King Kong

The first great monster film, and Willis O'Brien's stop-motion still has more personality than anything rendered since.

A film crew sail to an uncharted island to shoot a picture and come back with the animal. The New York sequences are the part everybody remembers and the island is the better half: a wall, a ravine, a fight with a tyrannosaur that took O'Brien weeks per minute of footage.

Kong is about eighteen inches tall and made of rabbit fur over an articulated armature, which is why his coat visibly ripples as though wind were moving it. That was the animators' fingerprints and they could not eliminate it. It reads as breath.

Max Steiner wrote the first full orchestral score in American sound cinema for it, which changed how films were scored permanently.

The 1938 reissue cut several sequences that were not restored until 1971.