Of Trope, Melisma, and Ray Harryhausen (Part 1)
During the discussion of The Matrix, someone asked me why I was looking for movies in the library in the first place. The answer is that for reasons unknown, my local library has a large collection of Ray Harryhausen movies, and I have been a huge fan of Mr. Harryhausen's work ever since I first saw Jason and the Argonauts, when it was a first-run movie and I was just 8 years old. Forty-two years later, I still love that movie, and still get a thrill at the dramatic climax, when the dry and barren dirt cracks apart and breaks open, and one by one, the skeleton warriors slowly rise to their feet...
Okay, I'll concede right here that most of his movies qua movies are downright bad. The acting is second-rate; the dialog is laughable; the science in something like 20 Million Miles to Earth is pure gibberish. But those things aren't Harryhausen's fault, as he was neither the writer nor principle director. Rather, he was (in case you didn't know) the special effects director, and his unique genius lay in the now nearly lost art of stop-motion animation. Anyone can cover a golf-cart with a papier-mache shell and pretend it's a giant ant, or put a man in a rubber suit and pretend he's a monster, or glue some spikes on an iguana and pretend it's a dinosaur, but Harryhausen was the master of making the impossible come to life -- and not only to come alive, but then to act, often with more skill and expressiveness than the humans who were split-screened into the scene.
I've been thinking a lot about Ray Harryhausen lately. In part it's because I've just finished a lengthy essay on King Kong for an as-yet-untitled BenBella Books anthology, and in writing it I was suddenly stricken by the realization that, well --
Willis O'Brien was the animator who brought Kong to life, and 12-year-old Ray Harryhausen was so dazzled by Kong that he spent his life perfecting stop-motion animation techniques, eventually winding up working for O'Brien on films like Mighty Joe Young. Now, Harryhausen also stayed lifelong friends with his old high school buddy, Ray Bradbury, and it just so happens that I've met and spoken with Mr. Bradbury a fair number of times over the years. So this means...
To be continued...
Okay, I'll concede right here that most of his movies qua movies are downright bad. The acting is second-rate; the dialog is laughable; the science in something like 20 Million Miles to Earth is pure gibberish. But those things aren't Harryhausen's fault, as he was neither the writer nor principle director. Rather, he was (in case you didn't know) the special effects director, and his unique genius lay in the now nearly lost art of stop-motion animation. Anyone can cover a golf-cart with a papier-mache shell and pretend it's a giant ant, or put a man in a rubber suit and pretend he's a monster, or glue some spikes on an iguana and pretend it's a dinosaur, but Harryhausen was the master of making the impossible come to life -- and not only to come alive, but then to act, often with more skill and expressiveness than the humans who were split-screened into the scene.
I've been thinking a lot about Ray Harryhausen lately. In part it's because I've just finished a lengthy essay on King Kong for an as-yet-untitled BenBella Books anthology, and in writing it I was suddenly stricken by the realization that, well --
Willis O'Brien was the animator who brought Kong to life, and 12-year-old Ray Harryhausen was so dazzled by Kong that he spent his life perfecting stop-motion animation techniques, eventually winding up working for O'Brien on films like Mighty Joe Young. Now, Harryhausen also stayed lifelong friends with his old high school buddy, Ray Bradbury, and it just so happens that I've met and spoken with Mr. Bradbury a fair number of times over the years. So this means...
Forget my being just two degrees away from Kevin Bacon. I'm only three degrees away from King Kong! Is this cool or what?!
To be continued...
posted by ~brb at 5:48 PM
