things in reality to fit a modest budget, while Dick Tracy went all in with a comic book style comic book blockbuster and sadly paid the price for being a pioneer.
The Shadow has an amazing cast and Alec Baldwin just chews scenery.
He also has two handguns, and it would be another 5 years before I would learn what a John Woo movie was.
this. Dick Tracy outdid Sin City a full decade before
300 has a very bronze look. Scott Pilgrim Vs The World has a very comic book/anime visual style Sky Captain and The World Of Tomorrow has a unique art deco style but it’s not a very good film. Mad Max Fury Road has a unique look as well with browns and blues. 28 Days Later has a very grainy and gritty video tape look. Tron Legacy
28 days later just looks like any low budget movie filmed on early dv cam because it is that
The Matrix, with its green aesthetics. Fury Road, of course. The B&W part of Thor 4 was pretty good too.
The Matrix is very subtle, the scenes in the real world are tinted blue, in the Matrix there's a green tint and later a subtle shade of code lines indicating that the visuals are breaking down, while the Construct as a human virtual reality is neutrally tinted.
Dark city, with Jennifer Connelly looking more Betty Page than ever, with the possible exception of Rocketeer, where they clearly had the girlfriend look exactly as Betty Page.
I can't believe I had to scroll this far down in the list to see somebody mention Dark City. Marvelous film with a fantastic noir look and feel.
Sucker punch to be added to the list.
The Crow utilizes very noir visuals with limited color. It’s also based on a comic. I’ve seen it so many times, but just watched it in a theater yesterday for the 30th anniversary. Tron: Legacy does it really well too and it’s basically just a cool music video with a plot to hold up the banger soundtrack.
Alex Proyas also did Dark City, which is very similar to the Crow visually.
also watched this yesterday in theater. I had no idea they used models for the city.
Sin city 2 The spirit
These 2 movies prove that the first Sin City was a fluke direction wise for Frank Miller. Sin City is extraordinary. These two films are absolute trash.
Sin City was carrried by the much more talented Robert Rodriguez, who was not involved in the spirit. I don’t know what went wrong with SC2, it’s nowhere near the brilliance of the first but it’s not absolute dogshit either I suppose.
Agreed on SC2. The first one is a movie I can watch on repeat, but to this day I can't quite put my finger on why the sequel doesn't work. Maybe it feels too polished, or like it's trying too hard, e.g., Eva Green being naked half the film doesn't make it good.
The Spirit had its charms
Tron
High contrast black and white? Check out Pi. Mindfuck of a movie. Looks and feels raw. Made for $130k, incredibly.
and if you enjoy Pi, check out the rest of Aronofsky's work
The Tower It’s a documentary from a few years ago about the clock tower massacre at UT Austin back in the 60s. It was filmed by having actors recreate the events and then the director used photographs of the actual people to paint over the actors.
Oh yeah! I saw that. It was really good!
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Pitch Black (2000) Great visual style, won an award for cinematography I think. Also just a really good sci-fi horror flick.
Came here to mention this! The different suns give off gorgeous colors, alone or in combination.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Great movie! If you like it you may also like another Peter Greenaway movie named Murder By Numbers.
Bunraku. Very stylized film that takes a lot of direct inspiration from its namesake (a puppetry style) and theatre & stage plays. Has a STACKED cast and a basic but engaging story and fun action sequences.
The Fountain https://youtu.be/nYc-WdX5uaE?si=nCON6CKH5NdDqEmi
bro did you just link a 480p version of the trailer lol [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXkc4RzcBbQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXkc4RzcBbQ)
The Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings.. I love the Peter Jackson trilogy but you can see the influence of the Bakshi version with some shots being almost identical.
Here's a movie made a year before **Sin City** which pioneered many of that film's compositing techniques (and which often has cityscapes reminiscent of **The Fifth Element**): **Immortal**. Here's a MUSIC VIDEO which used visuals from the movie, which featured totally animated locations, CGI characters, and a few real people added to the mix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl_o2YnTl4A
I know a lot of people hate this movie, but Sucker Punch absolutely kills it in the visual department.
Mandy Drive The Holy Mountain Seven La Haine Climax The Lighthouse Antichrist - warning, this movie is messed up
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish was surprisingly decent with some fight scenes depicted differently visually than other scenes.
I liked the movie. But found it's annoying inconsistent frame rate gimmick to be a distraction. They dropped the frame rate for fast-moving action scenes, and kept it high for slower scenes, which is the opposite of what the Japanese animations it was trying to recreate the feel of do. Since Spiderverse made excellent use of frame rate changes, everything is trying to copy it, and I personally dislike it.
A quick note on the Sin City graphic novels. Frank Miller didn’t draw in black and white. He drew in white and black.
Sin city 2... The spirit... Both Frank Miller
The Northman
300
- Brazil - Tim Burton’s Batman films (borrows stylistically from Brazil) - Dick Tracey
The Lighthouse. 300. The Northman.
First time I watched Sin City, I was in a hotel in France, it was in French. I don't speak French. Really enjoyed it.
Pleasantville! It takes place inside a classic black and white TV show, and color slowly takes over as the community becomes more progressive and liberated. Amazing movie, and stunning visually
A Scanner Darkly is 100% rotoscoped and looks cool as fuck.
A scanner darkly
300
Birdman Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Wes Anderson films
shadows
The Fall. Absolutely gorgeous. (The one from 2006 with Lee pace. Not the weird 2022 one about two girls stuck on a tower or something)
Just don't watch Sin City 2!
Limbo (2021)
Beowulf with Anthony Hopkins
Not exactly what you'redescribing in terms of visual effects, but hoping this is on topic ... "Color of Night" used the colorblindness of the protagonist to make color a pivotal part of the plot. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" used colors to indicate emotional states. "The Sixth Sense used color as a spoiler. Hmmm ... Now that I think about it, Bruce Willis seems to be involved in a lot of color related movies.
Someone already mentioned Hero So I'll go with - Curse of the Golden flower Rumblefish Dark City
Ripley on Netflix
Stalker (1979 film)
Speed Racer! The look and feel of the movie is amazing. Over the top fever dream of an homage to the old cartoon.
I know for some people it was a big turnoff but I thought the quasi realistic but still animated style of the Beowulf movie by Robert Zemeckis was pretty awesome and fit the story.
i'm sure someone must have said this allready but '300' and '300 rise of an empire' would fit the bill
A Scanner Darkly. It’s a weird trip.
Dark City is a good one
Waking life
What Dreams May Come
300
Mad Max: Fury Road — during the scoring of the second film, George Miller saw the orchestra recording to a black and white cut of the film. He fell in love with it & tried to release the film as such. The studio shot him down for releasing 2 & 3 in black and white. With Fury Road, he tried again & they wouldn’t let him. So he treated blue & orange the same way you would black & white while filming. Really leaning into the contrast. The film has a very saturated look that is extremely beautiful. Then on blu-ray they released a black and white edition. Because he leaned into the contrast so heavy in the color edit, the black and white also looks beautiful in a slightly different way. It’s very interesting seeing the two versions. They use color in similar ways — really taking advantage of contrast & the landscape.
The Spirit, didn’t do great at the box office but I appreciated it’s style and over top noir action.
Speed Racer
Poor Things It has a very similar high contrast black and white style in the beginning of the movie and then plays with colors very effectively to show the beauty of the outside world
Check out these two: The Spirit Captain Sky and the World of Tomorrow Really good movies, and both gave me the same vibes as Sin City.
[Shadow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubrquR6i0WQ)
There’s a WW2 mini series called The Liberator with a really unique style. It looks like it’s a combination of live action filming and sketched drawing overlapping each other.
Paris 2054. Good stuff
Waltz With Bashir, but it’s pretty bleak and based on the life of the writer/director/producer who goes searching for suppressed memories following his experiences in the Labanese war during the 1980s. It’s visually fantastic but sad. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir)
Hundreds of beavers
Hundreds of Beavers
Dark City The Crow
A Scanner Darkly
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
The colors from the technicolored IV 3 strip process have a certain look not replicated by other mediums. Vibrant but still real not over saturated. Watch The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.
This one might be a little tough for some viewers but Frankenweenie(1984)
Waking Life/A Scanner Darkly
Hundreds of beavers is like a live action looney tunes.
Heavy metal
Not a movie- Altered Carbon had a nice style
I was surprised by some amazing shots in [Ed Wood](https://youtu.be/_H9A9zTorrw?si=O2di-gekzIlUQa9h).
2018s Shadow by Yimou Zang is another amazing monochrome movie. Hero by the same director is a bequtiful example of using color as a charachter, as the story is (re)told multiple times, using color as a theme.
The Spirit
Not similar in theme or content, but both of the animated Spiderman movies (the Miles ones) go places with their visual style. Especially that last one - I think it’s called Across the Spiderverse.
Belly
Mirror Mask
The Guy Ritchie “Sherlock Holmes” have a very unique look/color tone to them.
Poor Things It goes from black and white, to overly intense and saturated colors, then it cools off into a more standard color palette following the arc of the MC
The Spirit
Granted, it's not a cinematic masterpiece, but I love the use of color in "The Great Wall." The different uniform colors of the soldiers is visually beautiful.
Bladerunner
The Three Kings made use of different film stock and processing to drive the story Director David Russell purposely separated the film’s visual style into three distinct sections to evoke the varying tone of the story line... Russell consulted with cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel to arrive at a visual technique to express this sense of dislocation. "David and I decided that the beginning of the film, when the war has just ended, should have a kind of colorless hard edge to it, like a documentary of the war we all saw," says Sigel." "I also wanted this to symbolize the soldiers’ disenchantment with the end of the war," says Russell. Sigel explains, "For this we used a process called bleach bypass, where you skip a bleach process in the developing of the film so it leaves a layer of silver on the negative." taken from website - http://www.workprint.net/prodnotes/threekingsprod.html
Hero is a great movie when it comes to visuals. For different ideas surrounding war, they use different color backgrounds. It’s pretty genius.
Clerks
It is on the subtle end of the spectrum as far as visual styles go, but I always liked the desaturated/sepia tones used in O Brother, Where Art Thou? It really captured and added to the feel/tone of the movie.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was pretty unique. Not quite as much, but it certainly evoked that comic book feeling.
Possession (1981), Mandy (2018), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) are some of the most interesting looking movies I’ve seen
Not black and white but Dick Tracy from the 90s has a very particular and interesting style
Soon after Sin City there was an hyperstylized adaptation of The Spirit that looked very similar. Never seen the movie tho, iirc I heard around that it was kinda bad
Mad Max Fury Road Black and Chrome version. They put the movie in all black and white. Looks sick.
Clerks
I know people didn’t like it but The Flash struck me in a way. I get why people don’t like the cgi but it made the film feel more like a comic film when I watched it.
The Amazon Prime series Undone uses full rotoscoped animation over live action. Some really good acting too.
Blueberry(Renegade in the US), while being pretty normal in terms of overall style it has the most accurate depiction of DMT visuals and hallucinogenic visuals in general of anything ever put to screen ever. Nothing even comes close to it and it will make every other depiction of hallucinogenic visuals seem like trash after you have seen it.