Ray Harryhausen’s career shows how childhood fascination can become a lifelong creative pursuit. Follow that fascination through the work it demanded, the personality he gave his creatures, and the filmmakers who caught the same spark.
Seven Skeletons and Four Months
In the early 1960’s, on the set of Jason and the Argonauts, a daunting task was set for an action sequence. Possibly the most complex effect done at the time and it would be a defining evolution in the work of fantasy in film. Three actors with sword and shield in hand do battle with an army of animated skeletons. This scene is prolific in film school’s, video essays and really anyone that vaguely wants to talk about visual movie effects in general.
This effect was achieved by Ray Harryhausen, the man who would go on to become synonymous with stop motion animation. The movement of all seven skeletons, their sword swings, and jaw movements all syncing up with the actors’ performances and music. Harryhausen would recall it took four and a half months of work, and on some days only a second of footage would have been finished for his full day of effort. What makes someone devote months of their life to bringing a few minutes of fantasy into existence? 1
The Film that Moved Him
King Kong (1933) made a huge impression on Harryhausen and sent him on his path. The young Ray, only 13 at the time, recalled never seeing anything like it. “I fell in love with the movie, with the fantasy, with the fact that someone dared put a 50-foot gorilla with a girl in his hand on the screen.” he told Marshall Julius in an interview for National Galleries of Scotland. 2 “It was so outrageous and so convincing that it titillated my imagination”. He was so enthralled, he made several trips back to the theater and found himself trying to figure out how the famous gorilla worked. How did the filmmakers achieve the effect of a giant moving gorilla, interacting with real people on screen? With no how-to books or DVD extras spilling the movie’s secrets, the young would-be filmmaker started experimenting with his own camera, models and making his own dinosaurs to recreate King Kong’s effects.
One frame at a time he would take his self-made puppets and capture their movements. Take a frame, adjust the model, snap another frame, and repeat the process for hours and even days on end until a small completed movement was convincingly captured on film. A monster had come to life.
This enthusiasm in the hobby led to a friend arranging a meeting with Willis O’Brien, the very man whose work inspired so. After critiquing the boy’s work O’Brien advised him to take classes in sculpting and filmmaking. Taking this advice to heart, Harryhausen took evening classes at the School of Cinematic Arts in Southern California. This along with working as a camera assistant in the US Army, Ray’s hobby was slowly improving and developing into a life-long career. All of this from innocently witnessing the strange movements of an ape on film in his youth.
Most people reading this likely have a similar memory. Something in a movie that scared you, impressed you, or just left itself sitting in your head rent free. For me it was likely the first movie I ever saw in theatres, The Land Before Time (1988). The scale of the large creatures, the fluid Don Bluth style animation and the terrifying depictions of “Sharptooth” the tyrannosaurus were seared into my young mind.
Ray Harryhausen took that experience and made it into a career. He made it into magic. Okay, this sounds overly dramatic and a bit silly but bare with me.
Stop Motion Animation is Hard Work
His early work with George Pal and his Fairy Tale Shorts earned Harryhausen a name worth recommending, which led him to his first leading job over the visual effects for the famous author Ray Bradbury for a film based on a short story: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). A dinosaur-like beast based on an illustration from the stories reprinted title “The Fog Horn” served as the inspiration for the on-screen titular monster. The eerie statuesque figure paints a lovely silhouette and Harryhausen felt it necessary to mimic that silhouette in one of the iconic scenes of the movie. 3
The film was praised heavily for its visual effects at the time, though not seen as iconic as King Kong, the effects of The Beast were recognized as being some of the best that ever hit the silver screen.
Ray Harryhausen now had a name for himself in the industry and that meant a lot more work. I could post here for days on the cinematic monsters Harryhausen would create from the 50’s 60’s and even into the 70’s and 80’s. But for the sake of brevity, I will go over some of his most famous and detailed monsters and scenes, as well as ones that resonated with me growing up, here in a timeline.
A Timeline of Stop-Motion Fantasy
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1957 The Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth is likely the closest homage to Willis O’Brien’s King Kong, the lizard monster breaks chains and runs amok on some scientists and wrestles an elephant! This puppet would be repurposed decades later for the Kraken in Clash of the Titans. |
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1958 The Cyclops and Dragon battle sequence from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Two models clashing in a gargantuan battle from the Sinbad franchise with only more to come. |
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1963 The Hydra battle sequence in Jason and the Argonauts. 7 Heads all moving independently of each other, swaying and striking at the titular hero makes for a complex and nearly seamless action scene. One of many as mentioned earlier from this Greek epic. |
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1966 One Million Years B.C. wasn’t remembered for critical acclaim and got mixed reviews, but one thing that was universally praised was the Allosaurus scene as a terrifying dinosaur attacks a caveman settlement leading to tribesmen fighting it off and killing it with spears. |
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1974 The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, often remembered for the sword fight involving a statue of the six-armed Hindu goddess Kali, is often viewed as a video game boss in real life. You can almost see the inspiration this would go on to leave in many enemies in the Zelda series and others. |
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1981 Clash of the Titans is usually seen as Harryhausen’s magnum opus. There are so many to name but I have to point out the battle with Medusa. The haunting effect of the glowing eyes with moving, jittering and crawling snake hair gave me nightmares as a child and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention her here. |
The effects in these movies are all impressive for sure. Multiple limbs or heads, snake hair and gargantuan proportions believably masked with live actors. But what sells it is the acting he gives his creatures. Much like in all forms of animation, the animator is also creating a performance. Timing, posture, anticipation, and reactions help an audience read an fantastical creature’s emotions. This is an aspect he confirmed as important to his process. He was keen on giving even monsters the character they deserve to feel real. 4 To sell the fantasy they had to be as grounded as the actors they interacted with.
These details however would take time. And it would cost him time as well.
The Cost of the Craft
The skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts took 4 months of non-stop work to complete. Clash of the Titans took 3 years of work to complete all of the visual effects. This left him with very little time to spend with his family while production dragged on. It was an exhaustive process that would lead to his retirement.
“I worked for three years on Clash of the Titans and hardly ever saw my family. Our daughter had to grow up without daddy being around very much. Finally, I felt I’d had enough of it.” 2
The 1980’s would also launch the new age of computer generated effects so the somber hermetic style of Harryhausen’s work across the pond in England would be reduced to a novelty in the business. Despite the awards and accolades that would come after his retirement, his style of work was no longer profitable or effective in Hollywood.
Never-the-less his impact would be felt for some time to come through the same means that inspired Harryhausen himself.
Someone Else was Watching
Dennis Muren is likely not a name most people outside of the truly dedicated would recognize. But in the first week of the release of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad a young Muren had seen it eight times. At 14, nearly the same age as Harryhausen after seeing King Kong, Dennis had found the effects master in the phone book and called him. This is not something that would be encouraged today, but it would lead to an invitation for a visit.
This meeting with someone he admired, a creator of the fantastical creatures that captivated his young mide would inspire Muren to go on and start his own career in visual effects and ultimately work with George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, creating for Star Wars and Jurassic Park to name a few. 5
The Lasting Legacy of Harryhausen
Just like O’Brien to Harryhausen, the stop motion king would push someone else to pursue the love he had enjoyed for decades.
At the time of this article: LAIKA, a movie studio devoted to the art of stop motion animation will be releasing their fifth full length feature film Wildwood. Director Travis Knight has credited Harryhausen as a major inspiration for him wanting to get into movies and he speaks about his work frequently. 6
As I mentioned before, after his retirement Ray would keep busy by receiving a lifetime of awards. Awards he never receieved during his time working on these incredible films, despite the critical accolades they would elicit. He would go on to be an inspiration and even a lecturer at the very school he learned his trade, the School of Cinematic Arts. Documentaries were made for TV specials, his work would run on repeat and be sold on VHS and later DVD’s in crisp high definition.
There is no shortage and will be no shortage of remembrance for someone so prolific with a style of animation. Stop motion animation is still used as artfully today as it was in Ray’s day. It’s still a lot of hard work. It’s still done one frame at a time. But the result is still as captivating as ever in modern times. And for that we will always give thanks to legends like Ray Harryhausen, who simply walked into a theater at age 13, for inspiring the future of fantasy.
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