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Harryhausen
When it comes to motion picture special effects, there is only one name
that personifies movie magic - Ray Harryhausen. From his
debut films with
George Pal to his final film,
Harryhausen imbued magic and visual strength to motion picture special
effects as no other technician has, before or since.
Born in Los Angeles, the signature event in Harryhausen's life was when
he saw
King Kong (1933).
So awed was 13-year-old Harryhausen that he began researching the film's
effects work, ultimately learning all he could about 'Willis O'Brien'
and stop-motion photography - he even contacted O'Bie and showed an
allosaur short he made, which caused O'Bie to quip to his wife, "You
realize you're encouraging my competition, don't you?" Harryhausen tried
to make a stop-motion epic, titled Evolution, but the time needed cut it
short. The footage he completed - of a lumbering Apatosaurus attacked by
a belligerent Allosaurus -made excellent use as a demo reel, and as a
result Harryhausen's first film job came with George Pal, working on
Pal's Puppetoon shorts for Paramount, before a stint in the Army using
his animation skills for training films.
After the Second World War Harryhausen acquired over a thousand feet of
unused military film and made a series of Puppetoon-flavored fairy tale
shorts, which helped him land a job with O'Brien and
Marcel Delgado for
Mighty Joe Young (1949). Some 85% of
the actual animation was done by Harryhausen.
But Harryhausen's real breakthrough came when he was hired by Warner
Brothers to do the special effects for
Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, The (1953).
Forced to make quality effects on a film budget of just $200,000,
Harryhausen learned a technique called split-screen (rear projection on
overlapping miniature screens) to insert dinosaurs and other fantastic
beasts into real world backgrounds. The result was one of the most
influential sci-fi films of the 1950s.
From there Harryhausen drifted to Columbia and teamed with producer
Charles Schneer' , the tandem becoming synonymous for the remainder of
their respective careers. After three sci-fi monster films and work with
Willis O'Brien on the 'Irwin Allen (I) documentary
7th
Voyage of Sinbad, The (1958),
Harryhausen's first split-screen film shot entirely in color,
highlighted by Harryhausen's mythological monsters interacting with
Kathryn Grant,
and
Torin Thatcher
and the rousing score of
Bernard Herrmann.
Because Harryhausen worked alone on stop-motion animation, filming
usually took some two years, and the most famous example of the infinite
patience needed came with the skeleton swordfight sequence in
Jason and the Argonauts (1963), a
sequence where Harryhausen often could get no more than 13 frames of
film (one-half second of elapsed time) shot per day.
The 1960s were Harryhausen's best years, highlighted by his most popular
film
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
and his reunions with dinosaurs in Hammer Films'
One
Million Years B.C. (1966) and
Valley of Gwangi, The (1969). His pace
slowed in the 1970s but nonetheless saw three more masterworks,
Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The (1974),
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977),
and
Clash of the Titans (1981).
It was not until 1992 that Harryhausen finally achieved film immortality
with an honorary Oscar, a long-overdue tribute to the one name that
personifies visual magic.
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