« My week, and welcome to it! | Main | MapIt » Ray HarryhausenAt Boing Boing, Mark posts a link to a Ray Harryhausen tribute site listing all of his films and creatures, with links to some snippets of animation. Harryhausen was a stop-motion animation wizard who carefully built miniature models and animated them by shooting their movements one frame at a time. I was a big Harryhausen fan; it's been great over the last few years to see him getting the recognition he deserves. I first remember seeing his work in a preview of "It Came from Beneath the Sea," which featured a giant octopus menacing San Francisco, giving tentacle to the Golden Gate Bridge. The first of his films I actually saw is still one of my favorites – "20 Million Miles to Earth," which featured a creature brought back from Venus (by Hedda Hopper's son, William, who was also a regular on the Perry Mason series) as an egglet that hatched and grew bigger than a building. There's a great fight scene between the creature, called an ymir, and an elephant. His next film was the great "7th Voyage of Sinbad," that featured a cyclops that looked like the ymir's cousin, and a swordfight with a skeleton that was precursor to a more complex scene in "Jason and the Argonauts," a fight with an army of skeletons. These animations were real magic – perhaps not as realistic as the computer animations that are so much a part of today's films, but they had their own aesthetic of amazement. jon posted this at 10:33 AM |
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