Tom Hanks claims that the best film ever made is not ‘Casablanca’ or ‘Citizen Kane’, nor is it in the canon of absolute Hollywood classics. Nor is it any of his filmography. It is a 1963 title that failed at the box office and was officially vindicated by the actor when at the 1992 Oscars (although it was not on Oscar night itself) an honorary award was given to the person truly responsible for the magic of the film.
1992: the Harryhausen moment. That night, Hanks did not go on stage to compete for anything of his own, but rather to present the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, a technical recognition that the Academy grants outside of the main gala. The recipient was Ray Harryhausen, honored with this lifetime achievement award at a special ceremony held three weeks before the 1992 Oscars. There he famously uttered the phrase: “Some say Casablanca or Citizen Kane.” He prefers ‘Jason and the Argonauts’
Jason is going crazy. It is the best-known film that Ray Harryhausen made. Directed by Don Chaffey, it freely adapts the 3rd century BC Greek poem The Argonauticas, by Apollonius of Rhodes. The film was a box office failure at the time, but time has turned it into a fantasy classic thanks to the magnificent animations in stop motion from Harryhausen and a specific scene, the sword fight against an army of skeletons, which took the technician three months to animate. It is not the only amazing creature in the film: the bronze colossus Talos, the seven-headed hydra and the two Harpies are other mythological monsters in this adventure.
It’s the monkey’s fault. Harryhausen knew that he wanted to dedicate himself to the world of effects because stop motion when he saw ‘King Kong’ as a child, and it was in fact the creator of the gigantic gorilla, Willis O’Brien, who advised him to take his first steps, advising him to study anatomy and art. Harryhausen ended up helping him as an apprentice on films like ‘The Big Gorilla’. Starting in the 1950s, he teamed up with producer Charles Schneer and there his key works would begin, which would ensure him a place in the pantheon of classics.
With him, Harryhaysen began in science fiction films such as ‘The Beast from Ancient Times’, ‘Humanity in Danger’ or ‘Earth vs. the Flying Saucers’. Then came the fantasy adventures, often with mythological elements, that made him famous: ‘Sinbad and the Princess’, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, ‘The Mysterious Island’, ‘A Million Years Ago’ and, closing his career in the eighties, ‘Clash of the Titans’, with Medusa as one of his most remembered creatures. Harryhausen was not just an animator: he designed the creatures, sculpted them, built the models with articulated metal skeletons and then animated them himself, almost always alone.
Stop motion FTW. Some of the genius’s teachings are relevant today. In a 2006 interview, he defended that excessively realistic visual effects were reduced to something mundane, compared to the almost dreamlike quality that, in his opinion, the stop-motion. And it’s easy to understand why: any film animated with this artisanal technique, such as the very recent ‘I Am Frankelda’, has a texture of pure wonder that CGI simply cannot remotely aspire to.
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