Your summer of special effects-laden blockbuster films owes a debt of gratitude to film pioneer Ray Harryhausen. The stop-motion-animation legend died on Tuesday, according to a Facebook statement from The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation.
Even when I didn't know his name, I was watching Ray Harryhausen's work. Every Thanksgiving in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the local TV station would run the 1949 film, Mighty Joe Young. This King Kong knock-off featured an over-sized, but not gargantuan gorilla running amuck in the city. Unlike the more famous and ill-fated Kong, Mighty Joe gets to live.
The most remarkable thing, though, was that the gorilla who ran, played, jumped around and interacted with a live girl was a man-made creation -- wholly stop-motion animation (just like the 1933 King Kong, which influenced a young Harryhausen), and created by a Ray Harryhausen.
By the time I saw 1981's Clash of the Titans, I was well aware of Harryhausen's stop-motion work, as his cultural influence was already well in evidence. There's a fair bit of stop-motion animation work in 1977's Star Wars: A New Hope. The best example, and perhaps most memorable, is the chess match scene between R2-D2 and Chewbacca ("Let the Wookie win"). The stop-motion play pieces look like they could have been animated by the master himself.
Despite the advent of computer generated animation, Harryhausen's style of hand-made movies continues on in the work of Aardman Studios and works like Nightmare Before Christmas from Tim Burton. It also wasn't unusual for animators to pay tribute to Harryhausen in their films. At the end of Pixar's Monster's, Inc., Mike and Sulley visit a sushi restaurant called "Harryhausen's."
Online tributes to Ray Harryhausen poured into Twitter and Facebook throughout the afternoon, many of them from filmmakers clearly still feeling the influence of Harryhausen's decades-long work in the fields of special effects and stop-motion animation. For my part, it's unlikely I'd be doing Vine animations without his influence. You can read more about Ray Harryhausen's life here.
Here are some of the more memorable tributes.
Ray Harryhausen an inspiration and a legend, even before he left us. His influence cannot be measured and has shaped cinema as we know it.— Simon Pegg (@simonpegg) May 7, 2013
RIP Ray Harryhausen. He was a source of inspiration, the master of stop motion, and even a voice actor in Elf. His work still holds up.— Jon Favreau (@Jon_Favreau) May 7, 2013
Ray Bradbury on Ray Harryhausen, from the @bafta 90th birthday tribute at the @bfi. Was moving then, even moreso now youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3KiA…— David Cox (@david_t_cox_) May 7, 2013
Greatly saddened to hear of the death of Ray Harryhausen, recipient of the Special Award in 2010. awards.bafta.org/award/2010/fil…— BAFTA (@BAFTA) May 7, 2013
Ray Harryhausen. Farewell to an astonishing talent - He was a one-man industry and a one-man genre. Alsoa true gentleman.— Peter Lord (@PeteLordAardman) May 7, 2013
Anyone in the world of animation, SFX, or fantasy owes everything to Ray Harryhausen. A true legend. RIP Sir. #rayharryhausen— andrew stanton (@andrewstanton) May 7, 2013