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RAY HARRYHAUSEN: TITAN OF CINEMA Celebrating the 100th birthday of a mercurial movie animator
Ray Harryhausen’s adventures in stop-motion animation left generations of fi lmgoers wide-eyed at the feats of artistry he brought to the big screen. More than half a century’s work is brought together in Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema, a suitably epic blockbuster exhibition that comprises the biggest collection of the mythological master’s work to date. Presented in conjunction with the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, this major summer exhibition commemorates what would have been Harryhausen’s 100th birthday. From the sword-fi ghting skeletons of the Sinbad fi lms and Jason and the Argonauts to the dinosaurs of One Million Years BC, Harryhausen’s painstakingly realised creations forged from his ‘Dynamation’ technique had a profound infl uence on directors including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Tim Burton. Nick Park and Peter Lord, who created Wallace and Gromit for Aardman Animation, have also praised
Harryhausen’s onscreen alchemy, which itself was infl uenced by seeing Willis O’Brien’s own stop-motion work on the original King Kong from 1933. Like them, Harryhausen was every inch an artist.
‘Ray Harryhausen was really infl uenced by visual art,’ says Lauren Logan, the Scottish National Galleries’ curator of collection and research in modern and contemporary art. ‘Gustave Doré, who did the illustrations for the bible in the 19th century, was a big infl uence on his whole aesthetic.’ An extensive programme of screenings and workshops will show off the eye-popping fantasmagoria of Harryhausen’s work to a new generation weaned on CGI. ‘There’s something really believable about Harryhausen’s models,’ says Logan. ‘They come alive onscreen.’ (Neil Cooper) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, Sat 23 May–Sun 25 Oct.
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) 1 Apr–31 May 2020 THE LIST 101