BIBLIO WATCHDOG AN ANIMATED LIFE
By Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton Billboard Books, 770 Broadway, New York NY 10003
2003, 304 pp., $50.00 (hardcover)
IN 1972, master stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen published the first edition of his FILM FANTASY SCRAPBOOK, a picture-heavy overview that was attractively compiled but offered little insight into how his amazing illusions were achieved. Always extremely secretive about his processes (“The magician never gives away his secrets,” he was always fond of saying in an ami- cably guarded way), it has taken Harryhausen over thirty years to change his mind and agree to fi- nally blow the lid on Dynamation and all the other tricks of his trade. In AN ANIMATED LIFE, Ray Harryhausen (with co-writer Tony Dalton) takes us on a chronologi- cal tour of his life and films, much like the former work, only this time he offers as much text as illustration. In the opening chapter, we learn about the various influences that helped shape the art- ist we know today: his frequent visits to the LA County Museum and La Brea tar pits, which in- stilled in him an insatiable curiosity about prehis- toric life; the engravings of Gustave Doré that taught him the importance of mood-lighting and depth of image; and the spectacular murals of Charles R. Knight, whose scientifically accurate depictions of prehistoric life would inform the shapes of future models. Of course, it was the multi-faceted artform of cinema that would ulti- mately decide the direction young Harryhausen’s life would take; and eight years after having his
Reviewed by Bill Cooke
five-year-old imagination sparked by THE LOST WORLD (“Heady stuff for such a young mind”), it was effectively sledge-hammered by KING KONG in 1933. The author recalls this life-shaping epi- sode as if it happened yesterday, from the de- scriptions of the tropical foliage, live flamingos and full-size Kong bust that decorated the forecourt of Graumann’s Chinese Theater, to the
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seventeen-act pre-show and the film itself, which “captivated” the boy. “Obsessed with its magic,” Harryhausen was driven to create his own 16mm stop-motion animation experiments, enlisting the aid of his mother for costumes and his father to make the jointed armatures (a duty that Fred Harryhausen would proudly perform until his death
in 1963). Eventually, he came to know his hero, KONG animator Willis O’Brien, who dealt some harsh criticism (“Obie looked at [my stegosaurus model] for a few minutes and then said: ‘The legs look like wrinkled sausages. You’ve got to put more character into it... and study anatomy’”), but also gave the young animator his first real break as an
apprentice on the big-budget giant-gorilla fantasy, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949).
The decade of the 1950s contained as many vital junctures as the previous two. Concerned over the runaway costs of MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, Harryhausen patented a low-budget method of combining live action and animated models by way of mattes and rear-projected backdrops (later to be termed “Dynamation,” the process is explained via
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