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Ray Harryhausen
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This weeks feature
Ray Harryhausen: an animated legend
One of the top cinematic treats for youngsters growing up in the Sixties was ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ - one it’s been fun to relive at regular intervals on TV. Who can forget the screeching harpies, the skeletons emerging scarily from the ground, or the gigantic statue, Talos, creaking into life? Audiences are sated now by ‘computer generated images’ - CGI - which have spread to the point where almost every movie in the multiplex is considered incomplete unless some scenes have been bulked up with digital enhancement. |
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| Sterile CGI
But at the risk of sounding too nostalgic, there was something exciting about the animated sequences in films like ‘Jason’, ‘Clash of the Titans’, or, going back further, ‘The Lost World’ and ‘King Kong’, that makes CGI seem sterile by comparison. And, it has to be said, the models of those early films don’t seem much less credible than the ersatz Greek fleet hovering on the water at the start of ‘Troy’, the faceless passengers and crew on the ‘Titanic’ or the armies of Orcs in ‘Lord of the Rings’. Much of our continued love of those older, more primitive movies, of course, is down to admiration for the skill and imagination of film-makers, who could enthral us despite the technological limitations under which they worked. One of the greatest was Ray Harryhausen, a man acknowledged as an inspiration by modern animators like the creator of ‘Wallace and Gromit’, Nick Park. |
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Inspired
Now in his eighties, Ray was inspired to enter movie special effects by ‘King Kong’ in 1933. His aunt, nurse to the mother of Sid Grauman, of the famous Chinese theatre in Los Angeles, was given free passes to see the film, and took her nephew with her. “I haven’t been the same since,” he says. “That shows you how much film can affect a person. I pride myself in not latching on to Edward G Robinson in ‘Little Caesar’, though, or I might be a Godfather today!” |
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Experiments in the garage
At that time, little was known outside the studios’ SFX departments about the techniques used in ‘King Kong’. “I didn’t know how it was done,” Ray says. “There were no books on stop-motion animation. it was kept quite secret. It was only a couple of years later I discovered the glories of it.”
Having got hold of a 16mm camera, Ray began experimenting with the techniques in his parents’ garage, making clay models and trying to run the camera a frame at a time. Then he spotted a girl at school reading the ‘King Kong’ screenplay. it was the daughter of a man who worked with the film’s animator, Willis O’Brien, and Ray got an invitation to visit him and show him his work. O’Brien suggested the youngster study anatomy, a tip which made a huge difference to his work. |
| Ambitious
While still at high school he also studied photography and art direction. His garage projects became more ambitious, and the sequences enabled him to get a job with George Pal on the ‘Puppetoons’ series. During the Second World War he worked with Frank Capra in the Army Motion Picture Unit of the Special Service division. “I originally wanted to be a combat cameraman,” he says, “not realising they got shot down like clay pigeons. So I was quite lucky to go into Special Service . . .”
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Animated shorts
After the war he began producing animated shorts based on fairy tales, such as ‘The Story of Rapunzel’. But his big break came in 1946, when Willis O’Brien hired him to work on ‘Mighty Joe Young’, another film about an exploited gorilla - “the highlight of my life, to work with my mentors,” says Ray. After a year’s preparation and two in production, the film came out in 1949, winning the Special Effects Oscar. |
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| Masterpieces
Further hits followed, including ‘The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms’, ‘It Came From Beneath The Sea’ and ‘20 Million Miles to Earth’. But Ray really came into his own with his first colour movie, ‘The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’ in 1958. That film, ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ in 1963 and ‘Clash of the Titans’ in 1981 are his masterpieces, and his contribution was not limited to producing amazing effects. |
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Practical
“I don’t just do animation,” he says. “I often brought in the stories, I always worked with the writer and producer, and sometimes the director wouldn’t come in until the picture was ready to go. I was responsible for making the picture practical. “I also picked locations. We used places in Spain for ‘Seventh Voyage’ that hadn’t been photographed before, and 5,000-year-old temples for ‘Jason’. So our films had more to them than entertainment value, and a lot of people recognise that now. They have even used ‘Jason’ and ‘Titans’ in teaching Greek mythology.” Ray drew the line at actually directing, though. “I thought something would suffer - the animation or the rest of it. I never had patience with people. My characters did exactly what I told them to do!” |
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| Favourites
Of all his films, ‘Jason’ remains his favourite. “I think it tells what we wanted to tell in a very reliable way. And the seven skeletons was one of the most complicated sequences we ever had to film - it certainly took the most time. But I think my favourite character is Ymir from ‘20 Million Miles to Earth’. And there’s one reason - he’s not a bad character, he’s provoked into violence. We tried to get a sympathy with our demonic characters that people are not too familiar with. That’s why I like to call them creatures and not monsters.” |
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Sanguine
Nowadays CGI has taken over from the stop-motion techniques of Ray and his mentor Willis O’Brien, but he is sanguine about it. “I think CGI is awesome. Gollum in ‘Lord of the Rings’ is a remarkable character. But they have a big crew, all the time and money in the world. When we made pictures, nine tenths of what you saw was first takes, we never had time to refine it, you would have to start all over again. With CGI you can have a dozen people working on an image to refine it and refine it before it reaches the screen.
“The computer is a remarkable thing. I have great respect for it. But it is a tool. It doesn’t mean you have to use a computer for every type of story. Animation adds that dream quality. ‘Kong’ is like a nightmare - it has that dream quality. You don’t want it too realistic. Even today, with some of the faults you may see, it’s a great film.” |
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| King Kong
Now, after the derided Dino De Laurentis and John Guillerman version of 1976, ‘King Kong’ has been remade again, this time by ‘Lord of the Rings’ master Peter Jackson. “Well,” says Ray, “if anyone is the right person to do it, Peter Jackson is the man. If I had seen the De Laurentis version when I was a child, I would probably be a plumber today!”
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Visit www.rayharryhausen.com for the latest information on Ray’s projects. |
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