The Id Monster - ‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956)

To bring the invisible Monster from the Id to life, MGM made a deal with Disney studios to borrow one of their chief animators, Joshua Meador, and a crew of artists including Bob Trochim, marking the very first occasion that Disney had loaned their talent to another studio. Meador and his team developed a radical new method of animation to create the Id Monster, seen only against the discharge from an electrical fence and the crew’s blaster fire. Rather than rely on traditional cell animation, in which each frame is painted on a clear acetate sheet, Meador had each frame drawn in graphite on animator’s paper. Then, each of these frames was shot using high contrast film, from which a negative image was extracted and composited over the positive image.