by MARK SLUTSKY

Ravenous orcs, giant Cyclopses, swashbuckling skeletons, multi-headed hydras and killer crabs, dueling dinosaurs, six-armed swordsmen and humongous homunculi—this fantastical menagerie is the life’s work of legendary animator Ray Harryhausen, who single-handedly animated the stop-motion miracles in dozens of films over four inspired decades. From Mighty Joe Young and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans, not to mention the countless movies they influenced, Harryhausen’s fingerprints are all over the 20th-century cinema of the fantastic. Few artists in the field are as deserving of the Lifetime Achievement Award which Harryhausen, 85, will be handed at his appearance at the Fantasia festival, a three-hour session including rare footage, a Q&A and a sharp new print of his classic Jason and the Argonauts.

Kong is king

For all Harryhausen’s countless creations, it’s impossible to talk about his career without mentioning one creature in particular, and it’s not even one he animated. “I first saw King Kong when I was 13 and I haven’t been the same since,” says Harryhausen. “So that shows you how powerfully a picture can influence someone.”

The power and romance of the great King Kong was what led the young Harryhausen to creating stop-motion works of his own in his parent’s garage. What about it had such an impact on him, such that he still describes it with devoted zeal? “It was the fantasy aspect. They took you from the mundane world of the Depression into the most outrageous, fantastic situation that’s ever been put on the screen! You have to see it on the big screen—I pity the young people today who see it on television first. It’s not the same picture. You’ve gotta see it on the big screen!”

As a teenager, Harryhausen began work on a project called Evolution, a never-completed dinosaur film—dinosaurs always being a great passion of his—meant to showcase his talents. You can see scenes from it, amazingly sophisticated stuff to this day, on the new Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection DVD set, some of which he’ll excerpt at Fantasia. It was this project that got him hired by George Pal, straight out of high school, and it was around this time that he began his lifelong friendships with writer Ray Bradbury and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine founder Forrest J. Ackerman. “You felt that you weren’t the only soul on earth who had a wild imagination,” he says of his pals.

After working for Frank Capra’s Army Motion Picture Unit in World War II, Harryhausen struck out on his own with what he calls his “experiments,” short animated films intended for schools based on nursery rhymes and fairy tales. They’re still used in some schools today. “There’s something different about them. Some people think they’re too simple, but fairy tales are supposed to be simple.”

Soon thereafter, he got a chance to work with his idol, Kong creator Willis O’Brien. “That was the high point of my life, to work with him. He was my inspiration when I found out all about stop-motion and when I got to work with him as his assistant on Mighty Joe Young, I was absolutely delighted.”

From there, Harryhausen’s career really took off, with movies like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (based on a short story by Bradbury), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and 20 Million Miles to Earth.

Skeleton crew

At a point, Harryhausen says, “I got tired of destroying cities. So I was looking for a new way to use stop-motion in a dramatic way. And I came across the Sinbad legends.”

Harryhausen’s techniques represented a sea change in the way these legends would be imagined. “When I grew up,” he says, “the market was flooded with these Steve Reeve muscleman pictures. And they would talk about these fantastic characters and Greek legends, but you never saw them on the screen! They were always offstage! And if you did see a Cyclops, it was usually a Greek wrestler with an eye glued to the middle of his forehead!”

Sinbad’s success would eventually lead to what many consider his masterpiece, Jason and the Argonauts. It’s a perfect example of the intense, solitary labour that was the essence of the man’s career. The famous skeleton battle alone—featuring seven bags of bones taking on real-life humans—took four months to shoot. This was of course without the skilled crew of artists and technicians special effects departments deploy today. “Every film that I’ve made, except Clash of the Titans, I’ve done every inch of the animation myself.”

Designing the creatures, building them, moving them minutely frame by frame—all Harryhausen.

The age of CGI

After 1981’s Clash of the Titans, Harryhausen retired from filmmaking. “I felt I had spent enough time working alone in a dark room,” he says. And since then, of course, the advent of CGI has changed the game entirely. Though he appreciates the powers of computer animation (“You can do anything with it”), he still speaks of stop-motion’s singular “nightmare quality. That quality of a dream.”

And now, to bring it all full-circle, Peter Jackson, a great Harryhausen admirer, will be bringing his remake of King Kong to the screen in December. What does Harryhausen think of his beloved Kong, now clad in digital fur?

“I know Peter Jackson and his work, and I’m sure he’ll do a good job. There’ll always only be one King Kong—the original—but I think he’ll do a good interpretation of it. Because he loves the subject as much as I do. He has an affinity and he throws himself into it and he has a great imagination—I’m looking forward to seeing it!”

At Fantasia in the Hall Theatre on Sunday, July 24, noon

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