The Great Artist of Fantasy Cinema

“If you make the fantasy too real, I think it loses the quality of the nightmare or a dream”

This is the quote from the master himself that I think provides the framework for examining and looking at the body of work that Ray Harryhausen used to remake fantasy cinema. Few of these films can be exemplified as top-level masterworks, but they endure because of the primal power of the arcane and imaginative stop-motion effects work. Harryhausen could give life to the extraordinary, finding ways to give distinct personality to a menagerie of prehistoric beasts, mythological creatures, and fantastical nightmares.

While you’ll only find his name among the craftsmen on a vast majority of the films he worked on, he was the true auteur behind them all. No one really remembers who directed 20 Million Miles to Earth or The Valley of Gwangi, yet they remember the alien Ymir and titular Allosaurus. That is the power and dynamism of Harryhausen’s artistry. His creatures are often the most emotive and complex figures in his B-movie entertainments. There’s great joy to be found in popcorn cinema, and I was only to happy to spend this entire month watching his various films, both features and shorts.

When he died in 2013, I felt a distinct sense of loss and closure for a piece of my childhood nostalgia. It was a bit strange given that his final film was 1981’s Clash of the Titans, released six years before I was born. But I grew up wearing out the VHS tapes of Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad trilogy, and Mighty Joe Young at my aunt’s house over the summers of my youth. These films didn’t look or behave like the newer ones, and something about the artisanal quality of the folkloric fauna just mesmerized me. The seams show, but the technical bravado is transporting and the stuff that powers the fevered imagination of a bookish, shy, creative child.  

Perhaps I felt a strange kindred spirit with Ray Harryhausen, and that was what kept me coming back to his work even at that young age. I too was awed by King Kong at a young age, and watched it over and over to the point of obsession wondering how exactly they did that. I too had a deep love for the Greek myths, for fairy tales and world mythology, for anything populated with monsters and creepy-crawly beasts. This man was breathing life into my peculiar interests, and I didn’t learn his name until I was much, much older. But I feel as if I owe him so much for the hours of joy he’s brought me, and so I wanted to spend a month watching everything of his that I could find.

I would like to first discuss the various short films that he made as one group, so let’s begin!

SHORT FILMS

1942’s “Tulips Shall Grow” is Ray Harryhausen’s first solo outing as animator, despite being uncredited. The short gives thematic weight and artistic design to the phrase “hope springs eternal.” It tells a story about a young Dutch boy and girl romancing each other in a storybook Eden before mechanical screws render it a wasteland, only for cosmic justice and divine intervention to restore this autumnal paradise. It is not subtle in its political convictions, but it is gorgeous to look at.

Harryhausen’s genius is all over this production. The entire short resembles Fisher Price’s Little People toys running around in a pop-up book. But it’s the antagonists that impress the most. The Screwballs, goose-stepping mechanical monsters invading and terrorizing our young lovers, are eccentric designs with the ability to seemingly change their physiological makeup on a whim. Their warplanes resemble the exoskeletons of an avian creature, and tanks are dropped from the sky with umbrellas to gently land before causing chaos. If the political allegory gets heavy-handed, and it does frequently, then at least “Tulips Shall Grow” offers a variety of quirky sights to enthrall.

Beginning in 1946, Harryhausen set about making several short films based on famous Mother Goose rhymes, fairy tales, and Aesop fables for elementary schools. The first one, “Mother Goose Stories” (or “The Storybook Review,”depending on where you’ve learned the title), is a ten minute short encompassing four different nursery rhymes, complete and unabridged.

Stop-motion animation was not as fluid as it is now, so watching these is a bit jarring for the limited movements and distinct impression that their faces are melting when they change expression. It’s not just this misty-faced emotive performing that’s disarming, but the gleeful way that Harryhausen animates the more violent and hallucinatory parts of these rhymes.

It begins innocently enough with a storybook opening to reveal a kindly Mother Goose and a pet goose that follows her around. This Mother Goose looks less like an old-timey librarian than what happened when your kindergarten teacher dressed up as a witch for Halloween, but a kindly one. She shows us the four stories that we’ll be watching (“Little Miss Muffet,” “Old Mother Hubbard,” “The Queen of Tarts,” and “Humpty Dumpty”), pulls out a film projector, and off we go.

“Humpty Dumpty” is the obvious highlight here, a completely innocuous series of images that add up to something approaching a feverish nightmare. A gigantic egg vibrates of its own violition, magically grows eyes and a mouth, then sprouts limbs (and clothing) to go along with it. He climbs up the wall, and his movements are like watching a drunk trying to walk a tightrope and his success is short lived. Then we witness his fall, from a camera planted on the ground so that he lands beneath the frame and the shell fragments fly across the bottom. The sight of the knight holding the various pieces of Humpty calls to mind trying to glue back together a piece of china that’s shattered.

The other vary in quality, with “Miss Muffet” being acceptable, “Old Mother Hubbard” being weirder than you remember it, and “The Queen of Tarts” a few minutes of filler with an overly sexy queen and a pervy-looking king. It all ends with Mother Goose making the projector disappear, climbing back into the book, and closing it behind her. Sweet dreams, kids.

I first encountered “The Story of Little Red Riding Hood” on a VHS tape collecting hundreds of cartoons from the public domain. Sandwiched in-between Little Audrey, Felix the Cat, Mighty Mouse, and Fleischer Studios cartoons were these strange, slightly kitsch, semi-terrifying fairy tales that stood out for their herky-jerky animation and joyous expressions of terror and violence.

Granted, “Little Red Riding Hood” does tame down the sexuality of the story to the point where it’s all but been extinguished. Same goes for some of the more nihilistic and gore-filled moments of the tale. The wolf doesn’t get cut open here, nor does his stomach get filled with rocks, but he does get shot and make a quick escape. He may or may not die off-screen, that much remains unclear.

Yet it’s the wolf that impresses the most about this short. We’re sacked with Red and her forced happy ending, but that wolf possess more magnetic charm than anything else and I wouldn’t have complained if he devoured her whole and ran off into the woods. The wolf looks like what would happen if a Smilodon and a brown mutt performed cross-species mating. His large canine teeth barely fit in his head, and he leers with menace and the threat of violence at any second.  

This comes to a head in the climax where he chases Red up the stairs of her grandma’s house, only to grab hold of the banister and begin walking on his hind legs. The wolf stop being a cartoon of a real animal and starts drifting into horror film territory, looking like a crazed werewolf about to carve into its prey. And it it is this life-giving talent for monstrous creations that would make Harryhausen’s career a definitive example of boundless imagination merging with virtuoso technique in the years to come.

“The Story of Rapunzel” is probably the weakest of these fairy tale shorts. Not for any particular reason other than the lack of a truly memorable villain to make it all worth the trip. Of course this can be traced back to the source material. The fairy tale drops the witch quickly and then continues on with our tragic lovers finding each other in the desert wilderness before running off into the sunset.

Once more, the best thing about this short is the big bad. The witch doesn’t get nearly enough time, but her hunched body posture and more feral movements in contrast to the marionette-like qualities of Rapunzel and her prince. In fact, like many of of these shorts, Rapunzel and the prince resemble an Edgar Bergen puppet more than anything else with their apple cheeks, large eyes, and enormous teeth. They have as much personality as the clay and felt that they’re made from, and emote just as well.

Released the same year as “Rapunzel,” “The Story of Hansel and Gretel” is a marked improvement by creating a sustained atmosphere of dread throughout its ten short minutes then ending in a bittersweet happy ending. The innocence is forever lost in the dewy youth of Hansel and Gretel, but at least they didn’t get turned into a witch’s banquet. even better is how thoroughly definitive the animation gets in developing personality and individual characters.

While Hansel and Gretel still look like Edgar Bergen’s castoff puppets, and frankly like shrunken middle-aged frumps rather than elementary school aged children, their father is a study in haunted, worried paternal love. His body language is broken and fraught with despair, the never-ending poverty and worry about his children’s health and welfare etched into his face. While the wicked step-mother is missing, the nasty witch remains a frightening presence stomping around the forest. While her red eyes and teal skin, she lords over Hansel while he sits in a candy cane chair, slowly studying him before violently grabbing him and throwing his body into a cage. The witch is a ghoulish piece of work, a leering she-devil that erupts into puffs of sparkles when Gretel sends her back into the inferno.

Even better are some of the smaller moments, like the witch creating the candy-and-gingerbread house to lure Hansel and Gretel into her demonic hands. A large pile of sugar spreads out across the forest floor, then evaporates up before the house pops into view. And the two forest creatures are amusing little side attractions, with the hungry duck munching away on the bread crumbs an obvious delight. The problem still remains of the faces sometimes appearing to blur into various emotions, but Ray Harryhausen’s artistry is clearly growing by leaps and bounds. This witch is scarier than Rapunzel’s, and yet another marker on the way towards more memorable screen creations yet to come in just a few short years.

All of these fairy tale adaptations have flirted with terrifying images, but “The Story of King Midas” gives us a warlock that looks like Nosferatu manifesting from a loose golden coin in a puff of smoke. This creature of dark magic wouldn’t be out of place in one of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad movies or Jason and the Argonauts, but he’s a cracked visage of imperious and cruel fairy creatures here. It’s a minimalist knockout of Harryhausen creating mood and tension, character and ominous atmosphere through clever visual tricks and animation.

Just as great is the joy then slowly escalating terror in Midas as he realizes the truth and consequences of his greed and supernatural powers. It’s all fun and games transforming cups, torches, and flowers into golden objects, but once it turns his breakfast and sweet, young daughter, it all comes to a crashing halt. Then Midas sits alone at his table and weeps, a surprisingly tender and sympathetic portrait of a man’s hubris destroying him before the Nosferatu-lite warlock reappears and promises to undue all the damage.

“The Story of King Midas” is the strongest of the fairy tale shorts that Harryhausen directed in the late 40s/early 50s, and it was the last completed entry in the series prior to his ascendancy as a feature-length wizard of special effects and movie monsters. This wasn’t the last of the fairy tale/folklore adaptations though, one last entry, “The Tortoise and the Hare” begun in 1954 and uncompleted until 2002, remained something of an elusive subject for much of his career. Still, if this was the final one of these films, what a way to close them out.

First, a little bit of background information is in order. Begun as the sixth entry in his fairy tale series in 1952, “The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare” was abandoned once Ray Harryhausen realized there was more money in making movie monsters than there was in making short films for schools. Flash forward to 2002, two Harryhausen disciples, Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero, contact the master after hearing about his incomplete film, and ask to finish it for him. Despite this pronounced gap and change in directorial hands, the three men managed to make something charming and seamless.

“The Tortoise and the Hare” is a lively, positively lovely little movie with an adorable array of characters and detailed landscapes. It’s also worth noting that not only did this thing take fifty years to produce, but Harryhausen hadn’t worked on a film in twenty years by this point (Clash of the Titans being his swan song up to this point). For all of the history potentially working against the film, it makes like it’s slower hero and ends up a winner by the end.

Yes, the hare does have a strikingly similar appearance to a certain Looney Tunes brand character, and the fox looks quite a bit like he stepped out of Pinocchio, but no matter. That tortoise is an adorable little thing giving credence to Harryhausen’s defense of stop-motion animation; it’s both a real object and a clearly artificial construct creating a sense of fantasy built into the fabric of the film. The prior completed four minutes and the newly constructed six are indistinguishable from each other, and that is a high compliment. This would prove to be Harryhausen’s last completed work, and it’s nearly poetic how his career began and end with these fairy tale shorts. He was a maker of dreams, a creative genius in his field who inspired countless imaginations with his penchant for soulful terrors and frights. It’s nice to see a creator return to his gentler roots to say good-bye.

FEATURES

Mighty Joe Young arrived in cinemas sixteen years after King Kong terrorized the masses, and enthralled the young Ray Harryhausen’s imagination. In-between 1933 and 1949, Harryhausen managed to meet and tutor under Willis O’Brien, the special-effects wizard who brought Kong to life. O’Brien handed off much of the animation duties to Harryhausen while he handled figuring out how to make the effects work happen on a limited budget.

This film is a bit of a novelty, with many of the players in front and behind the camera from Kong reuniting to tell yet another story about an oversized gorilla. It’s a perfectly fine rainy day weekend charmer with its lone ambition seemingly to wow you with its impressive stop-motion animation. It succeeds at doing this, but the whole thing is inconsequential. The actors are wooden, the plot is barely there (Ben Johnson and Terry Moore engage in the limpest of love stories), and there’s an odd pile-up of cowboys, apes, studio-bound jungle sets, kitsch nightclubs, and several chase scenes.

Joe is more playful and sweet than Kong, and he exudes the most amount of personality in the entire movie. Hell, he even spits at his attackers during the final chase scene. Joe engages our deepest sympathies and empathy during his scenes of mistreatment while working as a nightclub act, literally becoming a performing monkey. He lacks the pathos and range of Kong, but he’s still a glorious artistic achievement. If Mighty Joe Young continues to linger in the popular consciousness, if it does at all, it’s more for historical import than its own merits. Even if he’s merely a hired-hand here, Harryhausen offers a glimpse of the charm, wit, and intelligence he would breathe into his future works.

The faux-dinosaur at the heart of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (dubbed Rhedosaurus) is the twisted atomic heart of an entire genre of films about gigantic monsters created or awakened by nuclear bombs. For all of the stilted dialog, slumberous pacing, and wooden acting, those big set pieces make the journey worth it. It’s brief running time taps into the Atomic Age paranoia by unleashing this super-beast to destroy civilization, only for civilization to eventually prove its undoing.

One of the best things about The Beast is the simplicity of plot and character development. There’s no moral quandaries here, just a zippy race through the big plot dumps and science pseudo-jargon to get us back to the big monster tearing shit up. It’s innocent nonsense and clearly in love with Ray Harryhausen’s charming lo-fi effects work.

Those special effects are a little dated, but they radiate with a curious imagination and dream-like terror. You can see how Jurassic Park’s T-Rex attacks echo the Rhedosaurus’ rampage through New York city, especially a bit where it leans down to eat a passerby, jerks its head from side to side, then swallows the poor guy. The Rhedosaurus is kept at a distance for the first 2/3 of the plot, then in the final act, all hell is unleashed. This last act makes the entire trip worth it, flaws and all, for the artistry of Harryhausen’s stop-motion creation. Its ultimate destruction in the ruins of a roller coaster ride is practically symbolic of the film itself, for what else could best describe this film than a thrill ride gone off the rails?

It is undoubtedly a classic of the genre, but a deeply flawed one. It’s charming to watch not just for the ways it lays the groundwork and all of the pieces for this genre, which Harryhausen made some of the best but by no means the majority of films in, but for its special effects. It’s wonky, but lovable in its giddy hokum. I frankly adored this dinosaur, and felt a childlike joy in watching it destroy a theme park. It was just too perfect and symbolically loaded for words.

It Came from Beneath the Sea is a step-up from The Beast in the acting and directing departments, but it’s still working out issues of pacing that later films would hammer out. It’s another run through “giant radiated beast rampages the city,” and I mean that as a positive notice on this piece of cinematic junk food. No one watches Harryhausen’s films for deep thinking exercises or challenging works of art. They’re pop cinema made up of equal parts theme park attraction and fantasy. The more propulsive they are, the more entertaining they are to watch.

The budgetary constraints do show here, and they trickle down to Harryhausen’s main attraction. A certain jerkiness is evident, and a few sequences feel rushed in order to keep the time and budget under control. At least Donald Curtis, Kenneth Tobey, and Faith Domergue are on-hand to play this purple material with a straight face. Domergue’s brainy-but-sexy professor is a refreshing heroine in that it’s her smarts that frequently save the day. There’s plenty to admire and like in It Came from Beneath the Sea, even if the entire package is a bit sloppy by even the admittedly loose standards of a B-movie.

The major problem with The Animal World, which which renders the film practically unwatchable today, can be traced directly back to this quote from Irwin Allen, the writer-director-producer of this nature documentary: “We don’t use the word “evolution.” We hope to walk a very thin line. On one hand we want the scientists to say this film is right and accurate, and yet we don’t want to have the church picketing the film.”

You can’t play this information both ways, especially if your goal is to show the progression of life over time. The Animal World is only notable by modern standards for a ten-minute sequence involving stop-motion dinosaurs animated by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. We various dinosaurs eating, laying eggs, fighting, and generally engaging in routine animalistic behavior, this sequence was Walking with Dinosaurs or Jurassic Park before either of those properties were even glimmers of artistic inspiration. This is the only part of the film anyone talks about or remembers, and with good reason. Harryhausen and O’Brien bring energy and true awe-inspiring artistic brio detailing these creatures and their ultimate destruction. Watch The Animal World for this section, that’s what everyone else does.

In light of Mars Attacks! it’s a bit difficult to watch Earth vs the Flying Saucers with a straight face, since Tim Burton’s homage/parody hybrid used it as the most obvious foundational subject. Still, once you get past that first batch of giggles, buckle up for a briskly paced piece of pulp science fiction in which death rays destroy D.C. and loads of military men. Please don’t come around here looking for brainy, politically-loaded science fiction around here, Earth vs the Flying Saucers merely wants to entertain and titillate with its steroidal B-movie charms.

While smarter contemporaries like Invasion of the Body Snatchers took Cold War paranoia (and good ol’ fashioned McCarthyism, which is making a disturbing resurgence of late) as a building block for a heavily symbolic nightmarish thrill-ride, Earth vs the Flying Saucers looks at that paranoia and imagines it ending in a parade of explosions and destruction. Rocket ships intended to collect information about the earth keep being knocked out of the atmosphere, and numerous locations around the world are reporting the appearance of UFOs hovering in the sky. Mounting dread and questions of “what if” lurk over these appearances as they’re quickly proven accurate and not the fevered imaginings of a hysterical public.

While prior Ray Harryhausen features played flirtatious with their monsters, keeping them hidden away until the money shots in the final reels, Earth vs the Flying Saucers lives up to its title by trotting them out within the opening minutes and routinely thereafter. From the knee-jerk military’s shoot-first reactions to the national monuments-go-boom finale, the flying saucers and aliens rain down death, destruction, and charm with their herky-jerky whirligig movements. The blueprints for future UFO invasion films like Independence Day is right here, although Harryhausen’s simplistic designs and creations are more memorable than many of those special-effects extravaganzas.

Harryhausen has stated that he preferred making movies based upon mythological stories in romantic pasts over his earlier science fiction amusements, and it shows in how anemic everything but the Venus-born reptilian monster are in 20 Million Miles to Earth. Despite being made of a wire armature and a clay exterior, the creature from 20 million miles away is the most expressive and unique performer in this routine science fiction adventure story.

Truthfully, the script problems are no more egregious or noticeable than the ones in any of the prior films, it’s just that William Hopper is possibly the worst leading man in any of these vehicles up to this point. He’s a charismatic vacuum and a steep comedown from Hugh Marlowe’s grounding, earnest work in Earth vs the Flying Saucers. Joan Taylor’s once again a smart, tough cookie, but quickly and unfairly sidelined through too much of the film AND sacked with a chemistry-less, totally unnecessary romantic subplot. Her earliest scenes have her calling out casual sexism, proving her smarts as she patches up wounded soldiers, and is the first person to run into the freshly hatched monster. If 20 Million Miles had proceeded to follow her around it would only improve as a film, but we’re sacked with the personality-free G.I. Joe instead.

So that brings us back to the whole point of this ridiculously overheated B-movie, the monster. Ymir, although never named properly in the film, exhibits the most personality and growth (both literally and figuratively) throughout the film. He emerges from a gelatinous cocoon about twenty minutes in, then continues to grow increasingly larger and destroy more and more property. Many of the images echo Mighty Joe Young and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, with the final scene being a direct lift from King Kong but without the deep empathy and air of tragedy that film invested into its fabric. Yet Harryhausen still creates a most impressive creature, capable of wagging its tail, breathing, thrashing under a net and exuding more natural charisma than many of the interchangeable human players.

There’s a liberating sense of wonderment and child-like awe in this adventure yarn, picking up with his story on a return home voyage with a fiancé and a promise of peace between kingdoms. This simplistic framework is the perfect vessel for Ray Harryhausen’s stellar effects work and imaginatively designed creatures. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is a non-stop spectacle of exotic sets, strange creatures, magical curses, a beautiful princess, and a handsome sailor. It’s the stuff of warmly nostalgic movie matinee memories.

If the prior films in Ray Harryhausen’s canon were fairly breakneck in their pacing, populated with a few wooden actors and far more memorable monsters, then The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is the first in a series of triumphs that bring in better actors, better scripts, and more monsters. Harryhausen’s films are best when they focus in on mythology and folklore, his science fiction films were fine and entertaining, but these films based on legendary characters are something truly special. Prior films featured maybe one or two creatures, but The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad would be the first to parade several in front of the camera.

We don’t focus on any one particular event for too long before we’re off to the next one, and this densely packed narrative is all the better for it. Think of it like the original King Kong, we fire through one extraordinary set piece after another in the name of entertainment. There’s more going on in this film’s slim 90-odd minutes than in a vast majority of modern day blockbusters. After all, we have encounters with a raging Cyclops, a cobra-woman, a fire-breathing dragon, a skeleton with a sword and shield, the two-headed roc bird, and those are just the ones that Harryhausen created.

If that list sounds exhausting or somehow overburdened, then you’ll be surprised just how fleet and nimble Sinbad is. Much of that credit needs to go to director Nathan Juran and the stars Kerwin Mathews and Torin Thatcher. Juran knows that the spectacle is the main attraction here, and provides ample amounts of it including the impressive sight of a Cyclops wading into the ocean to hurl rocks at an escaping Sinbad. Or the off-kilter way he imagines the inside of the genie’s lamp. Juran’s aided immeasurably by Mathews as Sinbad, knowing he’s a swashbuckling hero, a swoon-worthy matinee idol, and second-fiddle to the extravagance on display, he creates a stoic and appropriately heroic Sinbad. While Torin Thatcher slowly boils his performance from even-keeled and into straight-up theatrical hysterics as the magician Sokurah, who begins the film as an ally before becoming petty and spiteful over losing the magical lamp.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is the first truly pleasing Arabian Nights fantasy since the 1940 remake of The Thief of Bagdad. While it cannot compete with the perfection of that creation, it holds its own a lower-tier piece of whimsy and a bumper-crop of bang-for-your-buck entertainment. Look past leading lady Kathryn Grant’s stiff performance, ignore the fact that the film is light plot but heavy on ostentation, in fact, indulge in the fact that there’s a lightness of plotting and a heaviness of action-spectacle. It is all the grander and more engrossing for its simplicity, rightly stepping aside to make way for a series of Harryhausen creations that belong to the ages.

One of the least known entries in Ray Harryhausen’s canon, The Three Worlds of Gulliver keeps a lot of the sarcasm while spinning out an “all ages” piece of fluffy entertainment. It’s relatively light on the stop-motion maestro’s creature creations, but heavy on the glossy fantasy spectacle with loads of scenes of Gulliver interacting with the denizens of Lilliput and Brobdingnag. It’s a damn shame that this film wastes his talents, but there’s other reasons to watch and enjoy.

The Three Worlds of Gulliver is an incredible example of matte work done right, with scene after scene of Lemuel Gulliver (Kerwin Mathews) either towering over five-inch tall Lilliput citizens or being dwarfed by the giants in Brobdingnag. Either way, Harryhausen was in charge of all the effects on his major films, and one can be forgiven for composite work not immediately defaulting into your mind when you hear his name. While Gulliver only gives him two creatures to animate, a gigantic squirrel and a miniature alligator, they are exceptionally done, with the sixties being the decade during which Harryhausen’s artistry was at its peak.

Chiefly a matinee movie for a bored afternoon, Gulliver has several solid actors giving the material a wealth of pedigree and weight that it wouldn’t otherwise hold. This mainly rings true for Basil Sydney, Grégoire Aslan, Charles Lloyd-Pack, and Mary Ellis, while June Thorburn is wasted and awkward as the love interest. For all the scenery chewing of the British character actors, Kerwin Mathews is a bit too staid and a bit too self-righteous in a few scenes. He’s more good than bad, but while his bland handsomeness worked effectively for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad because he was merely a cipher for the succession of monsters, it doesn’t work as well in delivering this snappy dialog or monologues about knowledge and civility.

The script is stronger than many of Harryhausen’s other works, mainly thanks to that literary pedigree. There are bigger character developments at play here, with clearer goals in mind and strongest personalities. There’s also a strong sarcastic streak, borrowed over from Jonathan Swift’s original work and missing none of the political allegories or swipes at English culture. The ending is a bit of a heavy-handed let down though, as it involves Gulliver telling his love Elizabeth that inside of all of us is the capacity for pettiness and arrogance. After so much airy, colorful, humorous, special-effects heavy filmmaking, we’re smacked with social messaging and our lovers running off into the sunset. The Three Worlds of Gulliver is a charming throwaway that is smarter than it has any right to be, while still perhaps justifiably left in the lower-tier of Harryhausen’s work.

If you’re wondering why Ray Harryhausen was brought on a Jules Verne adaptation, look no further than two then-recent live-action adaptations from Disney. In 1954, they brought about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a still beloved piece of nostalgia that made piles of money and brought home two Oscars, and in 1960 they released Swiss Family Robinson, which also made piles upon piles of money. Columbia had the bright idea of taking a Jules Verne property, rushing it into production, and adding in Ray Harryhausen for good measure, despite the source material completely lacking in gigantic monsters.

It’s a good thing they decided to enliven the proceedings with Harryhausen’s stop-motion creatures, because otherwise there’s very little going on here to keep your interest. This is one of more anemic entries in Verne’s bibliography, and it bears little resemblance to the popular ideas about what its contents are. In fact, this film is probably the one that popularized the notion of the island being filled with humongous crabs, bees, prehistoric birds, and bits of mordant humor. For instance, after managing to knock the gigantic crab into a boiling geyser we’re treated to them lounging around the carcass discussing how tasty the meat was. A similar joke happens after the Phorusrhacos attack leads to a vaguely Thanksgiving looking scenario.

Not to say that there isn’t some art to be found in this breezy, goofy matinee picture. Harryhausen’s effects are consummate, with the Phorusrhacos and giant bee attacks being typically thrilling and fun pieces of pop entertainment from the master. These sequences, like so many others in Harryhausen’s filmography, is aided by a strong score from Bernard Hermann. Hermann translates the adventure, danger, excitement and whimsy of any given moment into his orchestrations. Just remember whenever the plot doesn’t make any sense (and it often doesn’t, but that’s practically beside the point) or when the acting waivers, there’s always another stop-motion creation around the corner and Hermann’s underscoring to entertain you.

Or there’s the handsome faces of Michael Craig and Michael Callan to stare at, the loveliness of Beth Rogan, and the solidly matinee turns from Gary Merrill and Joan Greenwood. Greenwood is especially good here, using her clipped posh tones to create bits of humor and bothering to give her caricature a bit of a personality. This all leads towards the surprise appearance from Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo, the benefactor of our marooned heroes. The film was never concerned with the numerous mysteries of the island, in spite of being dubbed Mysterious Island, so the revelation that Nemo was behind, well, everything is a bit muted. So it comes as a shock just how idiosyncratic and unique a performance he gives in the role, turning Nemo into a cracked humanist with questionable methods.

Naturally, Mysterious Island ends in a fiery volcanic explosion, because of the Chekov’s gun principle. Why else would you introduce a bubbling volcano in the first moments on the island if you didn’t plan on having it blow by the end? While not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, Mysterious Island is goofy formula done right. Perhaps a bit weaker than a few other films in the Harryhausen canon, but still worth a cursory glance. I mean, our heroes escape Nemo’s ship, an active volcano, and a rampaging cephalopod in the final act. There’s a certain time and place for this kind of well-made lunacy, and it’s on a lazy weekend afternoon curled up on the couch.

Ray Harryhausen regarded this as his all-time best film, and it was a moment of an artist correctly appraising their own work. This is not only the greatest film in his canon, but one of the greatest films of all-time. No, it’s not some deep, cerebral viewing experience, but this is what a piece of great entertainment looks like. This is what a transportive, highly imaginative action-fantasy-epic should feel like.

In a career filled with memorable and unique monstrous creations, Jason and the Argonauts is the definitive piece of an artistic master. The various stop-motion creations are doled out in a steady drip here, beginning with imposing Talos and ending with the one-two punch of the snapping hydra and the band of marauding skeletons. These creatures terrorize various characters and Greek cities that only exist in the fervid imagination of Harryhausen. Sure, Jason, Hercules, Medea, and the Greek gods appear in mythology, but not quite like this. They have been refracted through Harryhausen’s distinct cinematic prism, and it is a warm, artisanal point-of-view.

The obvious highlight of the still impressive effects work is how technically complicated all of it is. Talos, a gigantic metallic statue come to life, is something that Harryhausen had done before in the Cyclops attack during the earliest scenes of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Aside from that one sequence all of the others are technical feats that prove he was operating at the height of his artistry. The harpies fly and thrash under a net, the Hydra is a seven-headed nightmare of snapping mouths and a slithering tail, and the bravura battle with the skeletons all fire the synapses and linger in the mind. The minute attention to detail is so ornate that if you look close enough you’ll notice the shields on the skeletons contain prior Harryhausen creations like Ymir and the cephalopod from It Came from Beneath the Sea.

While there is no question that Ray Harryhausen is true auteur of his films, certain directors knew how to whip the sinewy material between his effects money shots into pleasing foreplay. Don Chaffy is a prime example of this, as he keeps you interested even when there’s no mythological monstrosities on display. His directing is energetic and buoyant, creating a series of memorable images in the absence of Harryhausen’s effects. Look no further than the tension filled sequence where the Argo travels between the Clashing Rocks where still waters are merely a prelude to a terrifying fate. Or how about the view of Olympus as a sterile white palace where the gods play with our fates like chess pieces on  large map and view their work through a reflecting pool. I’m sure that Harryhausen had a hand in these decisions, but Chaffey’s camera is what makes such absurdities into the stuff of dreams.

It is precisely this tangible quality of the effects, a series of matte shots, trick photography, stop-motion animation, that give Jason and the Argonauts the impressions and dream-like quality that makes it so memorable. Compare it to the recent CGI-behemoths like Jurassic World where the various dinosaurs look like close approximations of the real thing, and the wonderment in Jason and the Argonauts hits you harder. These are the ideas of what these creatures are, to repurpose the argument that Roger Ebert made in favor and defense of King Kong’s rudimentary imagery. This tactile quality imprints itself more so than all of the slick CGI can. If I asked you to describe to me the skeleton attack or Talos’ stiff movements in detail, you probably could. If I asked you to describe to me Medusa in the Clash of the Titans remake, could you?  

I have spent a great deal of time defending, describing, and engaging with the effects work and outlandish imagery of the film and very little how it uses Greek mythology, the acting, or the score. This is both a correct decision given how effective that specific quality is, and a wrong one at the expense of everything else. So let’s correct these oversights. Todd Armstrong as Jason is a bit bland, but he’s appropriately handsome and stolid. While Nancy Kovack is delightfully mysterious and vampy as Medea (in heavily truncated form), Nigel Green as a hearty and experienced Hercules, while Honor Blackman and Niall MacGinnis bring a certain overwrought-yet-classy Britishness to Hera and Zeus managing to sell the drollery and finicky nature of the gods.

Never go to Hollywood for a straight interpretation of Greek mythology, but Jason and the Argonauts makes a few interesting changes to the myth that work well for the medium. There’s no Hydra in the original, the honor of battling that demonic creature goes to Hercules while he completes his twelve labors. The original features a dragon that Medea uses magic to lull to sleep, and that’s just not cinematic. The decision to change it from a dragon to the Hydra and avoid a comparison to The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was a very smart one. The Spartoi, the monsters that spring up from the teeth of the dragon/Hydra, were tricked into battling each other instead of Jason and the Argonauts. That’s just not terribly cinematic or thrilling, and making it a thrilling climactic battle is just good movie-making. And any lover of Greek mythology will notice that the film ends mid-way through the myth, completely removing the eventual revenge of Medea and betrayal by Jason, leaving us with a happy-ish ending. This works since the final words are given to Zeus and Hera who decide that they’ve had enough of playing with the lives and fates of mortals for now and will resume their games with Jason eventually.

Then there’s Bernard Hermann’s score with its surges and underlining bombast of the action scenes and light romance. It ranks right up there, possibly even above his wonderful work in their prior films, most obviously Mysterious Island and Sinbad. All of these elements combine to make Jason and the Argonauts still feel alive and vital despite the fifty-odd years since its release. No film is a purer distillation of the magic of Ray Harryhausen, merging the penchant for absurdities and creativity that informs his best work. This film is the great light from which his legacy and legend grows, from which the special-effects industry grew by leaps and bounds.

After the artistic high of Jason and the Argonauts, First Men in the Moon is a drastic comedown. Here is a Ray Harryhausen movie where the limited budget shows, and instead of a cornucopia of tangibly strange stop-motion critters we’re treated to men in rubber suits. This Harryhausen film takes over an hour to give you what you came here for. Consider that the first cinematic sin against it.

Another H.G. Wells adaptation that plays fast-and-loose with the source material, First Men in the Moon takes kernels of good ideas and does nothing with them. It takes too long to get going, waiting roughly forty-five minutes to plop us on the moon to then spend another forty-five minutes doing a slow build that fizzles out long before the climax. The thudding humor, pounding the same vaudevillian key strokes over and over again, dominates too much of the narrative and proves more cumbersome than welcome. Consider these more cinematic sins.

There are highly imaginative and interesting visual concepts at play here, like the crystalline and stone cavern palace of the moon’s alien race. The three Harryhausen creations appear here, with two of them potentially hinting at a caste system within the alien race. A ruler with a gigantic head and a researcher are the only stop-motion aliens, standing in stark contrast with their lithe bodies and imposing height. The vast majority of the aliens are drones that are squatter and walk as if they’re folding in half. If this was supposed to purposefully state something about their society, we never get a square answer with the time spent on the moon rushed and muddled.

Also during this sojourn through the alien’s palatial quarters, our heroes run into the caterpillar-like creature that thrashes about. The sight of the caterpillar-thing and the aliens fighting is the dopey highlight of this clumsy film. Call me crazy, but if we had truncated the first half, spent more time on the moon exploration, completely removed the flashback structure, and spent more time on these ludicrous moments of pure spectacle, First Men in the Moon would have been a far better bit of B-movie schlock. Then there’s the persistent problem of Martha Hyer’s forced character which boils down to a waste of a highly talented actress. Try as Hyer might to bring something valuable to this character, she frequently grinds things to a halt or proves more unnecessary than anything else.

I’ve lost count of just how many cinematic sins we’ve piled up, but there’s not enough good here to tilt the scales towards enjoyably silly. The otherworldly moments come too late in the film to undo some of your wandering interest. If you’re a fan of Harryhausen like I am, you can wait to visit this film. There’s just not much of his magic or imprint here to really give a hearty recommendation in spite of its problems.

Some of the dopiest material ever committed to celluloid is found in One Million Years BC. There’s the gaggle of seductive cave woman, all big 60s mod hairstyles and fur bikinis without a speck of dirt or sweat upon their bodies, and the images of men outrunning gigantic iguanas and land roaming sea turtles. There’s a moment in a ritual where one of these cave dwelling honeys starts to go-go dance, honest to god, she starts gyrating like it’s an episode of Shindig!

What does it all add up to? Nothing much as it is merely a 90-minute kitsch fest with Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion dinosaurs and Raquel Welch wandering around like the hottest babe on the volcanic planet. Perhaps that climatic volcanic explosion is merely the earth’s natural reaction to seeing her panting and all wet. None of that matters in this ahistorical bit of schlock.

After directing the career-high for Harryhausen with Jason and the Argonauts, Don Chaffey returns but without the sustained sense of tone and pace that made their prior collaboration such a classic. We’re treated to the never-ending sights of mankind fighting dinosaurs and dinosaur-like creatures, many of which have been thrown together despite appearing across vast differences of time, yet none of our characters speak beyond rudimentary babble and grunts. If you’re going to ask us to buy into something as ridiculous as Raquel Welch fighting dinosaurs in a fur bikini, then couldn’t you also allow the characters to speak in normal English? After all, if you’re in for a penny with this absurdity then go in for a pound and completely dismantle any sense of plausibility in your tale.

One Million Years BC wants to be both a completely ludicrous bit of cheesecake, and a pseudo-complex tale of mankind surviving in harsh terrain with its series of power struggles, betrayals, romances, and reconciliations. This makes for stretches of the movie being near interminable as you wait for the next attack scene to drop you back into good ol’ fashioned camp territory. Harryhausen’s dinosaurs exhibit far more personality than just about any of the human players, exemplified in the battle between a Triceratops and a Ceratosaurus that has more rooting interest than any other action scene. This prehistoric hokum is passable as entertainment merely for Harryhausen’s efforts and the erotic allure of Welch. This is one is mildly entertaining without ever approaching the realm of good.  

The Valley of Gwangi was an inherited project for Ray Harryhausen. Originally intended by mentor Willis O’Brien as a follow-up to King Kong, with a few sequences of cowboys on the loose in Africa repurposed into Mighty Joe Young, Gwangi is actually the second run-through of this material after O’Brien produced 1956’s The Beast of Hollow Mountain. Of course, a weird western about cowboys battling it out with prehistoric animals sounds like something from the whacky imagination of Harryhausen anyway, so the transition of the idea between the men is seamless.

The Valley of Gwangi is inoffensively kitsch, a movie where you’re very likely to witness an Allosaurus (that would be Gwangi) munching on a character only dubbed “the dwarf,” then fight an elephant, before meeting its end in a cathedral undergoing renovations in a hellish vision of flames destroying the terrorizing monster. The first forty-five minutes has to be powered through, although none of it is terrible so much as it is a bit mundane and workmanlike, before the back half goes completely insane.

The second half is where we plunk ourselves down in the valley and a succession of Harryhausen creatures come trotting across the screen. There’s a Pteradon attack, a battle between Gwangi and a Styracosaurus, Gwangi attacking a Ornithomimus in a sequence that was directly lifted for Jurassic Park, and the cowboys trying to wrangle an adorable little Eohippus like a cow. If all of that sounds like wonderfully arcane nonsense, that doesn’t even account for the band of Gypsy hanging in Mexico, a British paleontologist, a traveling Wild West show, and a pervasive sense of daffiness.

Nothing about Gwangi is serious, and nothing in it should be taken seriously. Like many of the films in Harryhausen’s canon, the acting is blandly proficient but the dubbing of Gila Golan is noticeably bad. Her mouth and voice rarely match, nor does the dubbing match the emotive acting that Golan is displaying. Only James Franciscus manages to match the outlandish vibrato of his acting style to the material. Look, if your reaction is anything like mine, then you’ll be rooting for Gwangi to just lay waste to everyone and leave a trail of destruction in his wake as he makes his way back to the valley. I’m not usually so nihilistic, but it would be greatly entertaining to see that happen.

The Valley of Gwangi would prove to be Harryhausen’s last dip into the prehistoric realm, and it is a noticeable improvement over the interminable One Million Years BC. What’s more prominent is just how obviously indebted the entirety of the Jurassic Park series is to this lone film. The Michael Crichton novels provided the beats, characters, and framework, but this Harryhausen film gave the cinematic blueprint and visuals to follow. Trace over in more than a few instances. It’s a good-bad movie, the kind that knows it’s adorably strange, completely implausible, and clunky in its use of clichés.

Ray Harryhausen’s second spin around with Sinbad the Sailor takes the basic formula that worked so well in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and cranks it to eleven. This steroidal sequel lacks the naïve innocence of the original, but makes up for it in a bigger scope, more fantastical elements, more stop-motion critters, and more of everything else. It’s a worthy successor despite the general sense that the magic of these films was quickly drying up and their promised adventures falling short of the prior heights.

While the script is a collage of incidents with holes built into the material to provide wiggle room for Harryhausen to strut, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad does distinctly lack a certain something that was pervasive in some of his older films. Perhaps changing tastes had left this gee-whiz type of adventure story as archaic by 1974. Still, even with a major problem of middling awe there’s plenty to recommend and catch your imagination during the voyage.

Most notably is a moment of tender poetry, where Harryhausen seemingly wrote in (the Sinbad films are the few movies where he contributed story elements) a self-reflective moment between a creator and creation. Our villain, Koura (played by the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker) uses black magic to create a homunculus then gives it some of his blood to breathe life into the creature. This moment, oddly tender and beguilingly quiet, is a miniature portrait of the master at work, giving pieces of himself to bring to life a cavalcade of horrors to do his bidding.

While that scene is a clear highlight, it’s not the lone moment of inspired magic and imagination. An uncredited Robert Shaw, unrecognizable under layers of makeup and vocal distortion, as the Oracle of All Knowledge in a banging, clattering scene of awe and terror as the oracle drops mysterious clues and vague prophecy to aide our heroes on their adventure. Shaw’s Oracle looks positively demonic with it’s disgusting teeth, wild beard, and many horns protruding from his scalp. He appears and disappears in firestorm and blinding lights, and this is the type of moment that Harryhausen fans are thrilled by.

Of course, the real reason we all return to Harryhausen’s films is the stop-motion creature animation. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is overstuffed with creatures, and a few of them are some of the more memorable inventions of his career. While the one-eyed centaur is fun, and the masthead that springs to violent life is appropriately creepy, but nothing compares to sense of fantasy and wonder that the statue of Kali generates. The battle between Sinbad and his cohorts against the statue is the first sequence in any of these films to live up to the brilliance of Jason and the Argonauts’ skeleton army. This battle with Kali hammers home that when these films are working, whether in individual scenes or as an entire work, they convey a pleasing sense of the otherworldly.

Here is further proof that the third installment of a franchise is inevitably the weakest, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is a retread of not only the two previous entries in the trilogy but the entirety of Ray Harryhausen’s career. There’s no wonder here, no fun sense of otherworldliness at play. In fact, even Harryhausen’s creations are more humdrum than life giving to this limp piece of cornbread.

While neither Seventh Voyage nor Golden Voyage could claim modesty in how often and routinely they paused their narratives to bring in more fantastical creatures, Eye of the Tiger makes them look positively prudish in comparison. But the excess on display here has a strangely numbing effect since so much of has been done already by the master, and better. There’s ghouls, a metallic Minotaur, a troglodyte, a gigantic walrus, a chess-playing chimpanzee, a gigantic wasp, a Smilodon, and a witch who can change sizes and transform into a bird.

But none of them are as imaginatively rendered as they should be. I suppose one should be kind to Harryhausen for this, as even he admitted that there just wasn’t enough time and money granted to him to make the effects really pop. They’re perfunctory from beginning to end leaving Eye of the Tiger as the nadir of Harryhausen’s career. It feels wrong to criticize a master of his craft who has so incalculably aided to my imaginative development, but Eye of the Tiger is just not good or original enough by any measure.

Too much of Eye of the Tiger feels built upon the foundations of other material. There’s Melanthius, a Greek alchemist/exposition dump played by Patrick Troughton like a dry-run for Gandalf in a never-made Harryhausen Lord of the Rings adaptation. There’s Zenobia, another Sinbad movie offers up a dark-arts practitioner as its main villain, this time an evil stepmother played to theatrical heights by Margaret Whiting. Jane Seymour gets saddled with the poorly written love interest role, and Patrick Wayne is a hopelessly wooden Sinbad. The role of Sinbad is something of a mixed blessing for any actor. On one hand you’re the title character, on the other you’re merely a blank space for Harryhausen’s creativity to throw swords and magic spells at. Kerwin Mathews and John Phillip Law were likable, handsome, and knew how to give themselves to the material, while Wayne is just kinda…there.

The worst offender has to be director Sam Wanamaker. He splices the film with little regards or care for creating intelligible spatial geography and basic filmic geometry. He also allows too much bloat to make its way into this. Golden Voyage’s 105 minutes was pushing the boundaries for how long this material could sustain itself, and Eye of the Tiger’s near two-hours is clearly beyond the thin story’s reach. The better directors of Harryhausen’s films knew they were traffic cops trying to keep everything running smoothly, so I guess you could dub this film something of a pile-up.

Distinct and unique sense of mythology and location is noticeably absent here. Where the previous films were gleeful in the ways they mixed disparate bits of cultural mythologies into their whimsical hodge-podges, this feels lazily assembled. There’s obvious stealing from She in the pyramid hidden away in an arctic tundra, complete with steep stairs, a light vortex, and frozen Smilodons. Then there’s the oddball way that our characters enter a valley that either spits them out into a lovely spring and forest, or they walk back a desert pyramid. Looking for logic in these films is a bit of a stretch, but a certain set of fair rules and coherence by their own internal workings is not asking for much.

Yet I still possess a modicum of affection for it. Call it the hazy gaze of childhood nostalgia, call it my deep fondness and love of Harryhausen, call it what you will. Undoubtedly this is the lamest of the Sinbad films, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t stir some strange form of fondness in me. Hell that battle royale between the troglodyte, Smilodon, and Sinbad is a vast improvement over the Golden Voyage’s climax, and if you only watch Eye of the Tiger for that one scene, well, it’s a damn fine scene.  

Clash of the Titans is a swan song, not only for Ray Harryhausen’s career but for a type of romantic-adventure stories that are no longer made. While it doesn’t compare to its brethren like Jason and the Argonauts or The Thief of Bagdad, it is of a piece with those colorful epics filled with stolid heroes, beautiful princesses, enormous monsters, never-ending quests, and effects work that is arcane and more dream-like than anything in modern cinema. It is delightful in spite of a series of problems, and a fitting end to the storied career of Ray Harryhausen.

Much like Harryhausen’s Sinbad films, Clash of the Titans uses the basics of its mythological framework, a couple of familiar names and monsters, and rearranges them in a straightforward narrative. Ask anyone who is not obsessed with mythology and folklore to tell you the story of Perseus and Andromeda, and they’ll more than likely tell you the story as found here. That is the power of pop culture retelling these legends. This is a film dubbed about the clashing of the Greek Titans without featuring them actually clashing or any of the proper Titans, but instead retrofitting the title onto the Kraken and Medusa.

It also shows the power of Harryhausen’s artistry. After all, who else could plop a well-known aquatic monster from Norse mythology into a Greek myth? The Kraken emerging from the water to destroy cities and capture the sacrificial virgin is crude by today’s standards, but delightful for the quality of a dream that it projects. It exudes personality and menace, as though it were a primordial beast unleashing indiscreet havoc. Who cares if there’s no Kraken to be found anywhere in Greek mythology when this gargantuan monster is so pleasing in its purpose.

Even better is Medusa, quite possibly the most technically accomplished and artistically complex creation in Harryhausen’s entire oeuvre. The seven-headed Hydra and skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts still impress with the bullishness of their artistic brilliance, but they’re almost quaint in the sight of the slithering, glaring Medusa. Her hair made of snakes moves independently at every moment, she crawls across the floor, her tail rattles and slithers, and she alternates between lurching forward and shooting arrows at her attackers. She is the stuff of nightmares, a near prehistoric monstrosity of feminine evil.

Then there’s the curious problem of Bubo, the mechanical owl. A clear concession to Star Wars’ ascendancy no matter what the creators try to claim. It’s a bit of an annoyance, but it’s animated with tremendous care, skill, and personality. It’s a mixed blessing of a film, a clear fault but one that is done with clear, consummate craftsmanship. Bubo is something of the entirety of the film in microcosm.

While Clash of the Titans has the courage to stick to its goofy convictions, completely embracing the passing Saturday matinee fare that was more light-hearted and vibrant than the muddied and grim blockbusters of the current era. We get the Greek gods as played by Shakespearean greats like Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith, glorious hams like Burgess Meredith, and an attractive lead couple in Harry Hamlin and Judi Bowker. All of them genuflect to the material, some far more successful than others. Supporting players like Meredith, here as Ammon, a poet and quest master for Perseus, are right to go broad with the material to pick up for the slack of the blander leads. But Olivier as a petulant Zeus who is quickly tamed by a pretty face, Smith as a petty and vindictive Thetis, Clare Bloom as a haughty and regal Hera all make positive impressions. Hamlin is fine with a thankless role, basically spending the movie playing fetch in an ever escalating series of quests, while Bowker is pretty but vacuous, the only truly terrible performance in the entire film.

It is frequently dysfunctional, completely frivolous and campy in its execution, but dammit if Clash of the Titans isn’t a pleasing trifle. It sticks to the tenants of any Harryhausen film, a pervading sense of kitsch, hammy acting, workmanlike direction, and lovingly arcane special-effects work that give the distinct impression of unreality. Good for it, I say. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a perfect ending to Harryhausen’s incalculably influential career. It features all of his obsessions in one movie, and it’s packed to the rafters with monsters both big and small. No one will mistake it for the loftiest of cinematic arts, but it’s delicious, comforting junk food. Sometimes, that’s just what the soul needs.

Not to completely write off the earlier science-fiction films, but I much prefer when Harryhausen left them behind for kooky fantasies with large doses of monsters and romance. His name belongs to ages, and to the great artists of the cinema. If you don’t believe me, let us look at the powerhouse names that say he was a major influence on their work: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, John Lasseter (Pixar referenced him in Monsters, Inc.), Peter Jackson, Tim Burton (who included a reference to him in Corpse Bride), Henry Selick, Guillermo del Toro, John Landis, and Joe Dante.

My Essential Viewing recommendations:

Earth vs the Flying Saucers

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad

Jason and the Argonauts

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

Clash of the Titans