Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013

From Harryhausen’s unfin­ished Evolution of the World, late ’30s to 1940. Featured on the indis­pens­ible DVD set Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection.

I can­not speak for every­one who fell in love with the movies at an early age. Still, it stands to reas­on that what enchanted us about movies in our tender years had little to do with the way that cinema could con­vey psy­cho­lo­gic­al nuance, or even neces­sar­ily how dis­tinct­ively it could con­vey a story. No, what got us hooked, I think, was the movies’ abil­ity to show us things we’d nev­er seen before, things we might have dimly ima­gined, or hoped, or dreaded see­ing, but nev­er actu­ally laid eyes upon. The land of Oz. The sun going down on Tara. A twenty or, back in the day, forty-foot high snow globe. The Frankenstein Monster. An—impossible!—invisible man. 

Ray Harryhausen him­self would have been happy to tell you that it was the sight of a giant ape tra­vers­ing and wreak­ing hav­oc on the streets of con­tem­por­ary Manhattan that not only made him love movies but set him on his life’s path. King Kong was the movie. Harryhausen was in his early teens when he first saw it. About fif­teen years later, Harryhausen would work on the effects for Mighty Joe Young.

Harryhausen, Forrest J. Ackerman, and Ray Bradbury recon­vene at L.A.‘s Clifton’s Cafeteria for a fea­tur­ette for the Early Years DVD.

It is fas­cin­at­ing that Harryhausen’s two closest child­hood friends, Forrest J. Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, would them­selves become ambas­sad­ors of the fant­ast­ic in the realms of magazines and lit­er­at­ure respect­ively. The tri­um­ver­ate had an incal­cu­able impact on the pop ima­gin­a­tion. What Harryhausen did with clay and plastic and a stop motion cam­era still con­sti­tutes the most dazzling and awe-inspiring body of visu­al effects a single film­maker can lay claim to. Even once you knew the rudi­ments of how stop motion anim­a­tion was done, what Harryhausen accom­plished was unfathom­able. The com­bin­a­tion of his deep under­stand­ing of the fright­en­ing and the grot­esque (as intu­ited via the Greek myths from which he drew so much inspir­a­tion), and his painstak­ing drafts­man­ship, and his lit­er­ally saintly patience yiel­ded cine­mat­ic mir­acles. The lack of a cer­tain kind of seam­less­ness in the films that bear his work is in itself seduct­ive, exhil­ar­at­ing. Watching Jason and the Argonauts, the intro­duc­tion in a scene of a par­tic­u­lar kind of visu­al degrad­a­tion, the then-unavoidable res­ult of matte work, is excit­ing, because it’s a sig­nal, a cue: an indic­a­tion that some kind of mind-blowing effects sequence is about to begin. And then the skel­et­ons start sword­fight­ing with Jason and his men, and the con­scious­ness of the matte work goes away; the action is bril­liantly cho­reo­graphed and com­pletely mind-blowing, because you are con­vinced. Even if you intel­lec­tu­ally know that these images are the res­ult of one man mak­ing near micro­scop­ic move­ments on a mini­ature mod­el and tak­ing a still shot of each one, and keep remind­ing your­self of that, you can­’t not believe that you are watch­ing liv­ing skel­et­ons sword­fight­ing. They’re the stuff of night­mares, as are the harpies who tor­ture Phineas in that pic­ture; and yet there’a also a guiltily gig­gly kick to watch­ing these demon­ic mani­fest­a­tions. Just as the ali­en craft demol­ish­ing the Jefferson Memorial and more in Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers nails the ecstasy of destruc­tion in a pre­cise, painstak­ing way that sub­sequent hyper­trophied deriv­a­tions such as Independence Day nev­er, ever could, not just because of the dif­fer­ences in tech­no­logy but because of a lack of genu­ine per­son­al invest­ment. Harryhausen under­stood the things that we secretly wanted to see and made them hap­pen with his hands and his fin­gers and his lights and his cam­era. He was the not-so-secret sharer of every kid who ever skipped his or her home­work  over the course of a week and instead spent the time get­ting that Aurora mod­el of the Forgotten Prisoner of Castlemare assembled just right. And we knew his name because Forrest J. Ackerman told us about him in Famous Monsters magazine, and because Ray Bradbury wrote “The Fog Horn,” and because Bradbury’s  friend the oth­er Ray took the min­im­ally (albeit beau­ti­fully) described mon­ster of Bradbury’s story and made him into The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. 

It’s so easy to bring to mind the for­mid­ab­il­ity of his cre­ations that one may moment­ar­ily for­get their wit. Recall the giant not-quite-chicken of Mysterious Island. (And delight in the fairy tales col­lec­ted on the self-published Early Years DVD col­lec­tion.) And let’s not for­get the human­ity of Mr. Joseph Young him­self, Harryhausen’s trib­ute to the pathos that his mas­ter Willis O’Brien brought to both Kong and the son of Kong. Harryhausen lived a rich, long life, and he left a mag­ni­fi­cent record of it for his fans, includ­ing a remark­able book (An Animated Life), in which the detail­ings of how he made his incred­ible vis­ions only enhances their impact when the movies them­selves are re-viewed. 

My friend Joseph Failla will be con­trib­ut­ing some remin­is­cences and thoughts later. 

UPDATE: From the February 2004 issue of Première, Joseph Failla’s review of the DVDs of Beast, The Valley of Gwangi, and The Black Scorpion. Joe presen­ted the issue to Harryhausen in per­son at a Lincoln Center event that year.