Ray Harryhausen: The B-movie legend Tim Burton called “the guy”
Mainstream cinema’s most prominent master of the macabre, Tim Burton has become synonymous with a certain style of filmmaking, which has proven so successful over such an extended period of time that Burton-esque entered the lexicon a long time ago.
The downside that inevitably comes with having such a singular aesthetic is that accusations of being a one-trick pony are going to follow eventually. Still, it’s hard to argue with the results when Burton is one of the ten highest-grossing directors in history with a lifetime box office haul within touching distance of $4.5 billion.
Not every movie is a winner, but the hits have been balancing out the misses since the very beginning. His intricate world-building, gothic trappings and sense of grandeur have been on full display since his debut feature, and there are plenty of folks who’ll show up at their local multiplex on opening night and with no questions asked because Burton’s name is strong enough to be a selling point in itself.
Fittingly, then, another filmmaker who accomplished much the same decades beforehand became a pivotal influence, even if their day jobs were markedly different despite their shared beginnings in animation and art design. Burton was hardly alone in showing up to a fantastical film for the sole reason it promised the latest masterwork from the inimitable Ray Harryhausen.
“He was the guy,” Burton declared to Pop Entertainment. “If I saw his name, no actor meant anything, but his name certainly meant something.” Regardless of which kind of creature, monster, ghoul, or ghost he was bringing to the screen, one of the reasons Harryhausen became such a legend is because they felt like characters in their own right, and not merely enemies to be disposed of by the hero.
“His monsters had more personality than most of the actors in the movies,” Burton suggested with a very high degree of accuracy. “Even if the monster was just a monster; the death scene was always just so beautiful and tragic. The final little twist of the tail or the one final breath or whatever.”
Thanks to the passion and imagination on full display in every single one of Harryhausen’s creature features, he became one of the biggest influences and inspirations on Burton. It’s obvious in his own stop-motion creations, but also in how the director has always been able to turn his band of filmic outcasts, outsiders, and weirdos into tragic figures with well-rounded personalities.
He’s never gone full Harryhausen and indulged himself with a skeleton army or a rampaging sea beast, but that doesn’t make that DNA any less prevalent in his work. At a time when the visual effects artists were even less recognised than they are today – which is saying something – Harryhausen became a brand unto himself because every single jerky movement came from a place of love.
