Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts features Todd Armstrong and Nancy Kovak, but the personal stamp that lingers is Ray Harryhausen’s. The vision, the art, is embodied by his beasts.
The term motion picture is a misnomer. The movies don't move at all: We only think they do. Still images projected in succession, 24 of them every second, fool our eyes into seeing motion where there isn't any, like a flip book – a useful little magic trick we call "persistence of vision." That's why the idea of "stop-motion" is so amusing. For this classic technique a camera "is repeatedly stopped and started, for example to give animated figures the impression of movement," according to my OED. Still images projected in succession, in other words. Sound familiar? That's just cinema. All movies are stop-motion movies.
It isn't animation that distinguishes stop-motion as we ordinarily think of it – it's what's being animated. Persistence of vision is applied quite readily to people, who require only a camera to film them as they effectively animate themselves; our movements are natural, no intervention necessary. But just try to get plasticine moving. The plasticene warriors and monstrous beasts that populate the world of a stop-motion luminary such as Ray Harryhausen weren't simply switched on or captured. They were invigorated by his patient hand. Harryhausen's tools were models and puppets and all manner of objects benign. Through painstaking labour he vivified them, adjusting limbs and appendages millimetrically for hours or days at a time.
A Harryhausen effect is a wondrous thing. The serpent woman of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the hydra of Jason and the Argonauts, the giant octopus of It Came from Beneath the Sea: These still look marvellous, a half-century on. The only apt response to these creatures is awe.
"That's the genius of Ray Harryhausen," agrees filmmaker John Landis, a long-time friend of Harryhausen's and one of the animator's most eminent fans. Landis – director of The Blues Brothers and National Lampoon's Animal House, among other classics – will be in Toronto on Wednesday to present a master class on Jason and the Argonauts and 20 Million Miles to Earth this week as part of TIFF's Magic Motion: The Art of Stop-Motion Animation program. "He creates a sense of wonder. To me that is an incredible thing."
For me, though, the awe of seeing a beast brought to life is inseparable from the awe of the effort that went into it. Stop-motion is an extraordinarily demanding craft – one that needs almost stoical composure and determination. So when I'm watching, say, Medusa in Clash of the Titans, I'm astonished as much by the skill and tenacity I can sense behind it as I am by the elegance of the effect.
I asked Landis if he felt the evident workmanship was part of Harryhausen's appeal. "I hope not!" he says with a laugh. "You shouldn't see the sweat. When you see Talos, in Jason and the Argonauts, you shouldn't be thinking how artful the puppeteering is. You should be thinking, 'Wow! Look at that guy!'"
That was how Landis was introduced to Harryhausen's work – as a wonderstruck child. "I saw The 7th Voyage of Sinbad when I was eight years old," he explains. "I was there on that beach fighting that Cyclops. I just loved the movie." And the effect was quite lasting. After the film, Landis turned to his mother with a question about what he'd just seen: "Who does that? Who makes the movie?" "The director," she replied. So he resolved to be one.
It's widely agreed that Harryhausen was a singular effects artist, and his stop-motion work is instantly recognizable. Landis insists the artistry extends further.
"You could make the argument that Ray is the auteur of his films," he says, "regardless of the director or his collaborators."
It's true that nobody thinks of Nathan Juran's 7th Voyage of Sinbad or Don Chaffey's Jason and the Argonauts. The personal stamp that lingers is Harryhausen's. The vision, the art, is embodied by his beasts.
The beasts are old now, naturally. Stop-motion itself is an antique: once cutting-edge, long enduring, but outmoded in the era of the digital effect. For Landis, though, Harryhausen's models and puppets are not inherently superior to what can be dreamed up on a computer. His craft isn't special merely because of the tools. "I'm constantly asked if old school is better," Landis says. "But the truth is, these are just tools. You react to CGI negatively when it's shitty. When CGI is done well, you can't say it'd be better as a puppet. Tools are tools. It's not that one is better than the other. It's what works for that moment."
Harryhausen's effects worked in the moment – and they ought to endure not out of some nostalgia for a bygone era but because they are tremendous efforts of craft and style. "The amazing thing about Ray is that it's all really hands-on," Landis says. "He is, frame by frame, manipulating these puppets. It's incredible how much emotion and character he can put into these things – this rubber and fur, these metal skeletons. It's an incredible accomplishment."
How Harryhausen achieved this has certainly dated; the form has passed into obsolescence, become a relic of another time. And yet no matter how old the technique gets, the effect of the monsters in the moment remains fascinating. That aspect is elemental. "Tools change," Landis puts it. "Storytelling doesn't."
John Landis will discuss Jason and the Argonauts on Dec. 2 at the Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Magic in Motion: The Art of Stop-Motion Animation runs through Jan. 3 (tiff.net).