After cramming the first thirteen years of his life with every dinosaur book and mythical illustration that he could lay eyes on, Ray Harryhausen went to see King Kong with his aunt and parents. Upon witnessing the cutting edge special effects, the boy flew into a new obsession full-force, tracking down everything he could find that would solve the mystery, "How did they make it move like that?" Once he discovered the answer in stop-motion animation, he dedicated himself to the hobby.
At the age of eighteen, he could be seen daily in his mother's garden, forcing a video camera to film stop-motion animation of a wood-framed stegosaurus, a brontosaurus, and a bear he had fashioned from clay and fabric. This experiment, his first ever animated film, took months to complete. When finally he got to see his little movie, he found that the film was an utter failure. After hours of painstaking, meticulous work, Harryhausen's results were a spotty, jerking animation with shadows flitting in every direction as the sun moved.
More than any other moment in his life, Harryhausen's response to this failure revealed his work ethic. When artists have racked up a certain amount of success, they can frequently recover from a failure. By then, they have plenty of evidence to prove to themselves that they are good at their work. But, when a beginner like Harryhausen's first, arduous step proves only that he is an artist of disaster, the ability to move forward is more than just perseverance; it has a sense of pioneer spirit, of heroism.
When Harryhausen watched the terrible film, he made the hero's decision. He tried again. This time, he moved his "studio" inside the garage so that the sun's movement would not change the lighting. This time, he used a camera that had a one-frame shot feature. This time, the results were much improved. The only drawback was that his father had to park in the driveway for months while Harryhausen filmed. Without a studio to back his project financially or even an audience outside of his supportive mother and father, Harryhausen labored long hours over an ambitious project called Evolution of the World.
During work on his amateur project, Harryhausen met Willis O'Brien, the mastermind behind King Kong. The young man brought a hand-made model of a brontosaurus to the meeting. The sculpture had won him a prize less than a year before. But, for O'Brien, it was inadequate. After comparing the legs of the sculpture to overcooked sausages, he told Harryhausen to study anatomy. Surprisingly, Harryhausen was less insulted than grateful. In the following months, Harryhausen could be found whiling away hours at the zoo, carefully observing the animals. The elephant’s knees, the giraffe’s stride, the kangaroo's leap taught Harryhausen the subtleties of natural movement. He brought his old question with him: How did they move?
Not long after his visit with O'Brien, Harryhausen landed his first professional position in cinema: puppeteer at Puppetoons, a stop-motion cartoon studio. The project gave him the opportunity to animate using stop-motion in a professional setting, but the rigidity of the puppets’ motions left him uninspired. After dedicating years to understanding realistic movement, Harryhausen had a sense that he was taking a few steps backward as an artist. With just few years at Puppetoons under his belt, he decided to move on. Leaving the commercial film industry, he joined the Army in the Special Services division to create films for military orientation.
After this, Harryhausen had a moderately impressive resume that created inroads into artistically interesting films. His former mentor O'Brien reached out and offered him a position as an assistant on his new film, Mighty Joe Young, a sequel to King Kong. This giving Harryhausen the chance to finally see firsthand the answer to his old question, "How do they make it move like that?" Over the course of this movie and the next, Harryhausen began experimenting with ways of separating the background and foreground of the film in live action animated sequences in order to incorporate stop-motion animated models more realistically. The results stunned audiences.
Throughout a dozen films between 1940 and 1957, Harryhausen's constantly improving special effects brought dinosaurs and giants and even a Cyclops into realistic interactions with live actors. At the height of complexity, Jason and the Argonauts featured a band of seven skeletons in a elaborately choreographed sword fight with three living men. The sequence took months to complete. It remains one of the most lauded accomplishments in special effects history, analysed by college film students even today, and remembered as Harryhausen’s greatest cinematic achievement.
Harryhausen's popularity waxed and waned over the course of his career, but his abilities did not. As long as he contributed to films, he continued striving to improve upon his previous techniques, moving flawlessly from black and white films to colour, from ancient monsters to futuristic aliens. Upon Harryhausen's death in 2013, modern film directors and special effects designers like Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg flooded the news with statements of admiration toward the man who inspired their imaginations so much, simply by pursuing the question, "How did they make it move?"