26 Facts About Ray Harryhausen

Raymond Frederick Harryhausen was an American-British animator and special effects creator who created a form of stop motion model animation known as "Dynamation".

Ray Harryhausen's works include the animation for Mighty Joe Young with his mentor Willis H O'Brien ; his first color film, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad ; and Jason and the Argonauts, which featured a sword fight with seven skeleton warriors.

In 1960, Harryhausen moved to the United Kingdom and became a dual American-British citizen.

Ray Harryhausen lived in London until his death in 2013.

In November 2016 the BFI compiled a list of those present-day filmmakers who claim to have been inspired by Ray Harryhausen, including Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Joe Dante, Tim Burton, Nick Park, James Cameron, and Guillermo del Toro.

Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Science Fiction League, Bradbury in 1937, Ray Harryhausen in 1939, where they met Forrest J Ackerman; and the three became lifelong friends.

In 1947, Ray Harryhausen was hired as an assistant animator on what turned out to be his first major film, Mighty Joe Young.

The filmmakers learned that a long-time friend of Harryhausen, writer Ray Bradbury, had sold a short story called "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" to The Saturday Evening Post, about a dinosaur drawn to a lone lighthouse by its foghorn.

Ray Harryhausen was always heavily involved in the pre-production conceptualizing of each film's story, script development, art-direction, design, storyboards, and general tone of his films, as much as any auteur director would have on any other film, which any "director" of Ray Harryhausen's films had to understand and agree to work under.

The complexities of the Directors Guild of America's rules prevented Ray Harryhausen from being credited as the director of his films, resulting in the more modest credits he had in most of his films.

Ray Harryhausen's father did the machining of the metal armatures that were the skeletons for the models and allowed them to keep their position, while his mother assisted with some miniature costumes.

O'Brien again hired Ray Harryhausen to help with animation to complete the eight-minute sequence.

Ray Harryhausen then returned to Columbia and Charles Schneer to make 20 Million Miles to Earth, about an American spaceship returning from the planet Venus.

Ray Harryhausen refined and improved his already-considerable ability at establishing emotional characterizations in the face of his Venusian Ymir model, creating yet another international box office hit.

Reluctant at first, Ray Harryhausen managed to develop the systems necessary to maintain proper color balances for his DynaMation process, resulting in his biggest hit of the 1950s, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

The top-grossing film of that summer, and one of the top-grossing films of that year, Schneer and Ray Harryhausen signed another deal with Columbia for four more color films.

Only a handful of Ray Harryhausen's features have been set in then-present time, and none in the future.

Ray Harryhausen was then hired by Hammer Films to animate the dinosaurs for One Million Years BC.

Ray Harryhausen next went on to make another dinosaur film, The Valley of Gwangi with Schneer.

Schneer and Ray Harryhausen finally were allowed by MGM to produce a big budget film with name actors and an expanded effects budget.

Ray Harryhausen himself says the reason was that he worked in Europe, but this oversight by the AMPAS visual-effects committee occurred throughout the 1950s when Ray Harryhausen lived in Los Angeles.

Ray Harryhausen appears as a bar patron in Beverly Hills Cop III, and as a doctor in the John Landis film Spies Like Us.

Ray Harryhausen personally supervised the colorization of three films, two of them in partial tribute to their producer Merian C Cooper, who had supervised King Kong, the film that inspired him as a young man: The Most Dangerous Game, She, and the non-Cooper film Things to Come.

The BBC quoted Peter Lord of Aardman Animations, who wrote on Twitter that Ray Harryhausen was "a one-man industry and a one-man genre".

Ray Harryhausen was the man who made me believe in monsters.

The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of Ray Harryhausen's films, including Guadalcanal, How to Bridge a Gorge, and The Story of Hansel and Gretel.