The Birth of the Robot (1936)

This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many European filmmakers turned to puppets as an alternative, and Lye enlisted the help of avant-garde friends such as Humphrey Jennings and John Banting to make the amusing puppets. Exploring the still-complex color process, which involved the combination of three separate images, Lye creates such a vivid storm scene that reviewers hailed it as “proof that the color film has entered a new stage.” The music is Holst’s The Planets. - Harvard Film Archive

Released Oct. 1, 1936 6 min 7+

Genres: Animation, Short

Keywords: tmdb.short-film, mdblist.imdb-short, tmdb.commercial, tmdb.stop-motion, tmdb.experimental, imdb.oil, imdb.shell-company + 7 more, imdb.surrealism, imdb.robot, imdb.car, imdb.desert, imdb.advertisement, imdb.lubrication, aspectratio.1-37-1