Ray Harryhausen
Ray Harryhausen (born June 29, 1920 in Los Angeles, California) is an American producer and, most notably, a special effects creator.
Stop Motion Integration
Before the advent of computers and CGI, movies used a variety of approaches to achieve animated special effects. One approach was stop-motion animation, used famously in King Kong (1933). The work of Willis O'Brien in Kong inspired Harryhausen to work in this field.
He prefers not to compare his work with the special effects in live action films with the animated films of Tim Burton, Nick Park, Ivo Caprino and Ladislav Starevich and others, which he sees as pure puppet films. He, and other animators, moved stop-motion into the realm of live action movies. Their characters interact with and are a part of the real world where the action is taking place, which is different from the concept in movies like Chicken Run and Nightmare before Christmas.
Professional History
From his first demo reel, of fighting dinosaurs from an abortive project called Evolution, Harryhausen found work with Paramount, working on George Pal's Puppetoon shorts. During the war he worked for the Army Motion Picture Unit. From this work, he acquired several million feet of unused film on which he made a series of fairy tale-based shorts. This work led him to his first major film, Mighty Joe Young (1949) and then The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)(It has been stated that Toho studios copied elements of this movie to help prepare the launch of the Godzilla series). It was on the Warner stage that he first used split-screen projection, or a technique he would later call Dynamation, allowing his miniature figures to apparently interact with real actors.
Harryhausen then moved to Columbia and began a fruitful partnership with Charles H. Schneer. Their first release was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) about a giant octopus, followed by Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) but the first big success was The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958). Always working alone on his effects, it often took a long time for his movies to be made.
Jason and the Argonauts
After The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960), his next success was with his masterwork, Jason and the Argonauts (1963), which features an extended fight between the actors and a group of skeletal adversaries, a considerable advance on the fight scene in Sinbad, among a number of other classic scenes. The fight scene in Jason and the Argonauts took over four months to complete. Although Jason and the Argonauts is celebrated as Harryhausen's best film today, it was not a huge success at the time it was made.
Awards
Harryhausen next made First Men in the Moon (1964), based on the novel by H.G. Wells. He then worked for Hammer Films, demonstrating his skill by creating the dinosaurs in One Million Years B.C. (1966). He next went on to make another dinosaur film with The Valley of Gwangi (1969), although this was not a financial success.
He returned to mythology in the 1970s with The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), and the last film to show his miniature work, Clash of the Titans (1981), for which he was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Special Effects.
Despite his pioneering work, he was not rewarded by the film community until 1992 when he was given the Gordon E. Sawyer Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The award recognizes "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry." Harryhausen has also been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The New Millenium
The 2001 Pixar/Disney film Monsters, Inc. pays tribute to Ray by placing its characters in a sushi restaurant named "Harryhausen's".
Tim Burton's 2005 film The Corpse Bride also contains a tribute to Ray. The piano in the Everglot's front parlor bears the brand name of "Harry Hausens."
In the director's commentary on the DVD of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, director Peter Jackson stated that he paid homage to Harryhausen during the scene where a giant cave troll attacks the Fellowship. He based the troll on Harryhausen's monsters and many of their movements, as seen in Harryhausen's effects shots.
As of 2005, he lives in London. For the moment, he and his producing partner Arnold R. Kunert are working on a series of animated shorts based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The first of these shorts are said to be "The Pit and the Pendulum".
He was a life long friend of author Ray Bradbury.
See also: Hollywood Animation: The Golden Age, Bubo
External links
- Ray Harryhausen at IMDb
- Ray Harryhausen explores world of Poe
- The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen
- Ray Harryhausen Profile
- The Seventh Voyage A site paying tribute to Ray Harryhausen
- Ray Harryhausen's Split Screen (Dynamation) process explained