Ray Harryhausen (updated)

Channel surfing late last night I stumbled across Turner Classic Movies’ Ray Harryhausen festival. Ray Harry-who? I didn’t know at first either, but imagine my delight to find that his was the guiding hand behind so many of the films that captivated me as a kid. Ray Harryhausen pioneered the techiniques of stop-motion animation, whereby a model figure is painstakingly repositioned—by hand—through its full range of motion, each and every frame. For a complex scene, Harryhausen might average only thirteen frames of animation a day. Since films run at 24 frames per second, that means two full days of work for a second of screen time.

Dinosaurs, space monsters, giant crabs and octopi, mythological creatures, and his signature animated skeletons: Harryhausen did them all. From early classics like It Came from Beneath the Sea and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers through Mighty Joe Young, the Sinbad trilogy, Mysterious Island, Jason and the Argonaughts, and his final film Clash of the Titans, Harryhausen was the individual responsible for some of the most compelling moving images of my childhood. Part of what attracts me to his creations, then and now, is their self-evident artifice: the jerky stop-motion, the too-bright colors, the way they stand out in relief against their blue-screened background shots. I can’t help but think of the contrast to the Matrix Reloaded, which I finally saw this past week. The CGI is, of course, spectacular, and I’m not about to say that things were better in the good old days. But there’s something about the work ethic: on the one hand, the teams of animators and the vast rendering farms that produced the digital processing in something like 95% of the Matrix’s frames, and on the other hand Harryhausen, literally single-handedly putting a seven-headed hydra or a band of scimitar-wielding animated skeletons through their paces—frame by frame, second by second.

I don’t know how future generations will look back on the current crop of CGI, but I do know two things: that if I could afford the time, I’d be watching the complete Sinbad trilogy on TCM tonight (alas, no TiVo); and that Trog, the gentled troglodyte from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, could kick Shrek’s big green butt.

Update (via Slashdot): Shoulda seen this one coming.