Whether they’re swashbuckling pirate adventures or the colorful exploits of comic book heroes, today’s multimillion-dollar summer blockbusters boast hundreds, sometimes thousands, of technicians laboring to bring spectacle to the screen.
But there was once a time when visual effects were all handled by far smaller crews–and in some cases, one visionary artist. One such artist was Ray Harryhausen, the man behind such films as 1953’s Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and 1963’s Jason & the Argonauts.
And now he’s back, with a special 50th Anniversary DVD re-release of an early favorite, 20 Million Miles to Earth–and the 1957 black and white film is now in color for the first time.
Harryhausen–a feisty 87 years old–promoted the Legend Films/Sony Pictures release at his usual appearance at the San Diego Comic-Con, the ever-growing epicenter of all things fantastic and futuristic. Reflecting on his older films and giving hints about his new projects, he had a lot to say about the current state of visual effects–and about purists who scoff at the idea of colorizing movies from yesterday.
Acknowledging the popularity of computer-generated visual effects, he nonetheless warned of their overuse. “Things change, it’s an entirely different world from when I was making films,” he said to auditorium packed with fans both young and old. “If you make fantasy too realistic, you defeat the point of the fantasy.”
Everyone knows that most visual effects today are done with computers. But few may understand the intricacies at play in the movies of yesteryear, which required a more hands-on approach. Harryhausen utilized the all-but-lost art of stop animation. Working alone in his studio, he painstakingly moved miniatures by hand, photographing them one frame at a time. When the film was projected at normal speed, they appeared to come to life, moving of their own will. He staggered moviegoers of the day with images of sword-wielding skeletons and prehistoric creatures.
One of his earlier films was 20 Million Miles to Earth, about a U.S. spacecraft that unwittingly brings back a creature from the planet Venus. The tiny alien, called Ymir, appears harmless at first, but soon grows to gigantic proportions, wrecking havoc and destruction in the best 1950s monster movie tradition. But Harryhausen’s unique talents stood out–in a memorable sequence, the strange creature, emerging from its egg, hides it eyes from the harsh glare of laboratory lights. It’s the kind of small, humanizing touch that Harryhausen was known for.
Harryhausen himself appears in the movie in a cameo, as a man feeding peanuts to an elephant at the zoo.
The film had a limited release on home video and DVD. With this special edition, in what could be considered a controversial move, the film now exists in what Harryhausen himself calls, “glorious color.”
It was part of the original plan, he insists. “We were going to shoot in color but we didn’t have the budget,” he says. “So I’m grateful that with this new process that Legend Films has, we are able to put it out in color now.” While the colorization of classic black and white movies looked to become widespread in the 1980s, it soon fell out of popularity. The new film sports an improved version of the technology, with deeper colors and a wider range of shadings.
A B-movie in its day, with William Hopper in the lead role of a troubled scientist and Joan Taylor as his love interest, the real star of the film is Harryhausen, and the DVD makes no bones about it, featuring him prominently in bonus interviews, documentary footage and an audio commentary track, where he is joined by producer Arnold Kunert as well as Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet, the artists behind such films as Star Wars, Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds, who drew career inspiration from the master animator.
Harryhausen himself is a testament to imagination, innovation and good old hard work. It’s little surprise that today is involved with this release, and that he has a sequel to Jason & the Argonauts in the works, where he plans to be executive producer. Harryhausen was first inspired after his mother took him to see King Kong at the Chinese theater in Hollywood when he was 13 years old.
“I haven’t been the same since,” he says. But unlike aspiring filmmakers of today, who have a wealth of resources to draw upon, young Harryhausen was entirely on his own. “There were no books at the time I learned. Nobody knew much about it. I had to create things on my own by trial and error. I had to do things myself, at the time, because I couldn’t find anybody else that was as interested as I was.”
Encouraged by his parents, Harryhausen was soon building miniature sets and models, and photographing them with a 16mm movie camera. Even when he made into Hollywood’s big leagues, his mostly one-man process was essentially the same. As it happened, the largely solitary work suited him just fine. “I did it all myself,” he says, explaining that a larger crew of people “can sway you into thinking a different way. Creation is a rather delicate process. It’s just peculiar to a certain person. With CGI, they have dozens of people. One person does the face, another person does the tail.”
Ironically, Harryhausen’s techniques inspired a deluge of new artists entering the field of visual effects, who brought with them advances in photography, engineering and finally computer-generated animation. Harryhausen’s last film was the 1981 sword and sorcery epic, Clash of the Titans, after which he retired.
Harryhausen worries that some of the storytelling instincts in today’s technicians have been lost. “I think storytelling is a forgotten art today. Storytelling with a beginning, middle and an end is a basis for all entertainment, I think,” he says. But he also admits that thanks in part to advances in computer technology, the art of stop motion is recognized for being an important part of cinematic history. “Our pictures are more appreciated today than when they first came out.”
