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Ray Harryhausen's Birthday
Raymond Fredderick Harryhausen was born on the 29th of June 1920 in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A, to parents Fred and Martha. -
The Lost World
His parents took him to see The Lost World sometime in 1925, when he was barely five years old and there he witnessed what looked to be living dinosaurs. It was a revelation. His favourite scene was of an allosaurus fighting and then pushing a brontosaurus off the edge of the plateau where it lands in a lake of mud. -
Grammar School
It was whilst at Grammar school that he learnt how to make model miniature set pieces of Californian Missions. This took him to the next phase in which he began to make three dimensional figures and sets that of course led him to make his own versions of prehistoric creatures. -
L.A. County Museum
He discovered the LA County Museum where he marvelled at the murals of prehistoric creatures created by Charles R. Knight (1874-1953), particularly the one of the Le Brea Tar Pits which is still in situ. Knight’s visualisation of what dinosaurs looked like became the vision that Ray used throughout his career. -
King Kong
Eight years later, in 1933, Ray would see another film that would not only inspire him but change his life. The film was King Kong. Picture the scene of Ray, aged an impressionable thirteen year old, sitting in Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, with his aunt (who had acquired the precious tickets) and his mother. -
Marionettes
The young Ray began to recreate the images in Kong by using marionettes or string puppets. His first were inevitably Kong, a tyrannosaurus rex, a stegosaurus, a brontosaurus and a pterodactyl, which all featured Kong. For a while he concentrated on designing and producing various marionette shows, including a short version of Kong but he knew that marionettes weren’t the answer. -
Learning about animation
He searched around to try and find out how Kong seemed to be ‘alive’ and came across a few articles, some of which proved to be inaccurate and he somehow knew this straight away. Eventually he did discover articles that included information about something called stop-motion animation. Simultaneously he visited an exhibition at the LA County Museum on techniques used to make The Lost World and King Kong, which enabled him to piece everything together. -
Early Experiments
His first attempts were, of course, prehistoric and included a cave bear, a brontosaurus and a stegosaurus. To begin with, he used wooden armatures but they didn’t really hold their pose. His first studio was his parent’s garden but he soon realised that although there was plenty of light, the light moved. When his test footage came back from the laboratory, Ray realised that the sun had moved and caused the shadows, during his careful animation, to also become animated. -
Ray Bradbury and Forry Ackerman
It was during this time that he met two people who would become close and lifelong friends. The first was Forrest J. Ackerman (1916-2008), or Forry to his friends, whom Ray met when he borrowed some stills from King Kong. Forry would go on to be a respected collector of movie memorabilia and publish Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. The other friend would become a world famous author and screenwriter, Ray Bradbury (1920 - ). -
Junior Museum Hobby Show
When he was eighteen years old Ray entered a competition called The Junior Museum Hobby Show at the County Museum in March/April of 1938, submitting a diorama that included his stegosaurus (based on Knight’s paintings), which won first prize. -
Evolution of the World (1938-40)
In 1938, when Ray was just eighteen years old he began his most ambitious project called Evolution of the World, in which he planned to visualise the dawn of the planet to the end of the age of the dinosaurs. He designed and built a number of models including a tyrannosaurus rex, a triceratops, a brontosaurus and pterodactyl and began experimenting with mattes (a process which enabled images whether live action or not, to be integrated with another image). -
Willis O’Brien (1886 – 1962)
It was during Ray’s work on Evolution that he met Willis O'Brien, the man who had created the dinosaurs and animated them for The Lost World and King Kong.
He called O’Brien at the MGM Studios where the master animator was working on a project called War Eagles. Taking some of his own models. That day was a turning point in Ray’s design and execution of a model and led to still further fluid animation as when he did get creatures anatomically correct, moving them seemed more natural. -
Art and Film Making
Taking Obie’s advise Ray enrolled in art and anatomy night classes at the Los Angeles City College (LACC). He had discovered whilst visiting Obie at MGM that drawings helped visualise what was in the imagination. Without that visualisation people wouldn’t be able to understand what you were talking about. So Ray learned that this was just as important a part of the process of animation as animation itself. -
George Pal and Puppetoons (1940-42)
When he left high school Ray began to look around for work as an animator. Obie was between jobs so when Ray noticed an advert in the paper asking for technicians with film and animation techniques experience to work on short films, he rushed over to a studio on McCadden Place and Santa Monica Blvd in Hollywood. There he was interviewed by a Hungarian film producer who had escaped the Nazis and settled in Hollywood, his name was George Pal (1908-1980). -
Army (1942-1945)
When war was declared Ray designed and photographed a short film called How to Bridge a Gorge (1941) to illustrate how stop-motion animation might be used in propaganda or orientation films. When he enlisted in the Army in 1942 he was assigned to the Army Signal Corps and sent to Fort MacArthur for training. Prior to his entry into the Army, Ray had shown How to Bridge a Gorge to one of the teachers and he in turn had shown it to the film director’s Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak. -
Mother Goose Stories (1946)
Ray decided he would make his own short films. Using some out of date 16mm colour Kodachrome stock he had acquired, and with the help of his father and mother, he shot a series of nursery rhymes. He used armatured models. The ball and socket armatures were made by his father although based on Ray’s designs, and were clothed in tiny costumes made by his mother. When he had completed all of these stories he lumped them all together under the title The Mother Goose Stories (1946). -
Mighty Joe Young (1949)
Soon after completing Mother Goose Stories Ray was contacted by Obie. Merian C. Cooper (1893-1973) was planning another giant ape movie to be called Mr Joseph Young of Africa and Obie wanted Ray to work on it with him. It was like a dream come true literally. To work on another ape picture with the very same people who had made King Kong. For Mighty Joe Young Obie was the recipient, on behalf of the production, of the Best Special Effects award at the 1950 American Academy Awards ceremony. -
The Fairy Tales (1950-2002)
Ray returned to shorts with an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood, which he called The Story of Little Red Riding Hood (1950). Using the same methods as he used with The Mother Goose Stories the film proved another success with schools and so Ray set out to make what has since become known as the Fairy Tale series, although in fact not all were fairy tales. In 1952 he began but didn't finish, an adaptation of The Tortoise and the Hare. -
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1952)
In late 1951 Ray was offered his first feature production that was originally titled The Monster From Under the Sea but famously became The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The production company was Mutual Films which was run by Jack Dietz, who to Ray looked like Edward G. Robinson even down to the fat cigar. This was the first film that used a split screen technique to insert models into the live-action. Later the technique became known as Dynamation. -
Charles H. Schneer (1920 - 2009)
By chance a young Columbia Pictures producer by the name of Charles H.Schneer, who worked in the Sam Katzman unit, saw The Beast and conceived of another monster-on-the-loose idea on which he wanted Ray to work. Contacting Ray through a mutual friend, he related his story of a giant octopus that attacks San Francisco. -
It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955)
The model of the octopus had only six tentacles because of budget limitations, which in effect made it a sixtopus! To disguise this fact Ray designed the animation sequences so that the model was always partially in the water at any one time. He also made three large articulated tentacles for close up’s. These three armatures (partially covered in cotton) have recently been rediscovered in Ray’s LA garage along with the miniature submarine and torpedo. -
Earth Vs the Flying Saucers (1956)
Charles was always cutting out stories from newspapers and in the mid-fifties there were a spat of flying saucer sightings. Charles thought this phenomenon would make a good feature and so Earth Vs the Flying Saucers was the result. The design of the saucers was based on what most people would expect but Ray added an animated section into the top and underside that also had flutes in them so that people could see it was moving. -
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
Because Ray wanted to see Italy he changed the location of the story, called The Cyclops, which he had co-written with Charlotte Knight, from Chicago to Italy. It was eventually titled 20 Million Miles to Earth. Charles wanted the picture to be shot in colour but Ray insisted it should be black and white because Kodak had just brought out a 35mm stock that eliminated the problem of grain when the rear projection image is re-photographed. -
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
As with 20 Million Miles to Earth it was Ray who came up with the idea of using the Arabian Nights for a vehicle for dimensional stop-motion animation. He wrote an early step outline which he called Sinbad the Sailor. He had also executed key drawings for it, including the skeleton fight on the spiral staircase, in 1953, four years before it went into production. The final title, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was again Ray’s idea. The number seven has a mystical significance. -
Mysterious Island (1961)
Next to H.G. Wells and of course Ray Bradbury, another of Ray’s favourite fantasy authors is Jules Verne. Ray created a series of creatures that have been bred by Captain Nemo, the hero of Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. They include a giant crab, giant bees and two prehistoric creatures, the phororhacos (a prehistoric bird) and the nautiloid cephalopod (a prehistoric tentacled creature with a huge shell). -
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
This is generally seen as Ray’s best picture. ‘Everything seemed to fit and work so well’. Ray began to think of adapting a story from Greek or Roman mythology in the early 1950s but he began to develop ideas for such a feature when he was shooting the live-action for Mysterious Island. The skeleton sequence in the film took four and a half months to photograph the animation scenes and the entire sequence runs for four minutes and thirty seven seconds. -
First Men in the Moon (1964)
At long last Ray got to make an H.G.Wells story. Ray’s only film shot in widescreen, in this case Panavision, which caused him many problems. After much debate and rewrites, British writer Nigel Kneale came up with the idea of topping and tailing the Victorian story with a modern expedition to the Moon. -
One Million Years BC (1966)
This landmark film was the first since 1955 that was not made with Charles Schneer but for the UK based Hammer Film Productions. It was based on a 1940 film entitled One Million BC or Man and His Mate about a caveman battling against prehistoric creatures. The creatures in that first film were not animated but were lizards and baby crocodiles with fins stuck on their backs and even a man in a rubber suit playing the young allosaurus. Ray could only improve on it. -
The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
The story was based on an idea and artwork by Willis O’Brien, which began pre-production in 1941 but was never realised. Obie’s name does not appear on the credits because he was not credited on the original screenplay. The film was originally to have been called The Valley Where Time Stood Still, which Ray prefers. Ray always used a ‘monster stick’ when filming large creatures to help the actors ‘see’ what they couldn’t see. -
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974)
The Valley of Gwangi was not a commercial success so Ray and Charles decided to return to the security of Sinbad and the Arabian Nights. mongst the scenes that were never photographed was an introduction that was conceived by Ray. The homunculus, on the errand of the evil magician Koura, makes his way to the Visier bedroom in the palace and throws acid on the Visier’s face. -
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)
There were several scenes that were not included including a fight on board ship with a worm-creature and a fight between Trog and an arsinotherium (a two-horned rhinoceros-like creature). And there was to have been a sequence that showed how the Minaton was assembled with Shadowmen (zombie-like creatures) working a Frankenstein-like laboratory. The gateway into Hyperborea was a tribute to the gates in King Kong. -
Clash of the Titans (1981)
There was concern about making a film about a character called Perseus as the name Percy might, at least at one time, imply an effeminate man. Ray’s original key drawing of Medusa in her temple has her sporting a bra, or as Ray puts it, a boob tube. -
Retirement
Ray ’retired’ from dimensional animation in 1984 although he did indulge himself occasionally, to keep his hand in, on such projects as the UK television documentary Working With Dinosaurs (1999) and the completion of The Tortoise and the Hare, now called The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare (2001/2). -
The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation
The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation is a charitable Trust set up by Ray on the 10th April 1986. It is the primary aim of the Foundation to protect Ray’s name and body of work as well as archiving, preserving and restoring Ray’s extensive collection. In addition the Foundation is firmly committed to show and exhibit, for educational and enjoyment purposes, all of Ray’s unique collection and the short films as well and his feature productions. -
Memorial
His crowning achievement in this field occurred in 2004. Because Diana Harryhausen is the great granddaughter of the missionary and explorer, David Livingstone, Ray designed and oversaw the casting in bronze of a one and half times life statue of the great man being attacked by a lion. The statue can be seen in the grounds of The David Livingston Centre in Blantyre, Lanarkshire in Scotland. -
Lifetime Achievement Award
In 2011, Ray Harryhausen was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award by the VES (Visual Effects Society) accepted on his behalf by Randy Cook and Dennis Muren. -
Final Days
On May 7th, 2013, Raymond Frederick Harryhausen passed away at the age of 92 years old in his home in London, England. Ray lived with his wife Diana and in recent years took an avid and enthusiastic interest in The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation. The Foundation now owns and looks after his extensive collection of models, artwork, stills and miniatures, preserving and exhibiting the 50,000 + items into the future so protecting his legacy and his art.
