Ray Harryhausen: "If you make fantasy too real, it loses the quality of a dream."
AMEN! I was watching Life of Pi last night thinking, "Okay, that's a pretty impressive and realistic-looking computer-generated tiger and all... but...". This weird kind of feeling - attributed to a phenomenon called "uncanny valley" - has yet, for me anyway, to be overcome by CGI, no matter how good it looks. There's so such problem with Harryhausen's pioneering stop-motion animation creations. The hand-crafted charm, the jittery quality, the fact that an actual three-dimensional object was photographed, the onus being on the viewer to do some work filling in the gaps - these elements make, say the skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts, feel a whole lot more real than some of the slick, overblown CGI effects we've seen and been accustomed to in recent years.
Anywho Ray Harryhausen's passing is a great loss to the film world. Without this guy there would be no Star Wars, no Jurassic Park, no The Thing, no Nightmare Before Christmas etc! A lot of Hollywood's greatest and most memorable creatures, aliens and monsters simply would not exist.
Here's a pretty good comp of Harryhausen's work:
If you 'd like to catch up on some of the films he's worked on, this is a list of what we've got in our library:
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