Starring Special Effects

He's got style. He's got personality. He's got top billing in all the posters. He is undeniably the best character in the whole damn movie. He is...a big budget special effect?

That's right, folks: You don't need to be a human being or even technically alive to be the star. With a big enough budget, a little imagination and some talent to provide a memorable voice (though this may not be the case for much longer), you can take a prop and turn it into a character.

This trope is all about movies that not only employ such special effect characters, but put them in the spotlight: if you can take the Muppets, Serkis Folk or Toons out of a movie without affecting the plot line or core cast, then it's not this trope.

Examples of Starring Special Effects include:

Film

• The vast majority of Harryhausen Movies. Ray Harryhausen treated each monster as a character in and of itself, giving them operatic deaths when he could. Special mention goes to:
  • Mighty Joe Young - Joe is the star of the film, after all.
  • The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
  • Twenty Million Miles To Earth - A movie where to many audiences, the monster is the most like-able characters.
  • First Men in The Moon
  • The Valley of Gwangi
  • Clash of the Titans
• Short Circuit features Johnny 5, an animatronic robot, as the lead character.
• The infamous film version of Howard the Duck.
• Dragonheart, where Sean Connery voices a CGI dragon.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
• The live-action Transformers movies are mainly a vehicle to show off a whole set of special effects characters.
  • Some critics actually claim they didn't do this enough: Who came here to see a bunch of humans we don't actually care about? Give us the robots!
• The live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies.
• The live-action Garfield movies.
• Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which merges live action and animation in much the same way as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
  • And there's its predecessor, Space Jam. The credits for both films actually used "Bugs Bunny" as part of the starring role.
• The live-action Alvinandthe Chipmunks movies.
• The live-action Scooby Doo movies
• The live-action Rocky and Bullwinkle movie
• The live-action Casper movie, and its sequels
  • Roger Ebert even described the first one in his review as "a movie that essentially stars computer programming".
• ET the Extraterrestrial
• Debatable whether this applies when you have an actual actor playing a character whose appearance is created by special effects. Andy Serkis has played three of the most famous examples:
  • Gollum in Peter Jackson's film version of The Lord of the Rings, particularly in The Two Towers.
  • King Kong in the most recent remake
  • Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The trailer even said "From Weta Digital: the Visual Effects Company for Avatar"
• Pretty much any Kaiju movie qualifies as this.
  • Godzilla. Both the original Japanese version (who was played by a guy in a rubber suit... as well as an animatronic head used for close-ups in later films) and the CGI version of the remake.
  • The titular stars (yes, there were two of 'em) of Rodan were played both by guys in rubber suits and by large puppets.
  • Mothra herself is an animatronic puppet. Though, later films also use CGI for the flying scenes.
  • Baby Irys was an animatronic puppet... and the main villain of the film Gamera 3: Revenge of Irys. Irys' adult form uses a mixture of "guy in rubber suit" and CGI for the flying scenes.
    • Gamera himself, natch.
  • King Kong . Possibly the originator of the trope, to the point where Fay Wray was initially told that she would be appearing with the "tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood".
• Gwoemul from |The Host is a CGI fish-monster.
• All the movies starring The Muppets.
  • The policy of working with Muppets is that one has to treat them as legitimate people, to the point that many Muppeteers don't break character during the outtakes of the production.
    • Special mention to the 2011 Muppet movie where the Muppets get their own promotion interviews with the media.
  • Jim Henson's non-Muppet films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth also qualify—the bulk of the characters in the latter are realized with puppets, and the former has an all-puppet cast.
    • The Dark Crystal is especially notable, as it was the first live action movie done with no human cast. Every character however big or small was a puppet. This lent to the viewer's immersion in Henson and Froud's World Building.
• Jar-Jar Binks from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is what happens when this goes horribly, horribly wrong.
  • Jabba The Hutt starred "As Himself" in the same movie, and Yoda would join the ranks in the next two films.
• Christopher Johnson in District 9.
• Avatar
• S1m0ne is an in-universe example.
• The makers of Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance seem to describe the movie as such while trying to downplay the role of the movie's actual star Nicholas Cage.
• Variation: The film Battle of the River Plate included acting credits for the warships involved in filming it.

Live Action TV

• ALF
• Max Headroom. The title character was played by Matt Frewer with lots of prosthetic makeup, bluescreen and editing.
• The majority of LazyTown's main cast are puppets.
  • Does this count Robbie Rotten's Bruce Campbell like creepy makeup?
• Sesame Street would be nothing without its Muppet cast.
  • And, of course, The Muppet Show.
• Blue's Clues is completely rendered in animation. The only real thing is a single guy standing in front of a greenscreen talking to himself.
  • The exceptions, of course, are the Thinking Chair (he has to sit on something), the letter and the notebook.