Ray Harryhausen
Special effects titan…
“I owe everything to a giant gorilla,” admitted the legendary animator, picking up his honoree Oscar in 1992. Choosing his career path after watching King Kong (1933) for the first time, the 13-year-old Harryhausen managed to nab a meeting with the movie’s lead FX artist, Willis O’Brien, which led to a job as his chief assistant on the Oscar-winning 1949 big ape fantasy, Mighty Joe Young. Harryhausen went on to lead animation departments on a long list of landmark movies throughout the ’50s and ’60s. Scoring his first solo job animating the sea creature in 1953’s The Beast From
20,000 Fathoms, Harryhausen developed a system of sandwiching his stop-motion wares between the separate live-action background/foreground images – a timeconsuming method that involved handcranking projectors, controlling individual lighting rigs and laboriously rewinding and re-photographing each frame of the film. The striking result, though, was ‘Dynamation’, which set Harryhausen’s work apart from his rivals’. Harryhausen always preferred to work alone – even on his biggest projects. “I had to learn to do everything,” he laughed. “Now you see 80 people listed on the credits doing the things I was doing by myself!” Renowned for micromanaging every aspect of production, he only let his closest friends and family in on his trade secrets – with his dad machining the armatures of his models, his mum making their costumes and his taxidermist friend providing the scaly, toothy bits. The blockbusting success of The 7th
Voyage Of Sinbad (1958) ushered in a new taste for fantasy films. Harryhausen hit his prime in the ’60s with the likes of Mysterious Island (1961), One Million
Years BC (1966) and The Valley Of Gwangi (1969). But it was 1963’s Jason And The
Argonauts (and one monumental, now iconic set-piece involving an army of sword-fighting skeletons that took over four painstaking months to shoot) that will forever stand as the highest point of his career. When Harryhausen died in 2013, half of Hollywood claimed his work as an inspiration. Spielberg called him “the dean of special effects”, while both Lucas and Jackson said they owed him their careers. His real legacy, though, may be the current vogue for practical effects. His films have a charm that will arguably outlast most modern CGI blockbusters. “Stop-motion has the strange quality of a dream,” he once reflected. “And that’s the essence of fantasy – transforming reality into the world of the imagination.”