Felix’s Fact File: Animation Pioneers (7) - Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013)

Born in 1920, Ray Harryhausen first became interested in combining live action with stop-motion animated puppetry after having seen Willis O’Brien’s King Kong (1933). O’Brien had previously attracted the attention of audiences worldwide after having provided the dinosaur animation for the 1925 screen adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, but it was his 1933 smash hit that inspired Harryhausen to pursue an interest in animation, modelling and film.

Harryhausen was lucky in the sense that his parents not only encouraged him, but participated in the creative process. His father, a machinist, assisted in the creation of ball-and-socket armatures he used for his models, while his mother helped by making costumes. The very first stop-motion model, a ferocious cave bear, was covered in a material obtained from his mother’s fur coat. Throughout high school, he continued to experiment, and eventually seized the opportunity to present some of his creations to O’Brien, who was both encouraging and critical, advising him to take anatomy and art courses in order to better shape both his experience and his models.

Harryhausen, alongside his models; 2008

At the age of 18, Harryhausen began his first professional job working on Puppetoons shorts produced by George Pal for Paramount. He left after two years, when Pearl Harbour was bombed, and joined the army, where his stop-motion training film How to Bridge a Gorge (also known as How to Build a Bridge) saw him assigned to Colonel Frank Capra’s Special Service Division.

In the post-war period, Harryhausen produced a series of fairy tales. This was a major advancement in that it resulted in his being recruited by O’Brien to work on Mighty Joe Young (1949) as lead animator, forcing him to abandon his final fairy tale, The Tortoise and the Hare. Harryhausen developed upon O’Brien’s techniques, in that he perfected the illusion of scale, executing more subtlety in his animation, and slowing the process in order to convey the models to be of a more convincingly larger scale.

The most innovative aspect of his career is often regarded as being the establishment of ‘Dynamation’, a technique he created and patented which saw stop-motion models positioned between glass matte paintings or foreground objects and projected background plates, essentially conveying the illusion of their being situated in a convincing live-action environment.

Since new features of the late-1970s and early 1980s appeared to herald a new age of computerised special effects, Harryhausen’s work was beginning to be perceived as becoming increasingly obsolescent, a fact which ultimately encouraged him to retire following the release of his final accomplishment Clash of the Titans (1981). He briefly came out of retirement in 2001 to assist with the finalising of his previously abandoned short The Tortoise and the Hare, and in 2003 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Additionally, in 2005, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him into its library, making him one of its first non-literary contributors.

Images obtained from:

The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/movies/ray-harryhausen-cinematic-special-effects-innovator-dies-at-92.html?_r=0