Rating: ★★★

Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013) is a figure in fantastic cinema who has gained a cult reputation. In fact, Harryhausen is probably the only special effects artist whose name ever became a selling point in the promotion of films. Harryhausen specialised in Stop-Motion Animation where three-dimensional models were moved one frame at a time giving the impression of fluid movement. During a thirty-year career, Harryhausen made films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953); the giant atomic octopus film It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955); the alien invader film Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956); the alien monster film 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957); The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960); the Jules Verne adaptation Mysterious Island (1961); the Greek myth adventure Jason and the Argonauts (1963); the H.G. Wells adaptation The First Men in the Moon (1964); the caveman vs dinosaurs epic One Million Years B.C. (1966); the dinosaur film The Valley of Gwangi (1969); the two Sinbad sequels The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977); and the Greek myth adventure Clash of the Titans (1981).

Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan is a Documentary from French director Gilles Penso who had previously made film-based documentary works like We All Grew Up with Louis de Funes (2007) and the subsequent Behind the Mask of Superheroes (2013), Creature Designers – The Frankenstein Complex (2015) and Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters (2019). There is something fortuitous to the timing of the documentary in that it was made in 2011, only two years before Ray Harryhausen’s death, and one year before Harryhausen’s childhood friend, SF writer Ray Bradbury, one of the interviewees, passed away.

The documentary takes a chronological tour through Harryhausen’s life and films. It begins with his childhood and discovery of stop-motion animation with King Kong (1933) – the film readily acknowledges the pioneering importance of Kong’s animator Willis O’Brien. We see footage from some of Harryhausen’s early films, including the uncompleted prehistoric film Creation, which he says he shelved after Disney released Fantasia (1940), as well as his test footage for an unmade adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), before we come to the Mother Goose Stories shorts, which became his first released works in 1946.

Harryhausen’s first proper job in the industry was as an assistant to Willis O’Brien on Mighty Joe Young (1949), where Harryhausen ended up doing what he estimates was 90 percent of the work. We then move to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the work that began the Harryhausen legend proper. John Landis makes the interesting observation that this is the work from which we gain our idea of the way that dinosaurs move on screen. Harryhausen demonstrates his method of filming a model against rear-projected street footage that was wound on one frame at a time, as well as blocking out sections of the foreground to insert other sections of film footage, creating a sense of the dinosaur really being present in the streets.

On to It Came from Beneath the Sea, Harryhausen speaks of the problems getting the film made when the San Francisco City Council turned down his plans to shoot on the Golden Gate Bridge on the grounds that they didn’t want to give people the impression that the bridge might get torn down. They went and filmed anyway, using back projection footage that was shot with a camera placed in a bread van criss-crossing the bridge. Harryhausen also talks of how the octopus only has six arms in order to cut down on costs.

Harryhausen made The 7th Voyage of Sinbad because he had become tired of making monster movies. There was some difficulty in getting financing due to the recent flop of Howard Hughes’ Son of Sinbad (1955) but the production went ahead to great success. As with many of his films, it was constructed around the creature effects scenes first where the screenwriter then went away and wrote the screenplay to match. Harryhausen talks of hiring fencing masters and dancing instructors to get Kerwin Mathews and later Todd Armstrong in Jason and the Argonauts to match the movements he needed.

We learn much about Harryhausen’s style – that all of his armatures were handmade by his father up until his death during The First Men in the Moon. We even visit Harryhausen’s home workshop. The film is co-produced by The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, which was set up as a museum to house Harryhausen’s models, while Tony Dalton, chief curator at the Foundation, is a producer and one of the primary interviewers. As a result, we get to see a lot of Harryhausen’s actual models, sketches and storyboards, test footage for the films and behind the scenes material. Harryhausen’s daughter Vanessa is interviewed and offers up amusing anecdotes of going out with dinosaur models instead of dolls in her pram, or her father using the kitchen oven to cook the latex for his models, resulting in them eating meals that constantly tasted of rubber.

Interviewed are a number of filmmakers who speak of their debt to Harryhausen – Steven Spielberg of how The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms influenced Jurassic Park (1993), Joe Dante and his inclusion of a Ymir-lookalike included in Piranha (1978), the homage to the dinosaur roping from Mighty Joe Young in Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Guillermo Del Toro and the giant octopus-like creature in Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), the Jabberwocky and tower fight in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) that is borrowed from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, as well as the influence of the Jason and the Argonauts skeleton swordfight on Army of Darkness (1992), The Mummy (1999) and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). Peter Jackson even screens footage of his early Harryhausen-influenced 8mm film The Valley (1976).

There is universal praise for Harryhausen’s artistry – the expressiveness of his characters and the lengths he would go to animate elaborate sequences in Jason and the Argonauts and The Valley of Gwangi in particular. There is inevitable comparison to CGI where James Cameron speaks admiringly of how Harryhausen managed to keep every movement of the models in his head, while operating with a crew of only two – himself and a cameraman – whereas by the time of Cameron’s films he has hundreds to do these tasks. Harryhausen briefly discusses his decision to retire in the early 1980s. All he says about this is that he felt he could no longer compete with an audience’s need for fast action and explosions.

Trailer here