The Birth of the Robot

This experimental short was a prestige advertisement for Shell Motor Oil. As Walt Disney came to dominate conventional animation, many European filmmakers turned to puppets as an alternative, and Lye enlisted avant-garde friends such as Humphrey Jennings and John Banting to create the amusing puppets. Exploring the still-complex color process that combined three separate images, Lye produced such a vivid storm scene that reviewers hailed it as proof that color film had entered a new stage. The music is Holst's The Planets.