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Ray Harryhausen

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Ray Harryhausen (born June 29, 1920 in Los Angeles, California) is an American producer and, most notably, a special effects creator.

Contents

Stop motion animation

Before the advent of computers for camera motion control and CGI, movies used a variety of approaches to achieve animated special effects in movies. One approach was one of the many kinds of stop-motion animation which used realistric miniature models (more accurately called MODEL animation), used famously in King Kong (1933).

The work of pioneer model animator Willis O'Brien (and his animation assistant, Pete Peterson) in Kong inspired Harryhausen to work in this unique field, almost single-handedly keeping the technique alive for three decades as O'Brien's career sadly floundered for most of his life, until his death in 1963.

Harryhausen prefers not to compare his work with special effects animation in live action films to the animated films of Tim Burton, Nick Park, Ivo Caprino, Ladislav Starevich and many others, which he sees as pure "puppet films", and are more accurately (and traditionally) called "puppet animation".

Model animated characters interact with, and are a part of, the live-action world, with the idea that will cease to call attention to themselves as "animation", which is different from the more obviously "cartoony" and stylized designs and puppet-animation stop-motion processes in movies like Chicken Run and The Nightmare Before Christmas, etc.

Springing from O'Brien's groundbreaking work, Harryhausen, continued moving stop-motion into the realm of live action movies, keeping alive and refining the techniques created by O'Brien that O'Brien had first developed as early as 1917.

Professional history

After first seeing Kong in 1933, while seeing many repeated viewings, he spent those early years experimenting while producing short animated bits, inspired by many science fiction sources of his time. From his first formal demo reel, of fighting dinosaurs from an abortive project called Evolution (an homage to a similar project of Willis O'Brien's called Creation, which became O'Brien's demo for King Kong), Harryhausen found work with Paramount, working on George Pál's Puppetoon shorts.

During World War II, Harryhausen worked for the Army Motion Picture Unit making animated sequences educating soldiers about the use and deployment of military equipment when the equipment wasn't available for filming in live action.

From this work, he acquired several left over rolls of unused film on which he made a series of fairy tale-based shorts. After World War II, Ray Harryhausen shot a scene of an alien emerging from a martian war machine based on H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds, part an unrealised project to adapt the story using Welles original "octopus" concept for the martians. Harryhausen also produced a variety of other short animation demos during the post-WWII 40s.

Harryhausen put together a demo reel of his various projects and showed them to Willis O'Brien, who eventually hired him as an assistant animator on what turned out to be Harryhausen's first major film, Mighty Joe Young (1949). Harryhausen proved to be so skilled at animation that he would up animating the majority of the film, which won a special effects Oscar for that year.

As the science fiction craze took hold in movies at the beginning of the 1950s, Harryhausen was hired to do the special effects for "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms." While in production it was learned that a long-time friend of Harryhausen, writer Ray Bradbury had sold a short story called The Foghorn to The Saturday Evening Post about a dinosaur drawn to a lone lighthouse by its foghorn. Since Harryhausen's film featured a similar scene, the story was bought to avoid any possible legal problems. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) became Harryhausen's first solo feature film effort, and an international box-office sensation for Warner Brothers Pictures. (Tomoyuki Tanaka and Ishiro Honda have admitted they copied elements of this movie to help prepare the launch of the Godzilla series in Japan a year later.)

It was on this film that Harryhausen first used a technique that split the background and foreground of pre-shot live action footage into two separate pieces of film. The background would be used as a miniature rear-screen with his models animated in front of it, rephotographed with an animation-capable camera to combine those two elements together, the foreground element matted out to leave a black space. Then, the film was rewound, and everything except the foreground element matted out so that the foreground element would now photograph in the previously blacked out area. This created the effect that the animated model was "sandwiched" in between the two live action elements, right into the final live action scene. This was done without resorting to expensive optical printer work and prevented the image from second generation degradation. A few years later, when he adapted this technique for color film to made The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, he called the process DynaMation (modifying it to "SuperDynaMation" and then "DynaRama" for some subsequent films).

While the film's producers organized the film's live action production and hired various directors to develop the film's live action characters, Harryhausen concentrated only on the shots that involved model animation, visiting the sets only to supervise the filming of the live action background elements (called "plates" in the film effects industry) into which he would later add animated creatures.

Throughout most of his career, Harryhausen's work was a sort of family affair. His father did the machining of the metal armatures that were the skeletons for the models while his mother assisted with some skin textures. An occasional assistant, George Lofgren, a taxidermist, assisted Harryhausen with the creation of furred creatures. Other than that, Harryhausen worked entirely alone to produce the animated shots for all his films, until he hired an assistant, protege model animator and two-time Oscar-nominated Jim Danforth, to assist with animation for Harryhausen's last film Clash of the Titans (1981).

The same year that "Beast" was released, fledgling film producer Irwin Allen released a live action documentary about life in the oceans titled The Sea Around Us, which won a documentary feature film Oscar for that year. Allen's and Harryhausen's paths would cross three years later, on Allen's sequel to this film.

Harryhausen soon met and began a fruitful partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer, who then signed a four-picture deal with Columbia Pictures. Their first tandem release was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) about a giant octopus attacking San Francisco, a box-office success, quickly followed by Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), set in Washington D.C. and one of the best of the alien invasion films of the 50s, also a box office hit.

In 1954, Irwin Allen started work on a second feature-length documentary film, this one about animal life on land called The Animal World (completed in 1956). Needing an opening sequence about dinosaurs, Allen hired premier model animator Willis O'Brien to animate the dinosaurs, then gave him an impossibly short production schedule. O'Brien again hired Harryhausen to help with animation to complete the 10 minute sequence, Harryhausen's and O'Brien's first professional color work. Most viewers agree that the dinosaur sequence of Animal World was the best part of the entire movie (available on the 1957 Black Scorpion DVD).

Harryhausen then returned to Columbia and Charles Schneer to do 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) about an Earth spaceship returning from Venus with an alien passenger, who grows in Earth's atmosphere to tremendous height and escapes to terrorize Rome Italy. Harryhausen refined and improved his already-considerable ability at establishing emotional characterizations in the face of his Venusian Ymir model, creating yet another international box-office hit film.

Schneer was eagar to graduate to color films. Reluctant at first, Harryhausen managed to develop the systems necessary to maintain proper color balances for his DynaMation process, resulting in his greatest masterpiece (and biggest hit) of the 50s, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), a major inspiration for Dennis Murren, long-time multi-Oscar-winning head of George Lucas's ILM special effects company. The top grossing film of that summer, and one of the top grossing films of that year, Schneer and Harryhausen signed another deal with Columbia for a series of four color films.

After The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960) and Mysterious Island (1961), both great artistic and technical successes, his next film is considered by film historians and fans as Harryhausen's masterwork, Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Among the film's several celebrated animation sequences is an extended fight between five actors and seven skeletal adversaries, a considerable advance on the single-skeleton fight scene in Sinbad. The sequence took over four months to complete, and helped to inspire an entire generation of subsequent filmmakers like Spephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Tim Burton, and James Cameron, among many others. (When presenting Harryhausen with a special Academy Award, actor Tom Hanks told Harryhausen "Lots of people say Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all time... no way, it's Jason and the Argonauts!)"

Harryhausen next made First Men in the Moon (1964), his only widescreen (Panavision) film, based on the novel by H. G. Wells.

Oddly and inexplicably, this series of four films were box office disappointments at the time of their original theatrical release, and Columbia Pictures didn't renew their contract with Schneer and Harryhausen for more films.

Harryhausen was then hired by Hammer Film Productions to demonstrate his skill by animating the dinosaurs in One Million Years B.C., released by 20th Century Fox in 1967, a box office smash, helped, in part, by the starring role of shapely Raquel Welch, her second film.

Springing from that success, Harryhausen next went on to make another dinosaur film, The Valley of Gwangi for Warner Brothers (1969); although this was not a financial success (it didn't fit in with the counter-culture audiences of that era), it was a personal project that Harryhausen had been wanting to do for many years, as it was originally developed by his original mentor, Willis' O'Brien for a 1939 project that never saw completion. Set in 1912 Mexico, in a parallel Kong story, cowboys capture a living Allosaurus and bring him to the nearest city for exibition. Sabotage by a rival releases the creature on opening day and the creature wreaks havoc on the town until it's cornered and burned inside a cathedral. The film features a roping scene remiscent of 1949's Mighty Joe Young and is the technical highlight of the film.

After a few lean years, Harryhausen re-teamed with Schneer, who talked Columbia Pictures into reviving the Sinbad character, resulting in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), both box office successes.

Schneer and Harryhausen finally were allowed by MGM to produce a big budget film with name actors and an expanded effects budget. It became the last feature film to showcase his effects work, Clash of the Titans (1981), for which he was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Special Effects.

Oddly, and mainly due to his "hermit" style of production, and the fact that he produced half of his films outside of Hollywood (living in London since 1960), NONE of Harryhausen's films were ever nominated for a special effects Oscar, allowing the Oscar EFX committee to give many far inferior films the award, while theater goers (and future filmmakers) quietly marveled at his work in theaters all over the world.

In spite of the box office success of "Clash", more sophisticated technology developed by ILM and others eclipsed Harryhausen's techniques, and MGM and other studios passed on making his follow-up story, Force of the Trojans, forcing Harryhausen and Schneer to retire from active filmmaking.

Harryhausen then concentrated his efforts on authoring a book, Film Fantasy Scrapbook (produced in three editions as his last three films were released) and supervising the restoration and release of (eventually all) his films to video, laserdisk, and later, DVD. A second book followed, My Animated Life, detailing his techniques and history, and then "The Art of Ray Harryhausen, featuring sketches and drawings for his many projects, some of them unrealized.

Harryhausen continues his life-long friendship with Ray Bradbury and another close friend, book and magazine writer and super Sci-Fi fan Forrest J. Ackerman, who loaned Harryhausen his photos of King Kong in 1933, right after Harryhausen had seen the film for the first time. Harryhausen also maintains his friendship with his long-time producer, Charles H. Schneer, who lives next door to him in suburb of London, and model animation protege, Jim Danforth, still living in the Los Angeles area.

Harryhausen also is an inspiration to other animators. In the 2002 Disney/Pixar film Monsters, Inc., a fashionable restaurant is named Harryhausen's. He also performs the voice of a little polar bear cub in the Will Ferrell film Elf (film).

Awards

During the 80s and early 90s, Harryhausen's growing legion of fans who had graduated into the professional film industry started lobbying the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to acknowledge Harryhausen's immense contribution to the film industry and he was finally awarded a Gordon E. Sawyer lifetime achievement award in 1992, making Harryhausen an international celebrity. A long series of appearances at film festivals, colleges, and film seminars around the world soon followed as Harryhausen met the millions of people who had grown up enjoying his amazing work.

Near the turn of the 21st century, Harryhausen was also honored with a well-deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Harryhausen today

In 2005, Harryhausen released a DVD set of a complete collection of all his non-feature film work, including all his tests, demos, military work, a re-edit of all the biographical material that had been released in the mid-90s to VHS video under the title Aliens, Dragons, Monsters, and Me, and his entire set of fairy tales, including one fairy tale finally completed by a team of assistant animators after some 40 years in partial form.

Currently he is preparing a third book for release, and he and a producing partner, Arnold R. Kunert are working on a series of animated shorts based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the first of which is said to be "The Pit and the Pendulum". He is also working with Legend Films to reissue some of his early feature films on DVD in a series of colorized versions using an improved colorization process. According to Legend Films president Barry Sandrew, the filmmaker told him that his original vision was to do them in color but said that both limited budgets and limited color film stocks back then made it hard for him to do backgrounds and keep them color-balanced the way that was needed to maintain the films' realism. [link].

Harryhausen was also involved in the process of colorizing She, produced by Merian C. Cooper, who had originally intended to shoot the film in color but at the last minute the budget was cut by RKO forcing Cooper to shoot in black and white. As a tribute to Cooper, Harryhausen color designed the film in a manner in which he feels Cooper would have wanted it exhibited. The colorized DVD will include a video commentary by Ray and Mark Vaz (a Merian C. Cooper expert) as well as running commentary of Ray and Mark discussing the film and color choices. Also planned for inclusion is unscripted video of the creative process between Legend Films' creative director, Rosemary Horvath, and Harryhausen colorizing various scenes to create desired effects such as depth and highlights.

In July 2006, it was announced [link] that Harryhausen has licenced Blue Water Productions to create six comic book follow-ups to some of his most famous movies. The first three are "Sinbad, Rogue Of Mars," "Twenty Million Miles From Earth" and "Wrath Of The Titans," and are scheduled for release in late 2006. A further three are due in early 2007- According to the announcement quoted above, one will be a sequel to Jason And The Argonauts, and the other two are yet to be announced. Harryhausen will furnish new artwork, but not scripts.

Cultural References

See also

External links

 

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