Strong and Moving!

Absolutely Fantastic

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This was great fun. For one thing, Melies creates an amazing moon. It has all sorts of expression. It also has a kind of nasty grin that shows it's up to no good. The story involves the Astronomer figuring out a way to go to the moon, but while he is doing that, the moon comes to him. It devours his property. It spits out people and junk and terrorizes the old man. It is very clever and longer than previous efforts. What a gift this man made to cinema.

George Méliès makes my mind melt and my jaw drop again! This short film is actually better than the last! It has the extremely cool illusions of people appearing and disappearing out of thin air (still do not know how that was accomplished), but this one steps it up a notch. There's this really creepy moon that eats the furniture that moves on its own and it looks awesome. The guy who is playing the astronomer did a great job. His performance made me laugh. The biggest improvement though is the addition of music. Just simply adding music helps, but it's even better when the music fits perfectly and adds another level of enjoyment to something, which is the case here. This makes me way more eager to check out more of George Méliès work, and I think I can safely say I won't be disappointed.

Of course I'm talking about his uncommonly long short film "Trip to the Moon". The animated moon looks exactly the same here and the astronomer reminds the viewer as well of the ones building the rocket to set foot on the moon. The video quality is rather low early on, even for 1898, but quickly gets better. It's packed with fantasy references, occasionally even almost a horror film and it's surely lots of action happening for its only three minutes running time.The moon swallowing and spitting all kinds of things and children is quite a horror fantasy. I'd have panicked and run out as soon as I could if I'd run into that. Or maybe not with those stunning women the moon transforms into near the end. Certainly an interesting watch, maybe together with "Le voyage dans la lune" from 4 years later and it offers even some approaches it does not in that one like the constant switching of shapes and sizes while the 1902 film was really more of a scientific sci-fi movie.

This is actually a very elaborate fiction film for 1898. Made by Georges Méliès, it lasts over three minutes, when most films during the period lasted about a minute or less. Early cinema historian Frank Gray refers to this film as having consisted of three shots and 60 meters length. Yet, I can't precisely distinguish or separate shots or scenes in it, as the entire film takes place from a fixed framing and long-shot perspective. One could go to either extreme: saying that this is a single shot-scene film since its perspective is stationary, or you could say it consists of dozens of shots, including the trick splices for appearances, disappearances, substitutions and stop-motion animation, which is to say this film is a series of jump cuts."The Astronomer's Dream", however, does contain a three-part structure, I'd say. The bookend parts are of the astronomer safe within his laboratory, with the longer, middle part being the nightmare. There are also at least three slightly different decors used: the outer one with the telescope and the entire laboratory, a tighter, less furnished, yet similar one for closer views of the moon during the dream, and, briefly, a wall. Moreover, as indicated by this film having three entries in the Star catalogue, it was available to exhibitors in three parts, which was common then, as films were generally sold in 20-meter lengths. Regardless, this is a sophisticated narrative and production for its time.The following year, Méliès would produce his first féerie film (fairy film), "Cinderella", which consists of at least four distinct scenes transitioned by dissolves. "Cinderella", albeit, is in the tableau, theatrical style of stationary shot-scenes, but it does distinguish spatially separate scenes for a more advanced narrative construction. One fiction film in 1898, Robert W. Paul's "Come Along Do!" also contained two spatially separate scenes with action continuing across them. "The Astronomer's Dream", however, was Méliès's then most elaborate and sophisticated dream or trick film, although it does contain a fairy godmother type in the goddess Phoebe, who protects the astronomer from attacks by demons, the moon and the rest of the nightmare. It's purely part of what Tom Gunning has referred to as "the cinema of attractions"; the attraction here being the magic or tricks accomplished mostly through substitution splices (a.k.a. stop substitutions), as well as theatrical props and transitions and a brief chalkboard animation within the scene. Today, these trick films hold up well and remain at least amusing because of Méliès's wacky and imaginative humor; their primitiveness is even part of their charm.