Ray Harryhausen, the legendary stop-motion effects artist responsible for the wondrous visuals of 1981's Clash of the Titans and the battling skeletons of Jason and the Argonauts, has died. He was 92.
Harryhausen's passing was announced today on the Facebook page of The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving his work. "The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen," the post read. "Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous."
A stop-motion pioneer, Harryhausen's work was particularly influential to a legion of sci-fi and fantasy filmmakers who would go on to make films at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic in the years before computer-generated effects. George Lucas once said that without the visual effects artist's influence on filmmaking there "would likely have been no Star Wars," and John Landis called Harryhausen's work on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad "the reason I'm a filmmaker" in a 2011 interview with Wired.
"Ray was a great artist with an incredibly influential body of work, a true gentleman and a good friend," Landis told Wired via email today.
>'Ray was a great artist with an incredibly influential body of work, a true gentleman and a good friend.'
John Landis
Born in Los Angeles in 1920, Harryhausen's love of creature creation began in 1933 when he saw King Kong with his childhood friend Ray Bradbury, a film experience that inspired Harryhausen's first stop-motion animated home movies. Armed with DIY tools like medical bladders that could simulate breathing and rear-view mirrors that he turned into joints for his models, Harryhausen's creativity gave his films a fresh and distinctive look.
"It is a lonely profession, at least it was when I worked on my pictures," he wrote in the book A Century of Stop-Motion Animation: From Melies to Aardman. "But the loneliness, accompanied by much frustration and pain, was always outweighed by the excitement of seeing my creatures move in the same 'reality' as humans."
"What was cool about Ray was that he was like a magician. A significant aspect of his stuff was to keep it secret and magical," Phil Tippett, the ILM visual effects artist who worked on Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back told Wired in an interview last year. "Now everybody knows how everything's done. There's no magic anymore."
Speaking about Harryhausen's death today, Tippett said in a statement that the visual effects artist was a "mentor" and someone who "wanted to be a part of forming the next generation of artists and visionaries." Harryhausen's ability to make himself available to younger effects artists was something Tippett brought to his own studio, he said.
"Ray Harryhausen's passing signals the end of a very special era in filmmaking. He was the guy that everybody was inspired by to do visual effects work," Tippet said. "He was the singular creative person, so he inspired a lot of singular artists. … He will be missed."
