Ray Harryhausen Biography

Fast Facts

• Interest in stop-motion animation was piqued at 13 when he saw 1933's King Kong
• At 17, he made his first short film, The Cave Bear, and cut up his mother's fur coat to use as fur for his ursine creature
• His parents were so impressed with the project that they didn't punish him
• Was hired by puppeteer-filmmaker George Pal in 1940 to work on Pal's Puppetoon series
• During World War II, served in Frank Capra's unit of the Army Signal Corps
• Was best man at sci-fi author Ray Bradbury's 1947 wedding
• In 1953, devised the split-screen-filming technique Dynamation, which allowed for combining stop-motion with live-action
• To save money on his giant octopus creation for 1955's It Came From Beneath the Sea, he reduced the number of tentacles from eight to six
• For 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, British censors deemed the hero's swordfight with a skeleton too frightening for children
• Modern animators paid homage to him in 2001's Monsters, Inc
• via Harryhausen's nightclub, while 2005's Corpse Bride featured a Harryhausen piano
• His memoir, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, was published in 2004