25 best movie CGI effects ever

Willow (1988)

Ron Howard's fantasy adventure movie saw the first instance of digital morphing techniques on film, as Willow attempts to restore the sorceress Fin Raziel to human form. It looks laughably quaint now – you can perform similar tricks in real time on your smartphone – but at the time, the fluid shift between ostrich, tortoise, tiger and woman was mind-boggling.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Water's always been a tricky thing to get right on screen – witness all those ropey old model shots of ships, where the water doesn't scale properly – but CGI's made it possible to create realistic shots of water on a grand scale. A case in point is the flooding of Manhattan in eco-disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow – which called on Digital Domain to conjure up a tidal wave of water that accurately flowed through the streets of New York. The film itself was more of a damp squib.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

David Fincher's bass-ackwards biography called for Brad Pitt to play the title character from his birth as an old man to his twilight years as a youngster. The CGI effects team from Digital Domain had to create a CGI lead character that would mirror Pitt's performance and hold up to scrutiny – for the first hour of the film. No small challenge – but they rose to it, capturing Pitt's performance and mapping it onto an anatomically-accurate maquette of the aged Benjamin Button – and then placing the resulting CGI creation onto the bodies of different actors who played Pitt at different ages. Check out how Digital Domain realised the effect in this TED talk.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)

To realise the outlandish half-man, half-fish crew of The Flying Dutchman, Industrial Light & Magic refined its motion capture tech into the iMoCap system. Actors performing motion captured roles could work opposite their colleagues on-set - meaning that ILM could include more elements of Bill Nighy's performance as the half-squid Davy Jones into the CGI character that appeared on-screen.

Death Becomes Her (1992)

This somewhat forgettable horror-comedy bagged Industrial Light & Magic a visual effects Oscar for its work. It pioneered the depiction of realistic human skin using CGI – used to great effect in twisting Meryl Streep's head around on its neck and punching a hole through Goldie Hawn.

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