10 Movie Innovations That Happened Earlier Than You Think

4. The First Fully CGI Movie Character - Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)

A major landmark in the development of CGI as we know it was the ability for effects houses to produce not merely 3D effects, but fully 3D CGI characters that the audience could feel something for.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is understandably credited with popularising this, given the utter brilliance with which the villainous T-1000 (Robert Patrick) is depicted in its terrifying liquid metal form.

But six years earlier, Lucasfilm was actually responsible for delivering the first persistent CGI character in the 1985 cult classic Young Sherlock Holmes, with the brief-but-memorable presence of a knight made entirely out of stained-glass pieces.

The sequence was devised by Lucasfilm's John Lasseter, who of course would go on to become Pixar's CCO and direct their groundbreaking fully-CGI animated film debut Toy Story.

The effect in the film took a stonking six months to produce despite lasting just 30 seconds, yet impressively, it still holds up rather well 35 years later.