Animation legend Ray Harryhausen dies

Ray Harryhausen, the stop-motion animation genius behind films like ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ and ‘Clash of the Titans’, has died aged 92.

His family released a statement on Facebook. It says:

“The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen, Visual Effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator. He was a multi-award winner which includes a special Oscar and BAFTA. Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own Nick Park have cited Harryhausen as being the man whose work inspired their own creations."

Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation was inspired by Willis O’Brien’s ground-breaking work on the 1933 version of ‘King Kong’. Like O’Brien’s tragic giant ape, Harryhausen’s clay creations interacted seamlessly with their human counterparts in classic genre movies such as ‘Mighty Joe Young’, ‘It Came from Beneath the Sea’, ’20 million Miles to Earth’, One Million Years B.C.’ and the ‘Sinbad’ movies.

His most celebrated creations were the extraordinary and terrifying skeletons that fought Jason at the end of the film. In his account of the making of this iconic sequence for The Guardian, Harryhausen said:

“Each of the model skeletons was about eight to 10 inches high, and six of the seven were made for the sequence. The remaining one was a veteran from ‘The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’, slightly repainted to match the new members of the family... I had three men fighting seven skeletons, and each skeleton had five appendages to move in each separate frame of film. This meant at least 35 animation movements, each synchronised to the actors' movements. Some days I was producing less than one second of screen time; in the end the whole sequence took a record four and a half months.”

Shamefully, the film didn't get an Academy Award nomination for special effects (‘Cleopatra’ won), but it’s perhaps the most famous effects sequence in Hollywood history.

After presenting Harryhausen with a special Academy Award years later, Tom Hanks said: "Some people say ‘Casablanca’ or ‘Citizen Kane’...I say ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ is the greatest film ever made!”

Harryhausen’s last hurrah was ‘Clash of the Titans’ in 1981. In a film that featured actors like Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith, it was the animated Medusa that stole the movie and terrified a new generation of school children.

The 2010 remake that replaced stop motion with charmless CGI paled in comparison.

It was this technology that killed off Harryhausen’s career. A mooted sequel to ‘Clash’, ‘Force of the Trojans’, was never made, and with computer animation becoming established in the 1980s, Harryhausen retired.

His place in Hollywood history was nonetheless assured. On the Harryhausen Foundation page, industry legends paid tribute.

George Lucas said: “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no ‘Star Wars’”, while Peter Jackson described ‘The Lord of the Rings’ as “my ‘Ray Harryhausen movie’”.

Terry Gilliam said: “What we do now digitally with computers, Ray did digitally long before but without computers. Only with his digits.”

‘Avatar’ director James Cameron wrote: "I think all of us who are practioners in the arts of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we’re standing on the shoulders of a giant. If not for Ray’s contribution to the collective dreamscape, we wouldn’t be who we are."

Stars such as Simon Pegg, ‘Hot Fuzz’ helmer Edgar Wright and ‘Iron Man’ director Jon Favreau have paid tribute to Harryhausen on Twitter.

Ray Harryhausen lived in London since 1960 and is survived by his wife Diana Livingstone Bruce.