How Ray Harryhausen Conjured the Skeletons
Plus: news.
Welcome! It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the lineup today:
1. On the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
2. Animation newsbits.
3. The last word.
With that, let’s go!
1. Fantasy filmmaking
Ray Harryhausen knew stop motion. That said, his field wasn’t quite the same as puppet films — fairy-tale stories without humans, as he put it.1 What he loved best, and did best, was stop-motion movie magic. He did effects.
He’d seen King Kong as a kid in 1933.2 That was the moment he changed. Its fantastical animals amazed him, and he couldn’t figure them out. “I didn’t know anything about stop motion at the time,” he said. “I knew they weren’t real. They were not men in suits. So I got interested in finding out how the film was done.”
Harryhausen began to learn stop-motion effects on his own time. Eventually he got a job under Willis O’Brien, the King Kong animator, who became his mentor and passed down a philosophy. “[He] once told me that you should never attempt to create what you can photograph in real life — a piece of advice I have always applied to my creatures,” Harryhausen wrote later.3
The word that Harryhausen used for his films was fantasy: something “more theatrical than realistic.”4 Although he aimed for lifelike motion and real textures, there was always a disconnect between his creatures and the human actors around them.
“If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane. In Kong, you knew he wasn’t real, but he looked like a nightmare,” Harryhausen pointed out. That character’s “dream quality” was something he always channeled. “You have to be an illusionist,” he argued, “and not a photographer.”5
As Harryhausen summed it up in 1981:
To me, the ultimate aim in making our films has never been the smoothing out of stop-motion animation. To try to duplicate live action in every way seems to me like asking a painter to paint a landscape so it will appear like a photograph. Our pictures are more of a surrealistic experience rather than an excursion into technical perfection. I’m certain technical perfection has its place and its advantages, but could you really make a sequence such as the skeleton swordfight in Jason and the Argonauts … with a computer?6
The skeleton sequence was among Harryhausen’s favorite creations. And it might be his best known, noted his daughter.7 The thing was done more than 60 years ago, and its difficulty was incredible. But it remains an all-timer in movie effects.
Harryhausen projects had a specific approach. Their animation was nearly always his alone (partly to save money, partly because he preferred to work that way), and each film was designed around its effects. That was his style.
“I wasn’t what you’d call a special effect man. I wasn’t just given a script and told to put this on the screen,” he said. When Harryhausen touched a project, he got involved in the story and structure, and carefully planned sequences that he knew he could do on budget.8 He didn’t believe in mid-production rewrites. That’s how you go over-budget, he said, and his movies didn’t have that luxury.
At $3 million ($32.9 million today), Jason and the Argonauts was one of Harryhausen’s most expensive films. He used the money for great moments like the Hydra and the harpies and Talos’s coming to life. But it was the skeleton battle that “was always intended to form the centerpiece,” he wrote.9
It comes toward the end of the story, and it took four-and-a-half months to animate. Harryhausen recalled the work as “painful to the extreme.” On slow days, maybe 13 frames got finished. Like he wrote:
When one pauses to contemplate that there were seven skeletons fighting three men, with each skeleton having five appendages to move in each frame of film, this meant that an unprecedented 35 animated movements had to be synchronized with three live actors’ movements.10
To understand what Harryhausen was doing, you first need to grasp his most basic film trick: “rear projection.” It’s something you might recognize from car-ride scenes in old movies — the prerecorded footage that plays behind the actors. He used a version of the idea in most of his projects.11
Harryhausen’s skeletons sat on a table in front of a projection of live-action footage from Jason. The camera captured the illusion that his tiny 8-to-10-inch models were together with the actors. Harryhausen advanced the footage frame by frame, moved his skeletons to fit the action, then photographed.
To hide the animation table in shots where it might otherwise be visible, Harryhausen placed a glass sheet in front of the camera. He applied black paint to the glass to cover unwanted parts of the shot. As a result, when the scene was photographed, the black part was left unexposed on the film stock.
After the first pass, he rolled the film back, put an inverse matte in front of the camera and shot the background footage again. Lined up just right, the table disappeared, and the creatures looked like they were standing in the scene.12
This stuff was done throughout the skeleton fight. But it should be said: Harryhausen rarely relied on just one trick. “[Y]ou can’t keep doing the same technique time and time again,” he once argued, talking about another film. “So we mixed them up. … A combination of things so you don’t catch on too quickly to any one technique.”
Jason was like that, too. To let a skeleton stab the actor Andrew Faulds, its model sword was “whittled down between frames” to look like it was entering his body.13 When Jason leaps from a cliff into the water, life-size plaster skeletons were thrown after him during the shoot. On Harryhausen’s table, model walls and plinths were aligned with walls and plinths in the background footage, so that the skeletons seemed to touch the scene.
One of the wildest ideas appears when an actor impales a skeleton. Here’s Harryhausen:
During the live action Todd [Armstrong] plunges his sword down and then at a specific point in the movement lets go of it so that it drops to the ground. In the animation studio I animated the skeleton in front of the sword dropping on the ground, which appears in the back projection plate, and replaced the real sword, as it appeared to enter the skeleton, with a miniature one. Todd then pulls his arm away and the skeleton is seen clutching onto the miniature sword.
The skeleton fight began with Harryhausen’s drawings. He imagined a macabre sequence partly inspired by Gustave Doré, one of his biggest influences (he had “about 40 of his books” by the 1970s).14 Then he created storyboards to lay the groundwork for the shoot in Italy.
“The live-action choreography was intensely complex,” Harryhausen wrote. Under the supervision of Ferdinando Poggi, a crew of seven stunt performers trained with the actors to get the fight just right. With that down, they filmed an all-human version of the sequence as a reference for Harryhausen’s later animation. Then came the final shoot.
Andrew Faulds recalled the experience this way:
Over three Sundays, we did rehearsals. The first Sunday we were given the movements … We rehearsed this until we had got the run of the routine of the skeleton fight with some Italian fencers ... On the second Sunday, we did the fight again with the same men, but this time they all wore numbered jerseys [to be filmed as reference]. ... Then, on the third and final Sunday, we fought it for real, fighting thin air, following the movements exactly that we had practiced ... I thought this was never going to work. I was staggered when I saw the film for the first time.15
Back in England, at Shepperton Studios, Harryhausen prepared his creatures.16 The armatures were built by his father, and Harryhausen added “cotton wool soaked in latex, which I then shaped into bones.” One of the skeletons was a leftover from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) — Harryhausen was big on reuse.
Finally, it was time to animate. In his words:
… I had to count each frame of film on the rear projection plate to determine exactly where the actor’s sword, which appeared on the plate, and the skeleton’s sword would meet. The number of frames would determine how long it would take for the skeleton to go from point A to point B …
The speed of the live-action photography would be 24 frames per second, so I had to judge the speed of the movement for the animation accordingly. The broader the movement of the model, the faster it will appear to move when run at 24 frames. … This makes it necessary to sometimes move the model about half a millimeter per frame in order to keep in synchronization with the live actors. … Sometimes I would have to “kill” footage (killing time means that the model action is not completed) … but occasionally I would have to do the opposite by “fleshing out” time with subtle movements to allow synchronization with the live action and so lengthen the scene.
Remember that Harryhausen was working without Dragonframe or any other form of video playback. In fact, he’s written that he didn’t use many tools or notes at all to keep track of the skeletons’ movements. They were in his head. This was an idiosyncratic kind of film fantasy that came straight from him.
The skeleton work, again, was harrowing. And audience reactions to it weren’t clear when Jason first released. This fight is odd and creepy, but some people laughed. Over time, Harryhausen came to believe that “these were laughs of relief or nervousness” in response to the strangeness on screen.
Jason didn’t do well at the box office, but it became legendary among a certain group, and the skeleton battle was its high point. “Working alone, Harryhausen achieved the kind of complex special effects which now would only be attempted by a huge team of people,” argued Cinefantastique in the late ‘90s.17
By then, the age of stop-motion effects was just about over. Harryhausen had kind words for the CG effects that replaced him — in Jurassic Park, in Lord of the Rings.
But he wasn’t all-in on the new method. He found it often “so realistic that it loses the quality of fantasy,” and it involved too many artists for his taste.18 “I think it’s done by committee. You have to have a raft of 50 people to make two or three minutes of animation,” he said. The loss of showmanship bothered him, too: the willingness to tell viewers how images were made even before a film came out. He wasn’t impressed by a “magician whose tricks the entire world knows.”
The new ways were exciting, but they couldn’t simply invalidate the old ones — the surreal fantasy of Jason’s skeletons, and what Harryhausen called the “nightmare quality” of stop-motion creatures.19 His four-and-a-half-month struggle in the ‘60s had built something that wasn’t replaceable. As he wrote in the 21st century:
… I would never want to do it again. … Hours and hours of the same movements can wear a man down. But it was worth it. It is there on film for all to see, and no matter what technology is invented, it can never be reproduced. In stop motion the whole scene has a supernatural quality that could only be achieved by the use of dimensional animation.
2. Newsbits
An important American story: “Pixar’s layoffs came days after receiving a $26 million tax credit.” Amid Amidi brought attention to the problem, and explained why he sent letters to California officials about it.
In Russia, Leonid Shmelkov’s surrealist feature Restlessness got its wide release in theaters. The pre-sales were very good, and it’ll be interesting to see how it performs overall. Find a trailer here.
In Cuba, students aged 10–13 took part in an animation workshop called “Jugando a animar,” hosted by the ICAIC. See posts here and here.
Milin woolfelt (密林手作) is a popular animator from Chinese platforms like Bilibili and Douyin, and she’s getting hits on YouTube with her stop-motion series inspired by Brambly Hedge. See the latest episode here.
In America, animator Glen Keane was rescued by helicopter from Mummy Mountain in Arizona.
The Malaysian hit Papa Zola: The Movie is now set to reach theaters in many more countries. Cartoon Brew looks into the story.
In America, Steve Stanchfield posted an interesting article and video about scanning an old Mighty Mouse cartoon.
The Chinese film All Wishes Come True passed 1.1 billion yuan ($162.9 million) at the box office. Find a subtitled trailer here.
Varvara Arenskaya, an animator based in Armenia, spoke to Watermelon Rind Boats about her film The Girl and the Axe (watch) — a funny and entertaining piece.
Last of all: we looked into the tale of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, made in Japan.
3. Last word
That’s a wrap for today! As usual, we’re closing out with personal comments from the two of us:
Jules: In the last few weeks I’ve been revisiting some of Disney’s work from the ‘10s. I was very impressed by Zootopia the first time I saw it, and it still held up for me. The intricacy of the character performances feels like some of the studio’s best work in 3D. There’s a careful blending of animal behavior with human body language that really works — Nick, for example, often emotes with his arms close to his body, moving them more at the elbows than at his shoulders. It feels like how foxes hold their front legs when they stand upright, and like a conman keeping his cards close to the vest. It’s very detailed, studied and real, but the acting has enough golden-age Hollywood spirit to maintain clarity and feel larger than life.
John: I realized the other day that I’ve edited videos, in one form or another, for a couple of decades. It’s something I handle for Animation Obsessive as well. In the past year or two, though, I’ve had a breakthrough in my thinking about music and moving images. Close sync and landing on beat used to be my fixations. Lately I’ve found that editing footage as a silent visual continuity first, and then adding a musical layer loosely on top, lets the two parts breathe, say different things and reinforce each other in more interesting ways. Everything opens up, and nothing is redundant. It’s really exciting.
Until next time!
Harryhausen talked about this in Animato (Winter 1993), one of our most-used sources today.
See the Onion AV Club interview with Harryhausen, a key source.
Harryhausen wrote this in Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, our main source for today’s issue, and the origin of many quotes and details throughout.
From The House of Hammer (August 1977).
See this interview and L’Express (used a few times).
From CineFex (July 1981).
See Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema.
Quote and details from Harryhausen’s interview in Animation Magazine (August 1998), used a few times.
From Film Fantasy Scrapbook.
The Harryhausen “Dynamation” process is broken down in detail in The Dinosaur Films of Ray Harryhausen.
The same trick allowed Harryhausen to create “layers” in the background that his skeletons travel “behind.” Anything he blacked out in the first pass could be added above his skeletons in the second pass.
See From the Land Beyond: The Films of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, used a couple of times.
Quoted from Film Comment (November–December 1977).
See the AFI Catalog.
The initial failure of Jason and its later appreciation are discussed in Jason and the Argonauts Through the Ages. The quote comes from Cinefantastique (February 1999).
I remember seeing this as a kid when it came out in 1963 and was blown away.
I named my son Jason because of that movie and its special effects