When we last spoke to legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, he had just finished The Tortoise and the Hare, the last in a series of six animated fairy tales he started producing more than fifty years ago. Now all of the fairy tales are available on DVD, along with some other early works and never-before-seen material, in a scrumptious treasure trove titled Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years. We had the pleasure of again speaking with Mr. Harryhausen recently while he was in southern California promoting the new release.
"It’s unusual, isn’t it?" Harryhausen says of the DVD. "I think it will spread through the general public more than just the fans because the fairy tales are good for every child." He implies that his short films based on Mother Goose tales and Aesop fables possess a kind of charm missing in today’s childrens programs, saying, "Now it’s all slam-bang, cat and mouse and that sort of thing."
Harryhausen notes that he had to tone down some of the elements in the classic stories to make them more appropriate for screening in schools, where they have enjoyed quite a long run. Still, his wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is a fierce, realistically animated harbinger of Harryhausen beasts to come. "Yeah, but have you read the original [story]?" he asks. "The wolf eats Grandma and Red Riding Hood, and in the end he gets cut open and they step out. You could hardly show that bloody mess."
All the fairy tales were lovingly restored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since most of the negatives were in rough condition. "They look like they were made just yesterday," states Harryhausen. "They blew them up to 35mm as well since they were originally shot on 16mm Kodachrome."
The Early Years DVD includes a behind-the-scenes featurette on the completion of Tortoise and the Hare. Much like a young Harryhausen toiling away in his parent’s garage, animators Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh can be seen bringing his original, 50-year-old puppets back to life in the garage studio they were using in Burbank at the time. There are some really cool time-lapse photography shots in which the animators dart about at lightning speed while the puppets seem to move in real time. Harryhausen himself can even be spotted working on a shot for the film, his first since retiring with 1981’s Clash of the Titans.
Harryhausen says some interesting surprises turned up while he and producer Arnold Kunert were putting the DVD together. "We discovered new pieces of film in my mother’s garage, so we tacked that onto the end of the second DVD. It was some footage I’d forgotten I made," he says, referring to some real estate commercials he made featuring an animated character named Kenny Key.
The garage expedition also turned up an alternate ending to How to Bridge a Gorge, an animated WWII training film he produced during a stint in the Army. While the found footage had been fairly well preserved, some of it had to be restored as well. The pieces were also re-scored by composers John Morgan and William Stromberg.
When you watch the Army films, How to Bridge a Gorge and Guadalcanal, you’ll notice that vehicles, artillery and supplies move around by themselves, as if controlled by some magical force. "I didn’t want to show human characters," Harryhausen recalls. "The main thing was to demonstrate how stop-motion could be used in training films." Other bits of movie magic in those seminal films include explosive effects, which, in the days before AfterEffects, he had to cleverly create in camera using homemade squibs and other techniques. "I had to invent them all because there were no books on the subject at that time."
While Harryhausen survived his experiments with explosives, he’s concerned about stop-motion’s survival in this era of computer animation. "There’s so much hype on CGI that everybody thinks everything else should be discarded, he comments. "But I think different subject matter requires different techniques." He says he is very impressed with the footage he’s seen of Tim Burton’s upcoming Halloween release, Corpse Bride, and feels that the traditional art form is on the verge of being rediscovered.
Asked if he is going to be doing any more animation himself, Harryhausen replies, "I don’t know. I may. It’s in the lap of the Gods, let’s put it that way. I still enjoy it."
A must-have for any Harryhausen fan or stop-motion aficionado, Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years is available now from distributor Sparkhill (www.sparkhilldvd.com). The multi-region DVD set runs 233 minutes and carries a suggested retail price of $29.95.
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