As giant monsters crawl out of the ocean to rampage on the big screen again, you have to wonder how many of these new creature features will stand the test of time, as the films of master stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen have. To ensure that new generations will embrace such classics as It Came from Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, all three pics have been colorized with Harryhausen’s supervision and re-released on DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Fans can purchase them individually or wait until the Ray Harryhausen in Color Gift Set, which will include a 6-inch replica of the Ymir creature from 20 Million Miles to Earth debuts in June. Purists need not fear as the original black-and-white versions are also included on each disc.
In advance of the upcoming release of the gift set, we spoke with Harryhausen about the colorization process, the popularity of monster movies, remakes and other aspects of his amazing career in fantastic cinema.
Animation Magazine Online: What do you say to fans who are against colorizing classic films?
Ray Harryhausen: I know, but we would have shot it in color but we didn’t have the budget. With the new color process, it looks like it was shot in color. Legend Films has developed it into an art, I think. I worked with [creative director/senior designer] Rosemary Hovrath very closely and we colorized She, Merian C. Cooper’s 1935 version. Cooper wanted to shoot it in color but they cut his budget at the last minute.
AMO: Budgets were a problem especially for sci-fi movies and creature features back then. Now they’re mainstream fare and are being made for hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you feel about that?
RH: I get a lot of fan mail saying they prefer our pictures. I’m so grateful that our pictures, which were considered B movies at the time because they were low budget, have outlasted so many so-called A pictures. A lot of movies where they invested ten times what we invested in our pictures, you never hear of them again.
AMO: We’ve recently seen Transformers and Cloverfield, two films about giant things that tear a city apart, and you all but created that whole genre.
RH: Yeah, we tried to. But I think they’re more appreciated today than they were when they were first released. All we did was make the picture the best way we knew how. They were looked down upon for some reason, I don’t know why.
AMO: I think your films endure because there’s clearly a singular vision behind the fantastic visuals you created. We don’t really have that these days when there are whole armies of people working on visual effects.
RH: I know. I did it all by myself [laughs].
AMO: You got behind the colorization process because you believe it will help bring your films to a whole new generation. What were some interesting things you encountered during the technical process?
RH: Sometimes when I’m away, over here [England], they’ll send me things to be approved. We had a problem with the death ray in Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers. We tried to make it look extra-terrestrial. We didn’t want it look like anything we knew about on Earth.
AMO: With 20 million Miles to Earth, the Ymir animation model was painted a certain color, even though it was shot black-and-white. Did you try to match that original color?
RH: We tried to, yes. It was on the green side.
AMO: Your work was greatly inspired by Willis O’Brien’s animation in the original King Kong, a movie that still holds up 75 years later. What did you think of Peter Jackson’s remake?
RH: It had some good effects and was beautifully made, but it was a different concept. Nobody who goes to see a movie called King Kong is going to be that interested in Ann Darrow’s past and her juggling. The beauty of the original is that it was so compact. ‘Is this the motion picture ship?’ That was the first line of dialogue, and that set the whole scene. It was a well-made film, but a different approach than the original.
AMO: Some of your own films have been remade over the years. Jason and the Argonauts was redone for television.
RH: It took them four hours to tell the same tale we told in an hour and a half. They keep talking about remaking Clash of the Titans and I can’t understand why. They say, ‘We’re going to make it realistic.’ Well, you can’t make a fantasy and a mythology realistic. It defeats the whole point of a mythology.
