Review by Ben Bussey
Early on in this documentary, John Landis reiterates something he’s said many times about Ray Harryhausen over the years, explaining why he thinks the stop-motion master occupies a truly unique position in film history: this is the fact that he is the only notable case of technician as auteur. Really, would anyone dispute this? Sure, there are notable special effects guys that may have become household names, in particularly genre-savvy households at least – the likes of Stan Winston, Rick Baker, Dennis Muren, Phil Tippet – but even their most ardent admirers would surely concede that their efforts are at best collaborations with the director, facilitating the vision of Spielberg, Cameron et al. However, Ray Harryhausen is something else entirely, and each one of the aforementioned men (the dearly departed Winston aside) profess as much in Gilles Penso’s film.
Harryhausen never directed a feature film, never wrote a screenplay, never played the leading man, and yet we immediately identify the films on which he worked as his films. As is oft remarked here, few people recall who directed The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans, or any of the Sinbad movies, nor do we necessarily remember who the principle actors were (Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC notwithstanding), but we all know the name of the man who brought the films to life with his still-amazing stop-motion animation; and, as this film persausively argues, Harryhausen’s personality shines through his extraordinary creations in such a way that, although we never saw him in front of the camera, he really was the star of the show.
This, of course, is a pretty popular point of view, which I’ve no doubt most knowledgable film fans will have heard many times. Indeed, there really isn’t a great deal in Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan that existing fans of the man and his work will not have seen, heard or read elsewhere. In addition, the widely available Columbia/Tri-Star DVD of Jason and the Argonauts features full-length documentary The Harryhausen Chronicles (narrated by Leonard Nimoy, no less) and a short video of Landis interviewing Harryhausen, between which they cover near enough the exact same ground that is covered here, some anecdotes recounted almost identically word for word.
Still, as anyone who’s ever made a remake will tell us, if a story’s worth telling, it’s usually worth telling more than once. In a Q&A included on the extras disc, director Penso and producers Alexandre Poncet and Tony Dalton emphasise that a large part of their intent here was to educate a new generation of potential Harryhausen fans who might not necessarily appreciate the man’s singular significance. To this end they’ve grabbed interviews with every big name in contemporary genre filmmaking they could get hold of, including Spielberg, Cameron, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Tim Burton, John Lasseter and more besides, as well as a wide range of special effects designers from many a modern blockbuster, and in a cute touch each interviewee’s name caption is topped with an icon from their most recognised work: a Millenium Falcon for Dennis Muren, Avatar’s Neytiri for James Cameron, and Sinbad’s Cyclops for the man himself (see below). Seasoned fans might find it a little patronising how the film sees the need to assume such ignorance on the part of the viewer, and draw so heavily on the iconography of films that Harryhausen was not involved in (why use the Indiana Jones font for the title, for instance?), but given that the intent is to underline the role Harryhausen played in forging the spectacle-based blockbuster cinema with which we have long since grown accustomed, these are minor sins.
Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan also addresses questions on how things have changed since CGI took over. It’s curious to note (even though, to my recollection, no one in the documentary does) that only a year after Harryhausen bowed out with Clash of the Titans (1981), CGI first broke through in Tron (1982). Opinions vary amongst the interview subjects as to the relative merits of different special effects forms; Jim Cameron speculates that if Harryhausen were a young man working today he would be using CGI, but almost no one else sees it that way, emphasising the personal touch that’s so important to Ray’s work which can only really be found in stop-motion, not to mention its inherent dreamlike quality; the photorealism that Cameron aspires to was never what Harryhausen was going for. Personally, I’ve often pondered whether he was a little premature in his retirement, given that stop-motion was still around in the 1980s: take the skeletal Terminator, ED-209, or the big battlin’ bots of Robot Jox. Not that it’s easy to imagine Harryhausen working on such violent films, given how resolutely family-friendly his work tended to be. Perhaps this also indicates part of why he retired when he did; not only was his brand of special effects dying out, but also the overall tone of fantasy film was shifting into something harsher and darker, with an underlying cynicism that’s worlds apart from the wide-eyed wonder of Ray’s films.
So no, it doesn’t provide an especially new perspective on its subject matter, and in terms of production values it leaves a bit to be desired (the sound and lighting are pretty sub-par in many of the interviews), but even so Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan has value as a time capsule of a unique artist and his legacy. It is a little disconcerting to hear someone who’s still alive spoken of in such a eulogistic manner, even though the man’s into his 90s, but it’s also quite refreshing and inspiring to see that someone who has been retired for most of my lifetime is still around and perhaps even more influential now than he was in his active years. And, given the wealth of clips, stills and behind the scenes snippets in the film itself, plus the deluge of bonus material on the second disc including extended interviews, deleted scenes, Q&A footage from festival screenings and plenty more, die-hard Ray Harryhausen fans will surely find this a worthwhile purchase, even if it doesn’t tell them much which they don’t already know.
Ray Harryhausen – Special Effects Titan is available now on Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray, from Arrow Films.