Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts were both stop-motion animations for much of their effects. The artifice is obvious but ages well.
Forbidden Planet uses a mix of practical effects, mattes, and hand-drawn animations (the monsters of the Id). Again, fairly obvious, but all told, ages fairly well.
And 2001: A Space Odyssey, only ten years later, has effects many of which could be contemporary. Shots of Discovery in particular are near perfect, and I found the effects in the 1984 sequel, 2010 to be worse in regards -- the sagging of a supposedly zero-G bridge was one that still registers with me.
But there are also lots of bad examples. Many of the James Bond franchise sequences involving flight or spaceflight are pretty obviously cheesy. The effects from Superman are hit-or-miss. Rear and front-projection effects, especially in automobile scenes, where auto occupants clearly aren't in the same physics as the vehicle, are quite distracting to me (and date to the 1930s).
The thing about practicals -- model effects especially -- is that you've got a real physical object at play, and that's going to have depth and other elements which are still hard to capture in CGI. Though blends of CGI with live-action (the epiphany for me was True Lies which pioneered much of this) can be highly convincing. The key is subtlety.
Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts were both stop-motion animations for much of their effects. The artifice is obvious but ages well.
Forbidden Planet uses a mix of practical effects, mattes, and hand-drawn animations (the monsters of the Id). Again, fairly obvious, but all told, ages fairly well.
And 2001: A Space Odyssey, only ten years later, has effects many of which could be contemporary. Shots of Discovery in particular are near perfect, and I found the effects in the 1984 sequel, 2010 to be worse in regards -- the sagging of a supposedly zero-G bridge was one that still registers with me.
But there are also lots of bad examples. Many of the James Bond franchise sequences involving flight or spaceflight are pretty obviously cheesy. The effects from Superman are hit-or-miss. Rear and front-projection effects, especially in automobile scenes, where auto occupants clearly aren't in the same physics as the vehicle, are quite distracting to me (and date to the 1930s).
The thing about practicals -- model effects especially -- is that you've got a real physical object at play, and that's going to have depth and other elements which are still hard to capture in CGI. Though blends of CGI with live-action (the epiphany for me was True Lies which pioneered much of this) can be highly convincing. The key is subtlety.