If you’re over 35 and male, you’ll remember going to the movies and watching the original “Clash of the Titans” in 1981. This was the last hurrah for stop-motion animation and for the master of that art, Ray Harryhausen.
We wanted bigger and better, louder and faster, and Harryhausen’s beautifully crafted models just didn’t cut it with the blockbuster 80s anymore. Like the myths he brought tantalisingly to life, Harryhausen was slowly fading from memory.
Wes Anderson, Tim Burton and even James Cameron have all toyed with the stop-motion process over the years, but none has the panache or humanity shown by Harryhausen’s characters. Not to mention the fact that we want skeletons with swords fighting Greek warriors, not namby pamby foxes running about.
Before you watch CGI monsters smash the hell out of each other in 3D, brush up on their low tech ancestors.
5. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
Sinbad and his crew travel to a magical island to break the evil spell that has turned Prince Kassim into a baboon. Only then can Sinbad marry Kassim’s sister Farah (not a baboon), and live happily ever after.
Stop Motion Highlights: Sinbad fights monsters galore but the bad boy is a thumping great walrus with some serious tusks and skin like plate armour.
4. The Valley of Gwangi
Cowboys discover a lost valley full of dinosaurs.
Stop Motion Highlights: Cowboys versus dinosaurs, what more could you ask? How about a T-Rex running amok after escaping from a circus and chomping on the locals before burning to death in a Cathedral that’s what.
3. Clash of the Titans
Perseus has thirty days to save Andromeda from the mighty Kraken and faces a multitude of horrors along the way.
Stop Motion Highlights: Where to start? Giant scorpions, a two headed dog, the Kraken itself? All pale into insignificance when Perseus goes toe to tail with Medusa in one of the greatest dust-ups in movie history.
2. The Empire Strikes Back
Darth Vader kicks rebel arses all the way from Hoth to Cloud City in the best Star Wars film ever made.
Stop Motion Highlights: A surprise entry to some, seeing how the Star Wars franchise helped put a nail in the coffin of stop-motion, but the giant AT-ATs attack on the rebel base on Hoth is as exciting as anything in a Harryhausen movie.
1. Jason and the Argonauts
The daddy of them all and surely ripe for a big screen makeover? Jason leads a handpicked crew to steal the Golden Fleece from under the very nose of the King of Colchis and to rally his people.
Stop Motion Highlights: Forget the Hydra and the fabled skeleton battle, the heavyweight champ in this picture is the iron man Talos. Listen to the straining sounds of iron as he crushes Argonauts under foot and swats them with his sword. This is how real movie magic is done.
I remember seeing “Jason and the Argonauts,” the greatest of all B movies, when I was very young. That skeleton battle was unforgettable.
Also: Is the Latinate ending in “Farnsworthus” a comic reference to the classical motifs in the top five stop-motion animation films? Just asking. 🙂
It is. My dad would tell me about Jason and the Argonauts as a kid and when I finally saw it on television it lived up to everything he said. A wonderful film.