10 Greatest CGI Moments In Doctor Who History
1. Mr Ring-A-Ding (Lux)
Lux brought something entirely new to Doctor Who – an impressive achievement for a show that’s been running for over 60 years. Animation combined with live action isn’t a new concept by any means, but the Disney dollars meant that it was now possible to explore in the Whoniverse, and explore it they did.
Mr Ring-a-Ding wasn’t a CGI creature with limited screentime and quick cuts in the edit to avoid noticing any inaccuracies in the VFX, he was a main character with plenty of dialogue and plenty of screentime. There was no room for error here and the final result was remarkable. The attention to detail in the cartoon design, the seamless combination of Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu’s live-action performances with the added animation, the entire old-school cartoon aesthetic, complete with film grain and flicker – this episode, and this character, was a sight to behold.
Sometimes the oldest tricks work the best and that is certainly the case here. Mixing cartoons with live-action is a technique as old as Doctor Who itself but with the development of computers and computer-generated imagery, it’s a technique far easier to achieve nowadays and one which delivered one of the strongest episodes of Season 2 and one of the greatest examples of CGI used in Doctor Who history.