Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen (born June 29, 1920, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died May 7, 2013, London, England) was an American filmmaker best known for his pioneering use of stop-motion animation effects.

Harryhausen grew up in Los Angeles, acquiring a love of dinosaurs and fantasy at a young age. His parents encouraged his interests in films and in models, and he was inspired by the cinematic effects in such movies as The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933). After seeing the latter, he began experimenting with marionettes and stop-motion animation, making short films in his parents’ garage. At about age 18 he met noted animator Willis O’Brien, with whom he would later work on several projects. On O’Brien’s advice to refine his abilities, Harryhausen enrolled in art and anatomy courses at Los Angeles City College and later in film courses at the University of Southern California. It was around this time that he began developing the technique that became known as “Dynamation,” used to make it appear that actors on film are interacting with animated models.

In 1940 Harryhausen landed his first animating job, working for producer George Pal on a number of “Puppetoons”—short films that animated puppets by using a type of stop-motion. He subsequently served in the U.S. Army, where he worked with director Frank Capra on propaganda films for the war effort. After being discharged in 1946, Harryhausen created a series of short nursery-rhyme-based films that he distributed to schools. He was soon contacted by O’Brien to help on Mighty Joe Young (1949), an adventure drama featuring an enormous ape, in the style of King Kong. The film, for which Harryhausen did much of the animation, received an Academy Award for special effects. Harryhausen’s work on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), which was based on a story by his friend Ray Bradbury, caught the attention of producer Charles Schneer, with whom he would work on the majority of his films.

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Harryhausen contributed effects to more than a dozen movies, including It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Mysterious Island (1961), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Hammer Films’ One Million Years B.C. (1966). He was well known for the Sinbad films: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), his first colour feature; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973); and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). He also created the special effects for the star-studded Clash of the Titans (1981), which was remade with animatronic and computer effects in 2010. Though he effectively retired from animation in the mid-1980s, Harryhausen continued to work on small projects into the 21st century. In 1992 he received the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for technical contributions from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His published works included Film Fantasy Scrapbook (1972) and the autobiography An Animated Life: Adventures in Fantasy (2003; cowritten with Tony Dalton).