Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen carved out an all-but-unique niche for himself in movies, from the 1950s through the 1980s. In an era in which actors commanded the lion's share of public attention, with directors (and sometimes the increasingly rare producer) taking... more

Ray Harryhausen carved out an all-but-unique niche for himself in movies, from the 1950s through the 1980s. In an era in which actors commanded the lion's share of public attention, with directors (and sometimes the increasingly rare producer) taking most of what was left, Harryhausen -- who was neither an actor, director, or producer -- acquired a worldwide fandom as the creator and designer of some of the most beloved fantasy films of all time. He is usually identified as a special-effects designer and, more specifically, a master of stop-motion animation, but Harryhausen's role goes much deeper than that. He is the originator of most of the movies with which he is associated, and his special effects determine the shape, content, and nuances of his movies down to the script level, much more so than the directors of the movies, who often had little more to do than move actors around and run the crew. The only comparable figure in movie history is Willis O'Brien, the pioneer of stop-motion animation. It was O'Brien's spectacular work on The Lost World (1925) that introduced Harryhausen to stop-motion animation and live-action fantasy when he was a young boy. And once Harryhausen saw King Kong (1933), O'Brien's undisputed masterpiece, he was hooked. Harryhausen began devising his own models and puppets, working with a camera to create his own stop-motion work; he eventually met O'Brien and received some advice and guidance from him. Harryhausen's skills in stop-motion work were sufficient to get him assigned to an army-training film unit during World War II, where his experience and technique advanced further. After the war, he went to work for producer George Pal on a series of stop-motion animated short films called Puppetoons (to distinguish them from cartoon animation) that remain among the most entertaining children's films of their era. Finally, in 1948, he went to work for Willis O'Brien. At the time, O'Brien was working on a joint production with Merian C. Cooper (the co-producer of King Kong), making a fantasy film about a giant ape entitled Mighty Joe Young (1949). As it worked out, O'Brien was so heavily involved on the production side that 80 percent of the animation in the movie was Harryhausen's work. At the start of the 1950s, Harryhausen devised a relatively low-cost method of stop-motion work that permitted the creation of special effects on a smaller budget than had theretofore been the case. The first movie to make use of his new technique was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Inspired by the short story The Foghorn (written by Harryhausen's longtime friend Ray Bradbury), the movie told the story of a dinosaur awakened from suspended animation by an Arctic nuclear test; the dinosaur escapes official notice at first, wrecking isolated ships and a lighthouse as it follows its ancient spawning instinct down the Atlantic coast until it comes ashore in New York City. That last third of the film remains one of the most spectacular ever seen in movies, Harryhausen's model work and Willis Cooper's miniature sets resulting in stunningly realistic, spellbinding depictions of the gigantic beast and the destruction of the city. It was also helped by an excellent (if not exactly stellar) cast and highly sympathetic direction by Eugène Lourié, a former art director, who left room for Harryhausen's dinosaur to display a subtly sympathetic side (similar to O'Brien's Kong) as a victim of man's folly. The film was made as an independent production by Jack Dietz, but it so impressed Warner Bros. chief Jack L. Warner that the studio ended up purchasing the finished movie, and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms became Warner Bros.' top-grossing movie of the year. More than that, it triggered a whole new cycle of sci-fi horror films. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was soon being remade, first by Toho Films in Japan (on a much more topical level, but forsaking stop-motion work in favor of a man in a rubber dinosaur suit) as Gojira, which was later recut for the U.S. and retitled Godzilla, King of the Monsters; later, with animation by O'Brien, as The Giant Behemoth; and again, with a man in a rubber suit, as Gorgo. Both of the latter were directed by Lourié; indeed, Lourié's involvement with Gorgo, produced by the King brothers, was something of a tribute to the effectiveness of Harryhausen's animation work. The director's young daughter felt so sorry for the dinosaur at the end of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms that he gladly later embraced Gorgo, with its relatively happy ending for its title creature. Equally important were the other films about radiation- and space-spawned horrors, including Them! (which was devised by Warner Bros. to emulate the look and impact of Harryhausen's movie), Tarantula, The Monolith Monsters, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Kronos, and The Fly. Harryhausen was able to make a major contribution to this cycle from the repercussions growing out of Warner's success -- one man who saw The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was Charles H. Schneer, a young producer at Columbia Pictures, who became interested in doing a feature with him. Their first film together was It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), in which a gigantic cephalopod (i.e. octopus), driven out of its deep-water habitat by radiation from atomic tests, attacks San Francisco. It was another success, and it began a pattern in which Harryhausen made a significant advance in his technique and range with each successive movie. He took a short break from his work at Columbia to animate the prehistoric sequence in Irwin Allen's production of The Animal World, and then returned to work with Schneer on Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). Harryhausen and Schneer's third film together -- conceived in part because Harryhausen wanted a trip to Italy -- was 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). Its centerpiece was a rapidly growing, vaguely lizard-like Venusian that rampages through the Italian countryside and into Rome. Harryhausen had wearied of doing monster-on-the-loose stories, so he turned back to an idea that he'd first conceived after The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms of doing an Arabian Nights fantasy along the lines of the 1940 Alexander Korda-produced Thief of Bagdad. The difference would be that his would show all of the wonders of the ancient-world fantasy onscreen using stop-motion photography. Schneer was willing to get it made (and it had to be made in color, given its subject, which was a first for Harryhausen), and the result was The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The opening of Harryhausen's great cycle of fantasy films, the movie was a huge box-office hit and a critical favorite, despite the fact that it couldn't match the scale of the Korda movie. It did look beautiful, it was exciting throughout (even in the non-stop-motion sequences) under director Nathan Juran (himself an Oscar-winning former art director), and it was all wrapped up in a gorgeous, hauntingly beautiful score by Bernard Herrmann. It was also with this movie that -- in order to distinguish Harryhausen's stop-motion work from cartoon animation -- the studio introduced the term "Dynamation" to the marketing of his movies. The next 23 years were something of a golden age for Harryhausen and Schneer, as they generated seven extraordinary fantasy and sci-fi fantasy films: The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Mysterious Island (1961), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The First Men in the Moon (1964), The Valley of Gwangi (1969), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), and Clash of the Titans (1981). He also took a break from his own productions with Schneer to work on Hammer Films' One Million Years B.C. (1966), starring Raquel Welch and John Richardson. The latter featured the best dinosaur animation seen onscreen since King Kong, and The Valley of Gwangi gave Harryhausen a chance to pay tribute to his mentor, adapted as it was from a proposal of O'Brien's. The jewel among his own productions with Schneer, however, was Jason and the Argonauts, which brought the Greek gods, goddesses, demigods, and other mythical creations to life as they had never before been seen onscreen. Harryhausen's movies of the 1970s were no less dazzling, and it is to his credit that he continued making his fantasy movies into the era of George Lucas' and Steven Spielberg's ascent to domination of the field with Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. By 1981, Harryhausen and Schneer had reached the top of their game in terms of casting -- Burgess Meredith, Dame Maggie Smith, and Sir Laurence Olivier were all in Clash of the Titans. But Columbia had gone through several management shifts over the years and declined to produce that movie, which ended up in the hands of MGM. It was also the first movie in which Harryhausen had to rely on the work of assistants to help him. He was unable to get further films produced, however, as the generational change in the movie industry, combined with his good taste, his advancing age (as well as his corresponding desire not to be divided from his family for months at a time), and his unwillingness to utilize CGI technology, left Harryhausen seeming out of step with the business. From the 1980s onward, Harryhausen maintained (and his fans seem to all agree) that his stop-motion technique, though time-consuming, permitted the introduction of a personality into his creations. Those creatures, from Mighty Joe Young to Clash of the Titans, display the illusion of full life, including feeling and, within the limits of what their nature is supposed to be, an inner life. Indeed, one of the highest tributes to Harryhausen's art is the sense of real life behind his Rhedosaurus from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, his Ymir (and the elephant) from 20 Million Miles to Earth, the Cyclops (and most of the rest) from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and all of the creatures from Jason and the Argonauts and The Valley of Gwangi -- they feel so real that it hurts when they hurt and when (and if) they die. Despite Harryhausen's absence from movies for 11 years, he received an Academy Award in 1992 for his career-length work as a creator and designer of stop-motion animation. That event heralded an outpouring of accolades and honors for Harryhausen that continued for over a decade. A frequent guest at festivals of his films, he has also seen his models and miniatures exhibited in museums. Additionally, starting in 1992 with The Criterion Collection's release of the special laserdisc edition of Jason and the Argonauts, which contained a commentary track by Harryhausen, his movies have all received varying but significant degrees of special treatment on laserdisc and DVD. In May of 2004, he published Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, a deluxe oversize hardcover book (co-written with Tony Dalton), featuring a forward by Ray Bradbury. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide less