One Man Credit
The Animated Life of Ray Harryhausen
Usually we get to see a long list of credits when it comes to Special / Visual Effects in movies.
Well, a few decades ago, this was not always the case.
It was Mr. Raymond Frederick Harryhausen (1920-2013), who has given us life-like animations on Pegasus, the gorgon Medusa, fierce skeleton warriors, an intense battle with Hydra, giant cyclops, dragons, dinosaurs, a.s.o.
It was his work, which has inspired filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, James Cameron and Guillermo del Toro, just to name a few.
In 1933, after watching King Kong, the young Harryhausen was so inspired by this movie and the work of Willis O'Brien, it literally turned his life upside down.
He started building his own models and experimented in the production of animated shorts with a great support and help of his parents.
He even managed to meet his idol O'Brien, who has given him constructive criticism on his models and urged him to take classes in graphic arts and sculpture.
So he did and whilst still at high school, Harryhausen took evening classes in art direction, photography and editing and soon studied art and anatomy at Los Angeles City College.
His personal and rather ambitious project Evolution of the World, and it's fighting dinosaurs within, which was never completed due to disencouragement after seeing Disney's Fantasia, did serve him however to land his first model-animation job on George Pal's Puppetoons.
Evolution of the World
After WW2, when Harryhausen was working on his own series of Fairy Tale shorts, he received a phone-call by no other than his beloved mentor, Willis O'Brien, to work on his very first major film, Mighty Joe Young (1949) and his carrer started to go up steeply from there on.
The Beast from 20.000 Fathoms (1953)The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), a major box-office hit and the first film, where Harryhausen used "Dynamation", a technique he created to "sandwich" the animated model between live back- and foreground elements.
Maintaining full technical control and developing as well as executing most of this miniature work himself, saved production money.
Quick Introduction to Dynamation
Also was he heavily involved in pre-production with concept art, script development, art-direction, design and story boards on all the films he worked on, as much as other directors would have, which led to conflicts from time to time.
(Above) Some of Harryhausen’s beautiful concept arts he did for every project.
Followed by two further box office hits with It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Harryhausen collaborated one last time with O'Brien on The Animal World (1956) by creating the dinosaur sequence for it.
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)The Animal World - Dinosaur Sequence
Earth Vs the Flying Saucers (1956)20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) was his last film in black and white. It was noted highly for the Venusian Ymir and it's emotional facial expressions which haven't been seen in that manner before.
After a series of movies, where Harryhausen got to destroy, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Rome, the stop-motion master felt that a change of scenary was appropriate and, alongside his usual duties, co-produced The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958).
This summerhit secured him a deal with four more color films for Columbia Pictures:
With the latter bombing at the box office, Columbia Pictures did not renew Harryhausen's contract but he was soon after hired by Hammer Films to animate the dinosaurs for the hit movie One Million Years B.C. (1966).
He was also able to co-produce his pet-project The Valley of Gwangi (1969), which was originally storyboarded by his mentor, Willis O'Brien 3 decades prior and is a story set in the Kong universe, where cowboys capture a living Allosaurus, before it gets released and wreaks havoc in a Mexican town.
A few years later, Harryhausen revived the Sinbad character together with Columbia Pictures, resulting in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), followed by Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) and ended his movie career with the legendary Clash of the Titans (1981).
Lastly, here’s a great video on Ray Harryhausen done by the National Galleries of Scotland - A Must Watch!