Original subtitles

[Music]

for me as a child there were all the

other movies and then there were raised

movies

they were the films that looked

different whether it was the sinbad

films or jason and the argonauts or 20

million miles to earth or whatever

race films always stood out

as having better

characters and performances of the

characters and creatures in any other

movies that were being made at that time

the creatures seemed to be alive

you know and that was what was

compelling about

ray was trying to put on the screen

things that people hadn't seen before

i became a great fan of stop motion

probably without even knowing really

what it was

[Music]

ray harryhausen is one of cinema's

legendary figures

a master of the art of stop-motion

animation his films inspired many of

hollywood's leading special effects

artists and directors

think there was a period when i just got

into my early teens where i started to

appreciate that there were people who

who were behind the camera in the

filmmaking process and who were the

artists and and you start to track the

names and and try to you know figure out

what does this guy do who is this ray

harry housing guy what is stop motion

animation and you start to educate

yourself as a fan

verging on wanting to be a filmmaker

yourself

[Music]

[Music]

i used to uh study race films a lot see

how we did it i even went to spain where

some of the voyages sinbad was done and

walked on the beach that the cyclops was

on to get some idea of how big the area

was and how far back the camera could be

to get

you know the actors and the cyclops or

whatever in the same scene you know i

could study him and i could figure out

sort of how he did it

[Music]

when people say

you know when did you become a special

effects guy i'm not a special effects

guy you know i create characters

and uh and hopefully uh emulate uh

somewhat what ray harryhausen has given

to us all

long before the animatronic and the

computer-generated dinosaurs of jurassic

park

ray harrihausen's stop-motion art

brought prehistoric creatures back to

life

[Music]

[Music]

dinosaurs were my first love

i used to have my father drive me out

every two or three weeks to to see these

bubbling tar pits where they got all the

bone and the museum of course they had a

lot of skeletons that they retrieved

from the tar pit which made it all the

more

interesting i thought

and then the king kong wall was out in

culver city on the back lot of pathe

and i used to ask my dad to take me out

there so i could see the wall of king

kong

so

king kong played a very important part

in my career

[Music]

the oscar-winning fusion of stop motion

animation with live action photography

in king kong

made a lifelong impression on the young

californian

i saw king kong in 1933

when i was 13 years old and very

impressionable

and

of course i didn't know how it was done

at that time

stop motion was

secret

they kept it

hidden for good many years

and

a friend of my father's worked in the

studio at rko and he told me how it was

done

and i got intrigued and started doing it

as a hobby in my back garden in my

garage

ray harryhausen came to me in

1939

and he had already started

animating

and

at that time he had a

brontosaurus animation model that he had

done when he was just 13 years old as a

matter of fact the first example of his

work that he ever

gave me it's

right there the brontosaurus created by

ray harryhausen when he was only 13

years old

[Music]

my first dinosaur which was a

brontosaurus

it had one of these lamps that have a

neck that stays put

i used that for the dinosaur's neck

and uh

that was quite a thrill to see it move

[Music]

finally it developed from a

hobby into a profession

harryhausen's movie apprenticeship took

on many different roles

from service in an army film unit during

world war ii

to stop motion fairy tales

[Music]

[Applause]

finally hansel began to break off pieces

of bread and drop them along the path

see grittle said hansel when our basket

is filled with berries we shall follow

the trail of breadcrumbs back to our

house

[Music]

and then

in 1949

harryhausen received an invitation from

his idol king kong creator willis

o'brien to work on another giant ape

movie

mighty joe young

but stop potion in big budget hollywood

features like mighty joe would soon be

considered too expensive by the studios

and for the next 10 years ray

harryhausen was forced to practice his

art in the wilderness of science fiction

movies

i think the thing that impressed me the

most being a kid very young kid when i

saw beast 2000 fathoms was the special

effects

i probably was not following the story

and certainly the acting i could care

less about but to see that preacher

walking down the streets of new york

city in such an animated style so

interesting in his motions and all it

was pretty neat

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

in fact um there's a lot more attention

paid in some of these pictures

than there were to eight pictures of the

period

[Music]

a lot of the stuff with the aimer in 20

million miles to earth has a lot of

scenes in it that are pretty remarkable

uh in terms of creating from nothing but

this little sculpture an actual

creature that seems to have a

personality

my gloves where are my gloves under the

table

before 2001 a space odyssey before star

wars you know science fiction and horror

were very disreputable genres

they were either late night fodder or

low budget cheapo poverty row kind of

pictures and in a way that was the world

that road belonged to but that's part of

his charm as well of such stuff as cults

made

in my collection i have two famous films

of his one is earth versus the flying

saucers

and then there's that came from beneath

the sea

and well right here i have there's the

bridge from it came from beneath the sea

it was attacked by an octopus

it came from beneath the sea was the

brainchild of charles schneer a young

hollywood producer

the film would mark the beginning of a

professional relationship between

schneer and harryhausen that was to last

for more than a quarter of a century

i got word from a friend of mine that

this young man at columbia studios

wanted to make a film about a giant

octopus pulling the golden gate bridge

down

so that intrigued me and

he made arrangements for me to meet mr

schneider

and

we met and seemed to click

it was a great

i don't want to use the word romance it

was a great teamwork

charles watched out that we

could get the live action made for a

good price and we made these very low

budget films

which became very popular

[Music]

nobody paid the attention to us nobody

said why did you do this and why did you

do that we just did it and when the

picture was finished they saw it

we had full control artistic control

without any interference that was worth

the price of making a big picture as

opposed to an a picture

incidentally he didn't turn out to be an

octopus because the budget was so low i

had to cut off two tentacles so he was

actually a sextupus

as the 1950s drew to a close

schneer and harry harrison grew tired of

making monster movies

they began to look for new subjects for

their stop-motion animation techniques

and they found it in the colorful world

of myth and fantasy

i saw 747 about eight times the first

week it came out

[Music]

it was promoted with this dynamation

logo as if it was the second coming and

it was brand new and it was in color

we needed a sales gimmick in order to

sell our pictures to the public and i

drove about 10 miles to the studio every

day in california down sunset boulevard

and i happened to buy a new buick made

by general motors and i saw on the

dashboard

their trademark they're going after

their audience

called dynaflow

and i thought that was magic

so i dropped the flow kept the diner and

put mason to it that became dynamation

and became a part of the language of the

trade we wanted to get away from the mad

monster trampling down cities

i destroyed washington i destroyed san

francisco golden gate bridge

i destroyed coney island in new york and

it gets tiresome

so

we were looking for this new avenue and

mythology was ideal from the minute it

comes on with that fantastic bernard

hermann score

there was something really different and

quality about this picture now after the

cyclops appears in the first reel almost

nothing happens in this picture for the

next half hour and when you when you're

watching it again you go geez i've

forgotten that there's no no special

effects for there's just a lot of people

walking around in these palaces

[Music]

but

seeing

the cyclops

moving and eating people and the giant

rocks and the

skeleton thing at the end

it was a very magical movie

[Music]

i always wanted to animate a skeleton

this was the first inspirational drawing

i made

now i knew that you couldn't have a

modern day character such as james bond

phytoskeleton that it would be comic

so we

i went back to the arabian nights and i

found that you could believe that sinbad

would fight

[Music]

it takes a certain kind of mind to be

able to say okay i'm going to be

spending the next five weeks of my life

trying to make these scenes come to life

because there is a certain amount of

tedium to it

and it's extremely technical

and

that's probably why there weren't that

many people who did it

you have to

break down all the movements into static

positions

you're actually making a series of still

pictures

[Music]

there were times that he stayed in the

studio the whole night

clicking off a frame at a time

so that he could remember where he left

off and he just pull up a bed alongside

the camera

and his foot was attached to a pedal

that clicked off the

the frame

[Music]

a stop motion is a very solitary

job you know the concentration is so

specific and exact and you can't lose it

for a moment because you've got

you know you've got 60 or 80 body parts

that all have to move in a continuous

direction and be advanced the right

distance every single frame or else it's

not going to look right

so it's best to do it quietly away from

everybody

don't lose that concentration don't

answer the telephone

if the telephone rings you

and you go away to answer it and

you come back and you say was that

hydra's head moving forward and you

would wonder whether the third head was

moving forward or backward

but one tries to overcome that

you have to keep the physiognomy in

synchronization so that the movements

look graceful

for example i move it maybe a millimeter

take this out and shoot one frame

then i put this back

move it another millimeter

and shoot it one frame of film

i've always used these uh

machine shop tools

so that you could

put this

in a position on the skeleton and then

move it and you know whether you've

moved it a millimeter or two millimeters

or three millimeters if you move it

irregularly it tends to give a jerky

effect but if you take patience and time

you can get quite smooth animation out

of that

and after you get hundreds of these you

finally get a bit of action that may

last one minute or less than that

30 seconds 20 seconds

[Music]

[Laughter]

of course jason and the argonauts

presented a different problem we had

seven skeletons fighting three men but

here you see the introduction of the

skeleton

in the actual greek mythology

the rotting corpses come up out of the

ground and that wouldn't be very

pleasant and we'd probably have gotten

an x

[Music]

[Music]

the first ray harry housing film i saw

was jason and the argonauts um and of

course the skeleton scene that just blew

my head off

[Music]

i've got two small boys four and six

and they love

the ray harry house and football

envisioner and and particularly that

scene there's just something about those

skeletons

there's something about the the tension

you know they're standing there

and there's a kind of face off bit like

a sort of western face off

[Music]

suddenly there's a shriek

and you know they do battle

the actors had to rehearse ahead of time

quite a number of times to get the feel

of where their sword should stop

but the actors had a shadow box and

pretend that the skeleton was there of

course

and that was to be the piece of film

that i would use to put the skeletons in

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

you know in those days you didn't look

for movies for the director you went

because of the star except for alfred

hitchcock you know an alfred hitchcock

film but i started looking for ray

harryhausen's name on the poster

i don't think anybody really

ever went to ray harryhausen film for

the acting uh i mean his leads and his

films were always instantly

forgettable and it's quite interesting

just to bang on about the kids again

they watch jason the argonauts they

still don't really know which one is

jason

with the seventh voyage of sinbad and

jason and the argonauts harryhausen and

schneer brought stop-motion animation

back from the grave

generations of children grew up

enthralled by sword-fighting skeletons

giant dinosaurs and other fantastic

creatures

[Music]

we had a word in distribution at the

time i remember the wonderful

descriptive word called kid out

kid k-i-d-u-l-t

maybe it's still used today

and that's the audience we were looking

at that's anything from five to ninety

as long as they were kid-outs

i remember very distinctly in the third

grade

seeing mysterious island

it made a huge impact and it's still a

very good film i i watched it with the

with the kids just recently and and it

holds up they were mesmerized

the crab i got from herod's department

store the fish department

we had it uh dismembered and

so that i could put a mechanism in it

to use for stop-motion photography

[Music]

and it's probably the only example in

modern cinema where they then etch the

special effect

yes we had a lovely crab dinner

afterwards

i guess hitchcock would have been

pleased

[Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

that's the best crab i ever cooked

way to be more impressed mr spillet if

you put it in the pot by yourself

[Music]

[Music]

ray harryhausen is admired for his

artistic talents

as well as his animation skills

and throughout his long career has drawn

on classical traditions for many of his

most famous creations

centaur from greek mythology is a

character i've always wanted to make and

put on the screen

in a convincing way

to combine the human torso and the

horse's body is not an easy task

and i found

that we we had a lot of problems in that

combination

but uh we finally got a centaur into one

of our films

and that was the golden voyage of sinbad

well ray was the ultimate vertically

integrated creative entity you know so

he would conceive of the character often

he would work out the story to allow

these characters to come into being then

he would draw them he would sculpt them

then he would bring them to life through

the through the craft of stop motion

[Music]

you become the ultimate artist in it in

a way

it steps off the page it steps off its

little pedestal as a sculpture comes to

life

[Music]

i think he's particularly good at

metallic sculptures telos the man of

bronze you know this how do you get

around the colossus concept usually it's

stone but he makes him a man of bronze

[Music]

this is the original model of taylor's

but he's you can hardly touch him

because he's made of rubber the original

one has a an armature with ball and

socket joints and he's made of rubber

and we tried to make him look like

bronze

in fact several critics criticized

taylor's for being jerky

didn't realize that

it was necessary to put over the idea

that it was a metal statue that came to

life

the same way with the collie

she was a metal statue in bronze and we

put sound effects of creaking noises in

it to give it the metallic concept

[Music]

this is

an image of shiva

these idols with many arms always

fascinated me i always wanted to animate

them bring them to life

as sculptures

[Music]

ray harryhausen combines two

visual talents really firstly the talent

of the engineer stroke inventor who grew

up tinkering in his father's garage you

know trying to make things work and then

there's the graphic skill which also he

learned at art school

stop

and in a way it's putting those two

thoughts together is so unusual the sort

of

inventor engineer and the guy who's a

great visualizer

[Music]

[Music]

ray was a wonderful graphic artist

and just like the old hollywood

designers that used to show the clothes

to the actress that she was going to

wear in the movie

brave sketches were part of the

inspiration of the whole deal it was

imbuing the actor with a sense of what

they were going to actually be stepping

into

[Music]

ray sketched every single scene that was

to be shot by a director

and ray virtually directed where the

scenes were to take place how they were

to take place

i think when ray was making his films it

was probably

difficult for the directors and the

actors to kind of understand what was

going on because at that time there

weren't very many effects films being

made and they were you know look over

there and there's a big creature that'll

be there but it's not there now

they say what are you talking about and

it would just be hard to understand it

[Music]

[Music]

the first thing i noticed on the set was

something i'd never seen which looked

like a second unit camera that was uh

attached to the earth with like 10 pegs

and i'm thinking what's this all about

you know and he explained to me that

even the slightest motion of the earth

you know of any kind caused would cause

a

a situation that would be undesirable in

his stop-motion work later

and that was fascinating to me because

there were that that became a clue

whenever i saw the camera tied down i

knew there was a monster coming

[Applause]

with stop-motion movies they're really

the auteur is really the guy who's doing

the stop motion and uh it's quite

possible that some directors have

resented the control that ray may have

had to have over a given movie or a

given sequence

a lot of directors have said what am i

i'm not necessary here you can direct it

yourself

and we explain to them that the

commitments they are making not only was

to the script but was to the design and

if you want to move the camera two feet

it takes a national conference to talk

about that

sometimes

uh you get a director who

isn't quite in harmony with that type of

thing and they want to

uh

do something a little different but

these pictures on their own are not

directors pictures

when you're a stop-motion animator

you're actually taking the place of an

entire film crew

you are

single-handedly creating a movie

and so in a way it's you're the most

unsung hero in hollywood but in another

way you're also the most pure auteur in

hollywood

one of ray harryhausen's most impressive

stop-motion sequences was created for

clash of the titans

the film which marked his return to the

world of classical greek mythology

this is the medusa sequence from clash

of the titans

it turned out to be one of the best

sequences i think that i've ever done

i designed the whole sequence myself

and edited it as well

we were a little worried at first about

cutting her head off because

that was

pretty grisly

and uh

we had various versions of trying to

decapitate her

as it's in the myth

but finally we ended up with

the hero

cutting her head off as described in the

myth itself

[Music]

[Music]

i'm rather proud of that sequence i

think it has a wonderful atmosphere

about it that

some of our other scenes haven't had

of course there are a lot of things in

the clash of the titans that were

fun and harry hawsen like but but

overall it all seemed to be a sort of a

a weak tea version of jason and the

argonauts with a better cast

i suppose the closest he got to proper

actors was when he got laurence olivier

and jams in for

the clash of the titans

but even then

you know you went and you sat around

waiting for the next monster to turn up

what ray was doing

was so powerful in its own right that

there's nothing that you could do in

this in this moments in between his set

pieces that could possibly live up to it

certainly on the budget that those films

were being made at the whole thing with

the gods and the olympus and

and that stuff um it just didn't seem

like he was challenging himself i mean

it really all that kind of stuff had

been done before by him and i think

better

uh and maybe he was disappointed with

the film and decided that he didn't want

to do any anymore

clash of the titans was harryhausen's

final journey into the world of fantasy

his talent has never deserted him

and there were plans for many more

projects

but the veteran filmmaker called it a

day

after just over a dozen features in 25

years

one gets tired being in a darkened room

for a year

while other people on the film have gone

off and made three or four more pictures

before you finish one

that was one of the factors there were

many factors including some personal

factors which made me decide that i've

had enough

he didn't have a feeling for his craft

as great as it was once

uh the digital came in

once all the machines came in where it

took 80 men to operate the machines that

took him one man to do it and he was not

only disheartened and disenchanted by it

but felt that his era was rapidly

drawing to a close

and the irony of it is

the very filmmakers who had grown up

enchanted by harryhausen's work were now

to consign his art to virtual extinction

by their switch to computer-generated

imagery

or cgi

now this is an early test from jurassic

park

and when we started it was all going to

be stop motion really nice looks you

know ways that the characters seem to be

sort of alive and looking around and

stalking and all that and they did a lot

of of these studies

of how raptors might possibly move in

the stop-motion mode

when we started testing here at ilm

computer graphics

and we began a series of tests and

within uh you know three or four months

we had our answer and that was we could

do with computer graphics and that's

what we did

[Music]

each

generation of technology supplants the

one before it

[Music]

so when you look at films that are stop

motion animated you have to look at them

as a snapshot of the technology of it of

its time and the audience will

constantly demand the newer more

realistic thing i've

always tried to put a lot of stop-motion

or some stop-motion into most of the

movies that i've done and it happens the

last film i did was almost entirely cgi

with puppets

and

it

was amazing when i thought about how i

would never have been able to make that

film in stop motion you know i think

that was the the breakthrough is getting

the technology to the point where you

could not tell that the work was

artificial i think that we probably have

pretty much seen the last of stop motion

but despite the now everyday use of

computer-generated imagery

harryhausen's fans believe that his

films like our love of dinosaurs will

endure long into the next millennium

actually ray is not right for that world

for the modern world of computer

generated imagery and giant budgets and

very similitude where everything has to

look more real the error of

hyper-reality that in a way he's out of

place in that world you'd never get a

ray harryhausen movie for 80 million

dollars it would lose so much in the

process

[Music]

the thing about stop motion is there is

a magic to it that seems to be lacking

in

the digital process in modern films like

star wars you sit there and say wow

that's great oh they just did it with

computers it doesn't seem anything very

exciting about it it's something about

stop-motion thinking that actually is a

little

model that's moving about and someone

has positioned it every one of those

positions

what is so hard to put back into cg is

the feeling of performance and character

and dynamics of the motions

that you can get so quickly with a

puppet an animator can so quickly get by

grabbing the puppet moving it and we're

still struggling with trying to get

those performances into our computer

graphic characters

[Music]

[Applause]

when i started out i couldn't find

another kindred soul interested in stop

motion

particularly in

prehistoric and

mythological imagery

but

after all these years more and more

people have

shall we say jumped on the bandwagon

i think our films have influenced a

great many people

not only in the profession but out of

the profession

there were two professors in in canada

who said if it wasn't for 1 million bc

and guangzhou they would never have

become paleontologists

and that it's rather satisfying to think

we made more than just an entertaining

film

[Music]

when i think of ray i think of him as a

a wonderful storyteller of the fantastic

i think of him as an actor i think of

the characters that he's created is

having you know character and

performance and i never think of rey as

a special effects guy

nobody will ever come along and do what

ray did better because nobody's going to

be doing it so there's a purity in that

you know which will exist forever

[Music]

you look at the credits of godzilla and

there's 47 model makers and and 47

animators and then you get to the

computers and the credits go on for

about 10 minutes anna ray harry hasn't

there's one credit ray harryhausen

[Music]

i'm grateful that this big gorilla

set off this

desire to do these type of films

and

it was in the lap of the gods

the fickled finger of fate

we shot about 350 frames animation

didn't we

yep and the rest are still yeah

[Music]

so do you miss it what

i don't want to

i don't want to get back and do it so i

have to put a wall up here

i do miss it a little i must admit

well

there is film on the

camera in the camera