March 04, 2005
Ray Harryhausen
Special effects usually have a very short shelf life. No matter how virtually seamless and natural they look at the time, one of the few sure things is that those same effects will look comical and campy as soon as they are outdated. Very few movies and special effect artists have withstood the test of time. Ray Harryhausen, the undisputed master of stop-motion photography and arguably the premier special effects artist in Hollywood history, is one of the very few exceptions. It is not that the skeletons fighting in Jason and the Argonauts, or the giant crab on Mysterious Island still trick the eye and are capable of suspending our disbelief the way they once did. The figures are clearly toy like. The longevity of these visual illusions has more to do with the mad scientist pioneering quality of Harryhausen’s imagination for trickery despite the Sisyphus-like task he had set for himself. There is a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of inventiveness in all his projects that becomes clear in Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life. Not only does Harryhausen contribute writing to the book about his lifelong friendship with Ray Bradbury, the tutelage of Forrest J. Ackerman of Famous Monsters of Filmland, etc., but each project is discussed and illustrated in detail. Images from all phases of production and experimentation accompany the text. One of the unexpected surprises in the book are Harryhausen’s drawings. At the risk of heresy, in some cases these studies actually outshine the art decoration and effect sequences ultimately based on their design.