To call Ray Harryhausen an animator would be to liken silent film star Lon Chaney to being a mime. Ray Harryhuasen’s contributions to cinema are legendary. In the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and mythology his career has encompassed more than fifty years and has impacted multiple generations of artists, special effects technicians, writers, and filmmakers.

Born in Los Angles in 1920, Ray was thirteen years old when his life changed forever: The years was 1933 and the film—RKO Studio’s King Kong (an entire blog could be written about all the famous people who credit this movie as their inspiration). For Ray the special effect known as stop-motion animation became an obsession and his early experiments show how deeply he took it to heart. He made several short films involving dinosaurs, space creatures, and a cave bear covered by cuttings he made from his mother’s fur coat (although this is a famous story known to Harryhausen’s fans, one point not often mentioned is that the coat was sacrificed with his mother’s knowledge and approval).

It was a short time after this Ray set out to contact his idol: Willis O’Brien, the man credited with inventing the stop-motion technique (although there is some dispute as to how the process was originated and by whom). O’Brien had become famous for creating the life-like dinosaurs in the 1925 film version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Of course, it was eight years later when O’Brien built upon the same theme for the far-more famous King Kong. O’Brien met with Harryhausen and graciously agreed to watch his films and examine Harryhausen’s models, offering constructive criticisms which would set Harryhausen on his chosen path. Harryhausen told a story of having met with O’Brien and his wife, who cheerfully encouraged their young visitor, at which point O’Brien told his wife, “You do realize you’re encouraging my competition.”

They would not be competitive for long. After Ray got out of the army O’Brien offered him a job as one of the chief animators for a film about another outsize gorilla: 1949’s Mighty Joe Young. It was the formal start of a career which would remain unparalleled in its uniqueness to this very day. Ray Harryhausen was no mere “technician” hired-on when it came to stop-motion animation, which he later dubbed “Dynamation”. The majority of the films on which he worked were based upon ideas he came up with, often designing the stories around major effects sequences (one example of this was Valley of Gwangi, an idea originally conceived by Willis O’Brien, featuring a sequence where cowboys lasso a live Tyrannosaurus in an effort to capture the thing). He admitted there were times he developed an idea for a film because he wanted to visit a certain place, so he would have the story take place in that location.

Ray Harryhausen is best known for his characters. Not only did he usually conceive the ideas for his films, he designed, sculpted, built, and animated the hundreds of creatures that dominated his films. These were not only monsters, although they were all monstrous in size or appearance. One example is the Venusian Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth, a lost animal out of place among humanity and brought to the same inevitable fate that awaited King Kong and so many countless other critters who just didn’t belong. The dinosaurs in One Million Yeas B.C. (which featured a young Raquel Welch clad in that famous fur bikini). Among Ray’s better known creations, one in particular holds a place of high honor among his fans, and while only playing a small part, it could have reigned supreme as the central character for a film of its own: the Cyclops from 7th Voyage of Sinbad. It was a creature that instilled terror in many a movie-goer, particularly the scene where he is cooking one of Sinbad’s men on a spit over a fire.

On April 2 of 2010 Warner Brothers (in conjunction with Legendary Pictures), will release its long-anticipated re-make of Clash of the Titans, twenty-nine years after the release of the original film in 1981 which was also Ray Harryhausen’s last feature film before retiring. Although he was sixty-one at the time and did share the work with other animators, he had by no means lost his touch. In fact, some may argue that the animation in Clash of the Titans is among his best and most complex. The film is based upon the story of Perseus, mortal son of the god Zeus, and his quest to save Andromeda from being sacrificed to the Kraken. The film boasts an array of characters like the flying horse Pegasus, the Kraken, giant scorpions, Perseus’ sworn enemy, the half-human, half-satyr Calibos, a giant vulture, and what many people consider (myself included) the crown jewel of the film: Perseus’ deadly confrontation with Medusa, the Gorgon.

In Medusa Ray created a true horror based upon the creature of legend. In his research he saw that through centuries of artistic recreations, she was always portrayed as a beautiful woman with a head full of writhing snakes in the place of hair, and adorned in a flowing gown of some sort. Ray went in another direction. He created a reptilian creature with a serpentine body complete with rattlesnake tail. As if her ability to turn mortal men into stone with her gaze was not scary enough, Ray incorporated one more detail—he armed her with a bow and arrow and a very nasty temperament, creating in the process one of the most frightening screen characters ever.

The 2010 version of Clash of the Titans will not be using the Dynamation process perfected by Ray Harryhausen. The film will be using CGI, computer-generated images first made popular in 1993’s Jurassic Park. Ray had been asked what he thought of CGI and he commented that he wasn’t too impressed. To him, the images were too lifelike. He said had King Kong been done in CGI when he first saw it in 1933, he probably would not have been interested in special effects and may very well have ended up in plumbing.

The folks at Believe It Tour are wondering if you’ve seen the old Clash of the Titans movie or the remake yet? If you’ve seen both what do you think about Harry Harryhausen’s vision as opposed to CGI that’s used for the new movie? Let us know what you think.