Ray Harryhausen

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Ray Harryhausen
Born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen
June 29, 1920 (1920-06-29) (age 87)
Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation Stop motion model animator
Spouse(s) Diana Livingstone Bruce (1963 - present)

Ray Harryhausen (born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen on June 29, 1920 in Los Angeles, California) is an Academy Award-winning American film producer and, most notably, a special effects creator most famous for his brand of stop-motion model animation. Some of his most notable works have included his animation on Mighty Joe Young (with pioneer Willis H. O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for special effects) (1949), The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (his first color film) and Jason and the Argonauts, featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors.

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[edit] 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. One approach was stop-motion animation which used realistic miniature models (more accurately called model animation), used for the first time in a feature film in The Lost World (1925), and most famously in King Kong (1933).

The work of pioneer model animator Willis O'Brien in King Kong inspired Harryhausen to work in this unique field, almost single-handedly keeping the technique alive for three decades. O'Brien's career floundered for most of his life—most of his cherished projects were never realized—but Harryhausen was the right person at the right time, and achieved considerable success.

Harryhausen prefers not to compare his work with special effects animation in live action films to the completely animated films of Tim Burton, Nick Park, Ivo Caprino, Ladislav Starevich and many others, which he sees as pure "puppet films", and which 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 they will cease to call attention to themselves as "animation", which is different from the more obviously "cartoony" and stylized approach in movies like Chicken Run and The Nightmare Before Christmas, etc.

Springing from O'Brien's groundbreaking work, Harryhausen continued bringing stop-motion into the realm of live action movies, keeping alive and refining the techniques created by O'Brien that he had first developed as early as 1917. Harryhausen's last film was Clash of the Titans, produced in the early 1980s. Currently he is involved in producing colorized DVD versions of three of his classic black and white films (20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and It Came from Beneath the Sea) and a film from the producer of the original King Kong (She).

[edit] Professional history

[edit] 1930s and 1940s

After having seen King Kong for the first of many times in 1933, Harryhausen spent his early years experimenting in the production of animated shorts, inspired by the burgeoning science fiction literary genre of the period. After viewing Harryhausen's 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 (Merian C. Cooper, the producer of "King Kong", saw O'Brien's initial work for Creation and had him reassigned to "King Kong"), Paramount executives awarded him his first job, beginning on George Pál's Puppetoons shorts.

During World War II, Harryhausen was also employed by the Army Motion Picture Unit, animating sequences educating soldiers about the use and deployment of military equipment when that equipment was unavailable for shooting in live action. From this work, he acquired several rolls of unused film from 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 of an unrealized project to adapt the story using Wells' original "octopus" concept for the Martians. Harryhausen also produced a variety of other short animation demos during the post-World War II 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). O'Brien ended up concentrating on solving the various technical problems of the film, leaving most of the animation up to Harryhausen. Their work won the special effects Oscar Academy Award that year.

[edit] 1950s

King Kong was rereleased in 1952, and started a movie monster craze. Harryhausen was hired to do the special effects for "The Monster from Beneath the Sea", whose story borrowed heavily from King Kong (prehistoric beast ends up creating chaos in New York City). While in production, the filmmakers learned that a long-time friend of Harryhausen's, writer Ray Bradbury, had sold a short story called "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (later The Fog Horn) 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 film studio bought the rights to the story to avoid any potential legal problems. Also, the title was changed to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Under that title, it became Harryhausen's first solo feature film effort, and a major international box-office hit for Warner Brothers Pictures.

It was on The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms 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. It saved money and looked better than previous techniques. A few years later, when he adapted this technique for color film to make 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 was working with the Sam Katzman B-picture unit of Columbia Pictures. Their first tandem project was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) about a giant octopus attacking San Francisco. It was a box-office success, quickly followed by Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), set in Washington D.C.--one of the best of the alien invasion films of the 50s, and 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, but then gave him an impossibly short production schedule. O'Brien again hired Harryhausen to help with animation to complete the 8 minute sequence. It was Harryhausen 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 DVD release of the 1957 film, The Black Scorpion.) The Black Scorpion used previously shot special effects footage by Willis H. O'Brien to create a story similar to another sf film of the era, Them!

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 egg, which soon hatches, a monster which grows in Earth's atmosphere to tremendous height and terrorizes Rome. 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 eager 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 Muren, 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.

[edit] 1960s

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 Steven 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 Casablanca or 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 Cinemascope anamorphic film, based on the novel by H. G. Wells.

Oddly and inexplicably, Jason and First Men in the Moon were box office disappointments at the time of their original theatrical release. That, plus changes of management at Columbia Pictures, kept "Dynamation" films from being greenlighted. It is possible that Harryhausen's love of the past, setting his films in ancient fantasy worlds or at least in previous centuries, kept him from keeping pace with changing tastes in the Sixties. Only a handful of Harryhausen's features have been set in the present, and none in the future.

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. It was a box office smash, helped in part by the presence of shapely Raquel Welch in a cavewoman bikini, in her second film.

Springing from that success, Harryhausen next went on to make another dinosaur film, The Valley of Gwangi. The project had been developed for Columbia, which passed. Independent producer Schneer did a deal with Warner Bros. instead. It was a personal project that Harryhausen had been wanting to do for many years, as it was story-boarded by his original mentor, Willis' O'Brien for a 1939 project that never saw completion. Scripted by William Bast, the film was set in 1912 Mexico, in a parallel Kong story; cowboys capture a living Allosaurus and bring him to the nearest city for exhibition. Sabotage by a rival releases the creature on opening day and the creature wreaks havoc on the town until it's cornered and destroyed inside a burning cathedral. The film features a roping scene reminiscent of 1949's Mighty Joe Young and is the technical highlight of the film. The film was released in 1969 and was not a financial success. It was said not to fit in with the counter-culture audiences of that era, but another explanation is that Warner Brothers released the film as a double-bill with a biker film and it thus missed more youthful audiences; supposedly this decision was made after Kenneth Hyman of Seven Arts (which had purchased into the Warners studio at the time and was involved with "One Million Years B.C.") was released from the studio.

[edit] 1970s - present

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. The film started out smaller but then MGM increased the budget to hire stars such as Laurence Olivier. 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. Harryhausen fans will readily discern that the armed-and-finned kraken (a name oddly borrowed from medieval Scandinavian folklore) he invented for Clash of the Titans has similar facial qualities to the Venusian Ymir he created twenty-five years earlier for 20 Million Miles to Earth.

Oddly, perhaps due to his hermetic production style 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.

In spite of the modest 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, laserdisc, and later, DVD. A second book followed, An 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 a suburb of London, and model animation protege, Jim Danforth, still living in the Los Angeles area.

Harryhausen and Terry Moore appeared in small comedic cameo roles in the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young, and he has also provided the voice of a polar bear cub in the Will Ferrell film Elf. He also appears as a bar patron in Beverly Hills Cop III, and as a doctor in Spies Like Us.

[edit] Awards

During the 1980s 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 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 work.

The work of Ray Harryhausen was celebrated in an exhibition at London's Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in 1990.

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

Inducted to the Monster Kid Hall Of Fame at The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards

[edit] Harryhausen today

In 2002, young animators Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero helped Harryhausen complete "The Story of the Tortoise & the Hare". This was the sixth and final installment of the Harryhausen fairy tales. The film was started in 1952 and completed in 2002, 50 years later. Caballero and Walsh refurbished the original puppets and, under Harryhausen's guidance, completed the film. The film went on to win the 2003 Annie award for best short film and gained world wide attention. Walsh and Caballero have since moved on to form their own stop motion company, Screen Novelties which is based in Los Angeles, CA.

In 2005, Harryhausen released a 2-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 "The Story of the Tortoise & the Hare". The second disc profiles a making of documentary, behind the scenes and interviews with Harryhausen, Walsh, Caballero and narrator, Gary Owens. During this time he also provided commentary for the DVD releases of King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, and was extensively interviewed for documentaries included in the DVD release. He was at the New York Premiere of the 2005 remake of King Kong and was disappointed that some scenes from the original didn't make it into the final film. He was happy again when the Deluxe Extended Edition was revealed.

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 was "The Pit and the Pendulum" in 2006.[1] 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 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.[2]

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.[3] 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 includes an audio commentary by Harryhausen and Merian C. Cooper expert Mark Vaz who discuss the film and color choices. The colorized trailer for She premiered at the 2006 Comic-Con.[4] Harryhausen also helped design the color on two further Legend Films releases, Things to Come and The Most Dangerous Game.

In July 2006, it was announced[5] that Harryhausen has licenced Bluewater Productions to create six comic book follow-ups to some of his most famous movies. The first three are "Sinbad: Rogue Of Mars", "20 Million Miles More" and "Wrath Of The Titans", and are scheduled for release in May 2007 followed by a further three: "Jason And The Argonauts: The Kingdom of Hades", "Back to Mysterious Island" and 10th Muse. Harryhausen will furnish new artwork, but not scripts. All will be five-issue miniseries. A one-shot, "10th Muse/ Shi crossover", is said to be released later this year.

Wrath of the Titans

Wrath of the Titans
Publication information
Publisher Bluewater Productions
First appearance May 2007
Created by Ray Harryhausen and Darren G. Davis
In story information
Alter ego *

[edit] Reuse

Harryhausen seems not to have been above reusing his creations in contexts other than those originally intended. His Ymir from "20 Million Miles to Earth", other than its tail, bears a striking resemblance to the Kraken from "Clash of the Titans", while the Troglodyte from "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" is all but identical to Calibos from "Clash of the Titans." This process was also used with his dinosaurs for One Million Years B.C. and The Valley of Gwangi, as B.C.'s Triceratops and Gwangi's Styracosaurus used identical metal armatures, and the Allosaurus was reused in both dinosaur films, Gwangi being a larger model due to the greater use of close-up shots.

[edit] Cultural references

  • The song "Worried About Ray" by The Hoosiers references Ray Harryhausen in its lyrics and the video for the song also features numerous Harryhausen creations.
  • In the music video for the song "Bones" by The Killers, there are numerous references to the skeleton fight scene in Jason and the Argonauts which was created by Harryhausen.
  • In the 1974 film Flesh Gordon, there is a character named "Nesuahyrrah", which is "Harryhausen" spelled backwards.
  • The soundtrack of a 1978 short film, Reproduction Cycle, makes references to Harryhausen. The film was produced by Church of the SubGenius co-founder Ivan Stang.
  • In the Strong Bad Email entitled "redesign", Strong Bad fights off a cyclops similar in style to one seen in the 1958 film, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, of which Harryhausen did the special effects. Also, in "different town", Strong Sad is seen dressed as Calibos, being confused by Strong Bad for a demon. He says that he is going to a Clash of the Titans convention, and asks whether he wants a bust of Bubo, to which he responds, "Oh, um. Right. Of course. Yeah, I still want the bust of Bubo."
  • Harryhausen appears in Marvel's Italian comic Rat-Man episode Cinzia la Barbara by Leo Ortolani. The hero is overwhelmed by an army of skeletons, and has to kill their creator to win. Rat Man shoots an arrow and Harryhausen is shown dead at his desk.
  • The graphic novel "tommysaurus rex" by Doug TenNapel features a scene where the main character is fighting with a boy about whether or not King Kong is real and Harryhausen pops up to explain stop-motion and give the boy a signed drawing. In addition, on the back of tommysaurus rex, Harryhausen states " you made me look like mr.magoo."
  • The Playstation game Crypt Killer contains various enemies modeled from Harryhausen's creature designs. The JB also includes a secret boss fight against the giant floating head of Harryhausen himself.
  • In the June 1977 comic book Ghost Rider #24 from Marvel Comics, a super-villain called The Enforcer mistakenly believes that the Ghost Rider's powers are the result of trickery, exclaiming: "My ring can disintegrate anything! Anything! Including all your Harryhausen special effects tricks!"
  • In the 3-2-1 Penguins! episode "Lazy Daze", Doctor Fidgel has a Harryhausen Ray.
  • Three of his most popular monsters, the Medusa, Cyclops and Kraken, appeared in the South Park "Imaginationland" trilogy.
  • In the opening video of the TV series "Malcolm in the Middle", several fragments of Harryhausen's films appear.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] References

  1. ^ 2006 stop motion short film The Pit and the Pendulum
  2. ^ Barry Sandrew, as quoted in the article San Diego: film colorization capital of the world
  3. ^ CGSociety - Ray Harryhausen Presents
  4. ^ Comic-Con 2006 :: Programming for Friday, July 21
  5. ^ Blue Water Productions comic follow-ups

[edit] External links