Entertainment

MOVIES: The man who made fighting skeletons and other scary creatures will speak in Dallas

07:18 AM CST on Thursday, March 30, 2006

By MATT WEITZ / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

He has created monsters, moon-men, gods, demons and even warrior skeletons. But on the phone from his home in London, stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen doesn't seem like a dark or even fanciful guy.

Rather, as he discusses his career of more than 60 years as a special-effects pioneer, he radiates grandfatherly enthusiasm and charm that might come from a character in one of the stories by his best friend, Ray Bradbury.

Retrospectives such as the just-released The Art of Ray Harryhausen (Billboard Books, $50) sometimes sit like tombstones atop their subject, but there's nothing about the 85-year-old – who received his life's mission when he saw the original King Kong – that suggests anything other than an artist still at the top of his game.

Perhaps that's a testimony to the curative properties of a life spent doing what you truly love. One thing that The Art of Ray Harryhausen – full of sketches, plans and photos – makes abundantly clear is that the stop-motion animation techniques he mastered require a lot of work.

"That's because no one was interested in the technical aspects of what I wanted to do," explains Mr. Harryhausen, who will be in Dallas today for a sold-out speaking engagement and book signing at the Angelika Film Center. "I preferred to sculpt, but to create these moving sculptures I had to learn to draw, study anatomy, make the armatures and study photography and editing."

Millions have thrilled to Mr. Harryhausen's creations in movies such as Mighty Joe Young (1949), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Clash of the Titans (1981). His technique of photographing minute movements of detailed models gave extraordinary creatures a cinematic presence that looked real yet retained a sense of the fantastic.

"If you make something too realistic, you make it mundane," he says of the unique visual qualities of his method. "Stop-motion is an excellent way to add energy and life to fantasy subjects."

No young moviegoer with images of Gwangi, the Ymir or the Medusa burned into his brain is likely to dispute that, but of all his efforts, Mr. Harryhausen still has some favorites.

Of note is Jason and the Argonauts, the 1963 film that features the battling skeletons that he says is "the most complete."

"But Clash is also special – I love Greek mythology and was getting tired of destroying cities with monsters."

In an industry in which creative people seem to suffer the most, Mr. Harryhausen's sunny disposition is surprising.

"You've got to realize that filmmaking is all about compromise – with the weather, the light, the props," he says, illustrating his point with a story from The Valley of Gwangi (1969). He'd imagined a battle royal between a rampaging T. Rex and a circus elephant, and so he ordered a live one for the movie.

"I'd envisioned this animal as about 15 feet tall, and when the train arrived – the day before the scenes were to be shot – off comes this skinny little elephant that wasn't even 6 feet tall. It was a shock. We had to decide to animate his part right there, on the spot."

Since those days, he has taken great care to preserve his work, though some of the photos in Art show that time is slowly wearing away his legacy.

"It's fine stuff, but it'll rot in time," he says, paraphrasing from James Whale's The Old Dark House and explaining why his current efforts are in bronze. "Rubber isn't stable, and I wanted to cast some of my characters in a more enduring medium."

Thus we now have statues of memorable monsters such as Talos, the giant statue from Jason; the Kraken, the aquatic scourge from Clash ; and even a 1 ½-times-life-size statue of the explorer David Livingstone in a park in Scotland.

But Mr. Harryhausen's not done dreaming yet.

"I've always wanted to be involved with a truly heroic bronze," he says a bit wistfully. "I'd love to help rebuild the Colossus of Rhodes."

E-mail mweitz@dallasnews.com

Ray Harryhausen speaks about his life and career tonight at 7 at the Angelika Film Center, 5321 E. Mockingbird. Sold out. Go to www.abunchofshortguys.com for more information.