Stop motion visual effects master Ray Harryhausen died yesterday in London.
Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation. Over the period of the next 46 years, he made some of the genres best known movies – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), MYSTERIUOUS ISLAND (1961), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THER VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), three films based on the adventures of SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). He is perhaps best remembered for his extraordinary animation of seven skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) which took him three months to film.
In a career spanning more than half a century, Harryhausen brought a new level of imagination to movies, and influenced generations of visual effects artists. The video here is The Ray Harryhausen Creature List, featuring his stop-motion characters in chronological order. Harryhausen was 92. Link
I love Ray's movies and that clip of bits of his movies make me want to have a Harryhausen movie weekend!