Reading 2

Unit 3- Reading 2

Page 40

A big gorilla started it all

King Aeetes of ancient Greece is desperately seeking the Golden Fleece. lOnly Jason and his men stand in his way. He reaches into a helmet and throws the Hydra’s2 teeth upon the ground. Seven armed skeletons pop up from the earth and march in unison toward three nervous warriors.

“Kill them all,” Aeetes cries. For nearly four minutes, a wild battle ensues among the ruins of a temple overlooking the sea, as three live actors do close combat with the animated figures.

This famous action sequence from the movie Jason and the Argonauts (1963) is the work of special effects creator Ray Harryhausen, a legend and an inspiration to the technical wizards who create the cinematic wonders we enjoy today.

Those familiar with his work will detect the influence of what he called “kinetic sculptures” on later blockbuster films such as Jurassic Park and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Harryhausen achieved the skeleton illusion by using a technique called stop-motion animation. Harryhausen equipped one-foot-tall model skeletons with joints that allowed the skeletons to move naturally. He photographed the skeletons in one pose.

He then adjusted their bodies slightly and photographed them again. When this process was repeated many times and run as a movie, it created the illusion that objects were moving on their own. By coordinating the actions of the models with the actions of live actors, Harryhausen made us believe the miniature models were interacting with full-size human actors.

It was a tedious process—the skeleton battle took four and a half months to film. But the characters were far more realistic and three-dimensional than cartoon characters and more physically expressive than puppets.

Born in Los Angeles, California, in 1920, Ray Harryhausen’s bond with movie special effects formed at age thirteen when he saw the pioneering stop-motion work of Willis O’Brien in the film King Kong (1933).

Even as an adolescent, Harryhausen could tell that the gigantic gorilla was not a man in an ape suit or a cartoon. He wondered how the filmmakers made the gorilla’s movements seem so natural and its face so expressive.

Harryhausen began his long career of trying to achieve and surpass the effects made famous by King Kong.

His first effort was a cave bear made out of his mother’s fur coat and photographed with a borrowed camera. Despite difficulty controlling the camera, he succeeded in making the bear appear to move. Excited by the possibilities, he then sought training in all aspects of trick photography. He studied drawing, ceramics, and sculpture, each an important component in the success of his stop-motion work.

By 1940, Harryhausen was making films on his family’s back porch, and soon worked on animated shorts for Paramount Studios. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army Signal Corps, where he worked on animated sequences for training films. After his discharge, Harryhausen made five stop-motion fairy tales called Mother Goose Stories.

The artistic success of these animations led to his first big break when Willis O’Brien hired him to work on Mighty Joe Young (1949). The movie, an entertaining King Kong sequel of sorts, earned its producers a special effects Oscar.

In the 1950s, Harryhausen did impressive special effects work on low-budget, black-and- white science fiction monster films.

In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), sci-fi fans saw a giant stop-motion dinosaur attack New York. In It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), an octopus tears down San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. In 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), a monster from Venus grows huge and lays waste to Rome.

Over the next 24 years, Harryhausen turned from sci-fi to fantasy/adventure stories filmed in color.

These ten films feature dozens of fascinating monsters, each a testament to Harryhausen’s vision. In The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), live actors fight a giant two-headed bird, a 30-foot-tall Cyclops, and a living skeleton. In Mysterious Island (1961), castaways do battle with a gigantic crab and a huge bird.

Jason and the Argonauts features a blind man fighting off two bird-like humans, a battle with a huge bronze man filled with thousands of gallons of fluid, and Jason’s duel with a seven- headed hydra. And don’t forget those relentless skeletons.

Harryhausen’s final feature film, The Clash of the Titans (1981), finds Perseus, the hero of Greek myth, fighting giant scorpions, outsmarting the deadly, snake-haired Medusa, and bringing down the colossus Kraken. Movie fans still marvel at the expressiveness and personality of these creatures.

Harryhausen was never nominated for a special effects Oscar.

Some feel it was because he worked away from Hollywood on lower budget films, rarely using assistants. (Harryhausen retained close bonds with his family—his father nude the ball-and-socket joints for his inotlel.s and occasionally his mother made the fur coverings.) Others feel that until the success of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), Hollywood marginalized sci-fi movies, particularly those featuring monsters and strange creatures.

In 1992, Hollywood finally recognized this oversight and honored Ray Harryhausen with a lifetime achievement Oscar. At the presentation ceremony, two-time Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks reportedly said to Harryhausen, “Lots of people say Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all time…. No way, it’s Jason and the Argonauts!”

Today, Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation technique has been superseded by more sophisticated computer-generated imaging and performance-capture animation. People accustomed to seamless digital effects may find his work a little rough around the edges. Nonetheless, many contemporary filmmakers are students of his work and cite it as their inspiration. Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong (2005), is one prominent example.

He credits much of his lifelong desire to make movies to a childhood fascination with Harryhausen’s work. And most of the stop-motion master’s work, even his early experiments, is available on DVD today.

Movies are usually labeled as the work of the actors or director. Technicians most often play an unseen or subordinate role in the moviegoer’s mind. Ray Harryhausen defies that tradition.

Although he never directed or acted in the 15 or so feature-length films he worked on, these films are now seen as vehicles for showcasing his talents. Known today as “Ray Harryhausen films,” each one is marked by the taste, imagination, and kinetic magic Harryhausen brought to his creations.