The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

226 John Landis
People have a misunderstanding of CG; they think that in CG somehow
the computer itself does the animating. That’s not what happens. People do
the animating. It’s just that they are using different tools. As evidence of
Willis O’Brien [the animator behind the original King Kong] and Ray Harryhausen’s
geniuses, if you look at the most successful animals or creatures
that have been done in computer animation so far—dinosaurs in Jurassic
Park or that big monster in Lord of the Rings—if you look at them, they
move exactly like Harryhausen animals.
What’s remarkable about that is, how were Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen
able to animate dinosaurs in a way that has become accepted as
the way dinosaurs move? It’s quite something. If you look at the King Kong/
Tyrannosaurus Rex battle in King Kong, it’s incredible. No matter how sophisticated
computer animation becomes, it just copies those movements. And
often those sounds.
One of the interesting things about Ray is he puts an incredible amount
of personality into his creatures and the way they move. In 7th Voyage, a
spear is thrown at the Cyclops’s back—and that reaching back trying to grab
that spear, the Cyclops trying to get at it, it’s so extraordinarily sympathetic
or empathetic. His characters have a real sense of life. And it’s handcrafted,
literally frame by frame.
One of the interesting things I read about him was that he didn’t take
notes. In the Hydra scene, he did it all by instinct.
Landis: Not only that, but stop-motion animators now use video playback.
Ray did all his stuff without this advantage, keeping place in his head.
When you see things flying and realize not only were there wires, but
those wires had to be hidden in the lighting. Now, everyone uses wires. In
Spider-Man it’s all these stuntmen on wires, and it doesn’t matter because
you can just erase them. Whereas in War of the Worlds and Harryhausen’s
movies, they were on-screen. You had to camouflage them. The amount of
work and physical labor involved, it’s quite overwhelming.
Ray has said that he’s never made a horror picture, that they were all
fantasy pictures. From your point of view as an eight-year-old, how did
that fit into your sense of genre?