By Joseph Rossi
Another hero has passed away. Effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen is gone. He leaves behind an unmatched legacy of stop motion classics like Jason and the Argonauts and Mighty Joe Young. His influence can be seen in the works of Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Del Toro and many others.
But if you notice the countless tributes that were pouring in among all the fan sites this week, the majority of them were from the craftspeople behind the director’s chair.
Special effects people are a huge reason why I love the movies. Sure, when we refer to a particular scene we tend to reference the director, the screenwriter or actors. We rarely mention the people who physically create something out of nothing. Sets, effects, both visual and practical, miniatures, and make up.
A few years ago Hollywood lost Stan Winston. He was one of the best make up and special effect men in the business. He was responsible for the full-scale animatronic dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the massive Queen Alien in James Cameron’s Aliens. His loss was truly heartbreaking since I grew up admiring most of his work. I would look for his name in the credits if I were truly intrigued by the effects work. In reading about Winston after his death, I learned that Harryhausen influenced him, which in turn made me read up on and later view the work of this old master.
Rick Baker, another make up genius (The Wolfman, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, etc) was a Harryhausen fan. Stop motion guru Phil Tippet (Starship Troopers) was a major admirer of Jason and the Argonauts. Denis Muren, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, visual effects man in the business (the Star Wars films, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) credits his meeting Harryhausen as a major step forward for his career.
What would the cinema world be like today if Ray Harryhausen didn’t make it in the movies? Worse? There are some who would say better. Bad effects have dominated the film industry like a bad rash. Nothing seems real anymore. I understand that we must forgo logic in certain genres but there’s something cold about noticing an effect. Like in editing, when we notice a bad cut, it stands out like a sore thumb. For example, no disrespect to Clint Eastwood but his last film, J. Edgar, was plagued with some horrible makeup that took me out of the movie. Leonardo DiCaprio had to don some awful looking prosthetics that’s just amateurish. I won’t even mention the countless phony looking CG creations that have plagued the screens in the last 10 years.
But when you get something magical like the creation of the Faun in Pan’s Labyrinth or the CG wonderment of Gollum in The Hobbit, then we can properly suspend our disbelief. Ray Harryhausen understood that audiences are not stupid. They will catch on. When it was time to hang it up, he did. He knew his stop motion craft was reaching its peak in 1981 when the underrated and still enjoyable Clash of the Titans did poorly. But he passed the torch to others that advanced his work to the new millennium and now, for every pixel that now graces our screens we owe some thanks to this pioneer of the business. An actual maker of dreams.
