Ray Harryhausen An Animated Life History Book (SIGNED EDITION)

Hardcover 304 pages

Inspired by the film "King Kong", at the age of 13 Ray Harryhausen knew his future lay in special effects. Following on from his mentor Willis O'Brien, creator of Kong, Ray took the art and skill of stop-motion animation one step further, weaving his magic on dinosaurs, aliens and mythological creatures alike. From humble beginnings working in his father's garage animating a selection of Fairy Tales, to blockbuster movies on location in the Yemen, Italy, Malta and Spain, Ray has seen and done it all. The last great animator before the introduction of CGI, he takes us through the pleasures and pitfalls of 60 years' bringing inanimate objects to life. Learn how Raquel Welch was picked up by a flying dinosaur in "One Million Years BC", why the octopus in "Mysterious Island" was only a sixtopus, and what Medusa's blood was made from in "Clash of the Titans". From the flying harpies in "Jason and the Argonauts" to battling skeletons in the śth Voyage of Sinbad", Ray explains the films' journeys, from original concept through to the critics' reviews. Anecdotal, insightful and honest, "An Animated Life" features hundreds of photographs from Ray's personal archive. It explains the basics of special effects and stop-motion animation, what working with the film stars of the day was like (Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and Lionel Jeffries to name but a few) and how his creations were really the stars of the movies.

REVIEW OF: RAY HARRYHAUSEN: AN ANIMATED LIFE HARDCOVER BOOK

Book Review by Joe Fordham

Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life is a rare entity. Despite its considerable bulk, the book is immensely readable, a hoot from front to back, as well as a treasure trove of imagery and reference material. As anyone who has stood in line to meet the man will attest, Harryhausen is a bright and witty storyteller, with a craftsman's passion for film and an intolerance for interfering producers. All the anecdotes are here -- the 'sixtopus' from It Came From Beneath the Sea and, at last, the real story of how he choreographed seven sword-fighting skeletons. Throughout, the narrative enthralls and captivates.

"What is there to be said that is new about Ray Harryhausen?" asks writer Ray Bradbury in his forward to the current book by his life-long friend. The answer, as chronicled by stop-motion legend Harryhausen and film historian Tony Dalton in Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, is quite a lot -- 304 glossy pages crammed with text, photographs, film posters, diagrams and sketches -- many previously unpublished from Harryhausen's personal archives.

The book, which appeared last November in the United Kingdom -- where Harryhausen has resided for decades -- has now been released in the United States with considerable fanfare and a full-blown book tour by the author. This is Harryhausen's second book, following the slim, technically deficient Film Fantasy Scrapbook -- which first appeared in 1972, with revisions in 1974 and 1981 -- a mostly-pictorial guide to creatures that have populated the effects maestro's films. An Animated Life towers over that. The book is part confessional -- revealing techniques never previously divulged by their creator -- and part love letter to a craft that Harryhausen describes in meticulous prose as 'dimensional animation.'

Bradbury sets the tone in his spirited introduction. Tony Dalton's preface continues in similar vein, recounting his 30-year friendship with Harryhausen -- almost half the length of time Bradbury has known him -- and outlines his journey into the archives of the British Film Institute, where much of his research material was obtained. The book is an exhaustive historical study, five years in the making, covering the production of every one of Harryhausen's films, written by the man himself with the support of close contemporaries.

While fans may be familiar with the films described, Harryhausen is quick to shoot down frequently printed fallacies, such as the origin of the material used to skin his first animated creature, the title character in Cavebear in 1935 -- not purloined illicitly from his mother's favorite fur coat! He also goes to pains to place his peers in context -- tracing how his first employer and mentor, Willis O'Brien, made the transition from sculptor in a San Francisco marble shop to the creator of King Kong -- and outlining his own lineage.

Fred and Martha Harryhausen are pictured as the loving parents of a strange, but talented only child in pre-World War II Los Angeles, assisting their son in fabricating miniature costumes, props and creature armatures, as long as their manual dexterity remained. Harryhausen lists other early influences -- including the fiction of H.G. Wells, the art of Gustav Dor鬠John Martin and Charles R. Knight -- touchstones that remained with him his entire career, as illustrated in atmospheric pencil and charcoal creature concepts, from his earliest student renderings to Force of the Trojans, an unrealized project that was to have followed his 1981 swan song, Clash of the Titans.

Unrealized projects abound in the back pages of the book, which contains a catalogue of 53 'Lost Worlds,' including some titles now in development by present-day filmmakers. Harryhausen relates how he decided J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit was not suitable for a live-action/dimensional-animation treatment, then adds: "How wrong I was!" Harryhausen also recalls how, following The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, he and producer Charles H. Schneer discussed, and rejected, the idea of doing an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars: "We felt the story simply wasn't strong enough." Harryhausen states the unrealized project he most wanted to pursue was The War of the Worlds, retaining H.G. Wells' Victorian setting. The book contains illustrations of Harryhausen's proposals for the film, which he submitted to producer George Pal in 1950, before learning that Pal had already been in discussions with Paramount to mount a contemporary adaptation.

A chronological filmography follows, listing Harryhausen's short films, television commercials, documentaries for the Army Signal Corps and 16 feature films. Harryhausen and Dalton then supply a glossary of filmmaking terms, which are quite poetic in their descriptions of photochemical and stop-motion paraphernalia. Digital artists should take note as Harryhausen reveals methods by which he rigged saucers to fly in his 1956 production Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers -- physically hand-painting wires prior to exposing every frame to render them invisible. Unfortunately, the book then concludes without an index to provide easy reference for this compendium of a lifetime's achievement.

From: