HARRYHAUSEN, Ray

(1920-)

   US special-effects supervisor, long based in the UK, associated with many sf and fantasy films. As a boy his main interests were sculpture and palaeontology. The desire to see his own clay figures move on the screen, aroused by KING KONG (1933), stimulated his interest in photography and special effects. While Willis H. O'BRIEN, who had animated King Kong, was preparing to make MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), RH approachedhim, showed sample footage of his work on 16mm, and was hired as his assistant on this film and on the subsequent abortive project El Toro Estrella, about a boy, a bull and a dinosaur. RH and O'Brien then wenttheir separate ways, though they later teamed up briefly to work on the dinosaur sequences in the pseudo-documentary Animal World (1956).RH supervised the effects in The BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), which was a success. He then formed a partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer that continued through his active career. Their first film together was IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955); it was followed by EARTH VS. THE FLYINGSAUCERS (1956) and 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957). By then the sf film boom was in decline and they decided that their next project would be a mythic fantasy. In 1958 they made The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, the first animation film of its type in Colour.

    It proved a huge financial success and similar fantasies followed: The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960), MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Then therewas a shift back to sf with FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1964), ONE MILLION YEARS BC (1966) and The VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969).In the 1970s and 1980stheir output fell and they returned to the format of their best-loved films, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. Their three further films in the same vein were The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) and Clash of the Titans(1981). In the latter (an adaptation of the Perseus legend) they attempted, by using distinguished actors in supporting roles, to counter criticisms that their films had become 5min dollops of monster-fighting stitched together with 15min stretches of pointless running about and bad acting. It remained a relative disappointment, not helped by the inclusion of an insufferable mechanical owl patterned on LucasFilm's R2D2 in STAR WARS (1977) - a film which, ironically, was deeply influenced by RH'searlier fantasies. The alien craft of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and the Ymir of 20 Million Miles to Earth probably stand as RH's best animation,and Jason and the Argonauts as his best film. While his effects were very influential state-of-the-art stuff in the 1950s and 1960s, he proved reluctant to adapt to the 1980s and 1990s boom in computer-assisted animation; Film Fantasy Scrapbook (1972; rev1974; further rev 1981) expresses his sense of things. He has gracefully retired, now sculpting figures from his films and acting as spiritual godfather to his pupils-cum-successors, Jim Danforth, David Allen and Phil Tippett. He appears, thinly disguised, as "Roy Holdstrom" in Ray BRADBURY's A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990).

   JB/KN