It's All in How You Look at It, Part 3 -- Ray Harryhausen

Although no one really challenges Willis O'Brien's title as the man who brought special effects to fruition, there is also no question that when one mentions stop-motion animation the name that will inevitably be spoken is that of Ray Harryhausen.

Harryhausen met stop-motion when he was a tot of five and his parents took him to see Willis O'Brien's pioneering The Lost World. After reading an article on the mechanics in Life, he began experimenting with clay models and his dad's 16-mm camera and made his first film. Matting out a portion of the frame, he animatede a "bear" constructed with his mother's fur coat, then rewound the negative, moved the matte and filmed himself and his dog "under attack."

"Although primitive, this technique was at the core of even the most sophisticated visual effects he produced in later years."¹

In 1938, after a stegosaurus he modeled won an LA Museum of Art competition, Harryhausen was encouraged to contact O'Brien. He did, and was encouraged by O'Brien's critique of the dinosaur models he'd hauled along in a suitcase to take courses in anatomy and acting as well as film directing and editing. In 1942 he landed his first job working with another animation pioneer, George Pal on the famous Puppetoons.

His employment was interrupted by World War II, and after enlisting in the army he worked on special film projects such as the Why We Fight series in the unit commanded by Frank Capra. One of his co-workers would on to acquire his own special fame -- a man named Ted Geisel.

It was O'Brien who gave Harryhausen his first big break when in 1946 he hired the talented young animator to assist him on Mighty Joe Young. For a time, the huge cost of making the film, which utilized all the techniques O'Brien had developed over the years, threatened it with extinction before it was born, and eventually Harryhausen did most of the work.

"Some of the animation sequences were so involved it took as long as three days to shoot fifteen seconds of footage. One segment, in which Joe attacks a lion's cage, combined rear-screen projection, tracking cameras, and stop-motion animation. It took a month to film."¹

Harryhausen's ability to provide his creatures not only with plausible movement but startlingly expressive faces is clearly at work in this marvelous film.

However, Mighty Joe Young's $2.5 million price tag and poor box office might have ended Harryhausen's budding career in one fell swoop, but in 1952 he was asked to create The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, working with a budget of $7,000. Contrary to popular belief, this tale of a dinosaur running rampant through the Big Apple is not based on Ray Bradbury's short story "The Foghorn." Bradbury and Harryhausen had been friends since high school, and when the script for the film needed some serious revision, he suggested Bradbury as the man for the job. He didn't get it, but the directors realized their opening scene was very close to his story and purchased the rights to it to avoid copyright issues.³

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