CHAPTER FIVE O’BRIEN AND HARRYHAUSEN CONTEMPORARIES – 1930...

CHAPTER FIVE

O’BRIEN AND HARRYHAUSEN CONTEMPORARIES – 1930-1970

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O’BRIEN AND HARRYHAUSEN CONTEMPORARIES – 1930-1970 147

‘The Ptushko Collective’. Between 1936 and 1938,the unit would produce fourteen animated shortfilms, usually based on Russian folktales, thatincluded Repka (The Little Turnip) (1936), VolkI iZhuravl (The Wolf and the Crane ) (1936), Lisa i Vino-grad (The Fox and the Grapes) (1936), Rodina Zovet(The Motherland Calls) (1936), Vesyolye muzykanty(The Merry Musicians) (1937), Skazka o rybakeI i rybke(The Tale of the Fisherman and the Goldfish) (1937),Zaveshchaniye (The Will) (1937), Lisa i Volk (The Foxand the Wolf ) (1937), Malenky-Udalenky (The LittleDarling One) (1938) and Pyos i Kot (The Dog and theCat) (1938). In most cases Prushko is credited asartistic supervisor of these pictures although he wasoccasionally responsible for the story and thescript, and in some cases directed.

In 1938 Ptushko began work on another ani-mated/live-action feature called Zolotoy Klyuchik(The Golden Key) an adaptation of Carlo Collodi’snovel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Although hugelysuccessful in the Soviet Union when it was releasedin 1939 The Golden Key didn’t receive a wide distri-bution elsewhere and it was to be Ptushko’s lastfilm featuring model animation. However, afterthe war he did made a number of fantasy filmsthat included Sadko (heavily cut and retitled theMagic Voyage of Sinbad for the States) (1953), IlyaMuromets (retitled The Sword and the Dragon)(1956) and Sampo (retitled The Day the Earth Froze)(1959). In 1968 Ptushko began work on the fea-ture Ruslan and Ludmila, which took a total of fouryears to complete. Sadly, a few months after the

film’s release in 1972, Ptushko died. Like O’Brien,his near contemporary, Ptushko will always beremembered in film history for one film, The NewGulliver, and though its message has somewhatdated, the film is undoubtedly a classic and a mile-stone in the history of model animation.

Although brought up in America, LouBunin was also Russian. Born in Kiev in 1904, heleft Russia at a very early age and received atraining in art at the Chicago Art Institute. Hisambition was to be an artist and sculptor so hewent to France to attend the Academie de laGrande Chaumiere with the sculptor Bourdelle.When he returned to the US in 1930 he held aone-man show of his art in Chicago and the fol-lowing year he travelled to Mexico to becomean assistant to the painter Diego Rivera. Whilehe was in Mexico he developed an interest inmarionettes and on his return to Chicago begana marionette theatre. This led him to experi-ment with animating and filming puppetswhich, in turn, led to his first animated film, ashort subject called Pete Roleum and his Cousins(1938), made for the Petroleum Industry standat the 1938/39 New York World’s Fair. It was athirty-minute colour film that featured an ani-mated bug eating a leaf and when insecticide issprayed on the leaf the bug rolls over and dies.Although not exactly a classic it did lead toother offers of work in the field of informationand industrial propaganda and slowly Buninbegan to be noticed.

146 O’BRIEN AND HARRYHAUSEN CONTEMPORARIES – 1930-1970

During the 1930s, when Obie was working onhis greatest creation and Ray was only just begin-ning his fascination with the art, there were fewother individuals taking any interest in model ani-mation, and those that were saw it only as one of avariety of visual effects. Slowly, however, with theadvent of the 1950s, interest in the art increased,largely as a result of the contemporary cycle ofmonsters-on-the-rampage movies. The public’sappetite for these fantasy films encouraged anumber of individuals to try their hand at modelanimation and so the 1950s and 1960s would turnout to be a golden age for the art.

Some of this potential new talent had, likeRay, been inspired by King Kong, which wouldcontinue to weave its spell over subsequent gen-erations, but these potential animators were alsobeing inspired, not just by Ray’s films, but by hismethods of bringing his creations to life, usingcheaper and more easily available methods. Theyrealized that such techniques could help thembring their own dreams to fruition and theywould devise their own methods, working in par-allel with or along similar lines to Ray’s ownDynamation. Eventually the vogue for the mon-ster-on-the-rampage movies which had inspiredthis renaissance would decline, giving way tomore inventive and ambitious science-fiction andmythological projects.

America was still at the heart of this surge inthe fashion for films that showed people co-exist-ing – not always very peacefully – with impossiblecreatures. However, there were also a few outsideAmerica who found their own ways of usingmodel animation; some of them would find amarket for simple puppet animation but thereothers who would recognize its versatility whencombined with live action.

Alexandr Ptushko was sometimes called ‘TheSoviet Walt Disney’ but it would be more accu-rate to say that he was a Russian Willis O’Brien.In 1934 Ptushko saw King Kong, and it convincedhim that the way forward for model animationwas to produce films that featured both animat-ed models and live actors in the same frame.

Ptushko was born in Lugansk, now in theUkraine, in 1900 and began his film career in1927 when he went to work for the Moscow-basedMosfilm Studio. Initially he constructed puppetsfor model animated films made by other film-makers, but because of his enthusiasm and pro-fessionalism he soon became a director anddesigner in his own right, making a series of stop-motion films between 1928 and 1932 that fea-tured a character called Bratishkin. It was duringthe making of these films that Ptushko managedto refine his animation techniques and evenmade tests combining puppets with live action. In1933 he assembled an animation team and beganwork on his first feature film, a project calledNovyi Gulliver (The New Gulliver). It tells the storyof a Russian boy called Petya (played by Vladimir

Konstantinovich Konstantinov whose only filmthis was) who falls asleep during a commune out-ing and dreams that he is a new Gulliver, washedashore on Lilliput. He finds that he has been tiedup on the beach but is eventually released andbecomes the guest of honour at a feast held bythe monarch of Lilliput. Being a good Stalinist,he is appalled to discover that Lilliput is a deca-dent, bourgeois society controlled by capitalistprofiteers, and before he wakes up to reality hehelps the workers in the King’s undergroundmunitions factory overthrow their decadentrulers. All a bit heavy, perhaps, but the joy of thisfilm is not in its blatant propaganda storyline orpolitical aims, but in its conception and execu-tion. It was a remarkable undertaking as Ptushkoreputedly utilized some ‘three thousand finger-size character models of revolutionists, bloatedplutocrats, crooners and burlesque queens’ (toquote the publicity of the time). However, it ismore likely that there were actually only fifteenhundred models, although that number, if accu-rate, still represents an incredible achievement.The models were made largely of clay and the keycharacters possessed detachable heads allowingthem a range of expressions. Over sixty sets wereused in the film, and a lot of time, effort andresources were spent completing the optical workthat combined the models with the one live actor.It is reputed that over fifty technicians, includingartists, modellers and animators, worked on thepicture for two years. It was halfway through themaking of Gulliver that Ptushko saw O’Brien’sKing Kong and was amazed and inspired by thefilm to such an extent that he utilized some of thetechniques he had seen.

Released worldwide in 1935/36 Gulliverquickly gained international acclaim, more forits cinematic innovations than its Stalinist plot-line, although one reviewer for The New YorkTimes wrote, ‘In addition to the technical finesse,the film has genuine wit in its sly assault on bour-geois institutions.’ The New Gulliver countedCharlie Chaplin among its great admirers, whichled in part to Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936).Always on the lookout for new animated picturesRay also saw it in 1936, when he was sixteen, andhe too was inspired, although perhaps not asmuch as by King Kong. Ray remembers that hismother took him to see the film, which had justbeen released in the US, and he was mesmerizedby the huge number of tiny animated figures,although the political message contained in thestory went right over his head. The film wasresponsible, to some extent, for inspiring theCzech animators of the 1950s and althoughlargely forgotten over the intervening years, it isnow gaining new admirers and Ptushko is beingrecognized as the genius he was.

Following the success of The New Gulliver, Mos-film allowed Ptushko to form his own stop-motionproduction department, which became known as

PREVIOUS SPREAD

Left, three of the seven armatured heads (Pan, Lao andMerlin) that were seen sprouting from the body of the LochNess monster featured in the climax of 7 Faces of Dr Lao(1964). These were animated by Jim Danforth and are now,along with two other heads (these can be seen on page172), in The Deutsche Kinemathek Museum Für Film undFernsehen in Berlin. Right, Ray looking at the models of Pegasus and Perseusfeatured in Clash of the Titans (1981) with Jim Danforth. Theseare the same models featured in close-up on page 130.

TOP

Alexandr Ptushko circa 1930s.

ABOVE

Alexandr Ptushko circa 1960s.

BELOW LEFT

A scene from The New Gulliver (1935) showing the live-action actor’s legs and feet bestriding the marching andLilliputian revolutionaries. This one shot shows just howmany tiny models Ptushko had to animate.

BELOW CENTRE

One of the ‘thousands’ of miniature puppets used in the film.

BELOW RIGHT

The Russian poster for The New Gulliver.

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was assisted by twenty-five other technicians,including some from the Disney and Fleisher stu-dios1, but the models and animation was designedand executed by Bunin. It is a superb piece ofwork and is perhaps the best section of a lacklus-tre film. Bunin remained at MGM for a few yearsworking on minor effects sequences, but was firedand blacklisted as a result of McCarthyism.

Bunin cherished an ambition to shoot a fea-ture film of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderlandusing model animation. Unable to raise themoney in Hollywood, he travelled to England in1948 where the J. Arthur Rank Organisationagreed to find some of the production moneyfor the film in which Bunin would combine alive-action Alice with animated models. Follow-ing a prologue sequence that takes place atChrist Church College in Oxford where CharlesDodson (Lewis Carroll was his nom de plume) wasa fellow and in the garden of Alice Liddell, whohad inspired the character of Alice, we then seeAlice (Carol Marsh) following the animatedwhite rabbit into Wonderland.

The project began production in 1949. It wasphotographed in Technicolor, cost one milliondollars and was filmed in two versions, one Eng-lish and one French. All the animation wasexecuted in a studio in Nice, France using eightytechnicians, several of whom were on loan fromMGM, including Irving Block, a matte artist, andLloyd Knechtel. The complex and surreal storycalled for many optical effects including multiple

rewinds and travelling mattes, and, most remark-able of all, the synchronization of the voices withthe models. The characters and costumes for themodels were based on the drawings by Sir JohnTenniel, the original illustrator of the book.Bunin set himself the task of animating multiplepuppet scenes, including the Queen of Hearts’cricket party in which at least twenty puppetsappeared at the same time. Although it mightseem that a scene with multiple dancing lobsterswould require multiple lobster puppets, Buninused only two. We see the lobsters dance towardsa flower, which is slightly off-centre and it was thisflower that concealed the camera lens. Bunincleverly animated the two models between twomirrors facing each other, which had the effect ofcreating endless rows of lobsters.

At about the same time as Bunin began ani-mation work on the film, in Hollywood WaltDisney was also beginning his two-dimensionaladaptation, also to be called Alice in Wonderland(1951). The Disney company approached Buninand Rank to request that they hold up therelease of their version for three years, so thatBunin’s film didn’t piggy-back on the publicityfor the Disney’s three-million-dollar film. Afterspending so many years in planning and produc-tion Bunin felt that this was unfair and openedhis version first, calling it Lou Bunin’s Alice inWonderland. Disney immediately took him tocourt; but the judge dismissed the case on thebasis that there had been several previous ver-


In 1942 Bunin was invited to work for a num-ber of top Hollywood studios including WarnerBros, Paramount and Universal, filming animatedinserts and other optical effects and it was whilstthere that he met Michael Myerberg with whomhe planned an animated version of Richard Wagn-er’s fourteen-hour opera cycle The Ring of theNibelung which they intended to reduce to fourhours. The conductor Leopold Stokowski was alsoto be involved and together they worked for threeyears on this extremely ambitious project. Howev-er, just when it seemed that Universal Picturesmight finance the film, it was dropped because theHollywood executives realized the close associa-tion between Wagner’s work and the Nazi regime.

The year he arrived in Hollywood Bunindirected as well as animated Bury the Axis (1943) ,

a political propaganda film for the US govern-ment, which satirized the leaders of the Axispowers – Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. Filmedin colour, the six-minute film lampooned all threefigures by using heavily stylized puppets (wonder-fully modelled by Bunin) and having them singderogatory songs. Aside from the three centralfigures Bunin also animated a stork, a snake (thiswas an introduction to Hirohito), geese and atank. It’s a wonderful piece of wartime propagan-da that is as fresh today as when it was made.

In 1943 Bunin was invited by MGM to workfor them on various productions including a pro-logue for their all-star musical Ziegfeld Follies(1946). In one section of this entertaining insertthere is a lobby scene for which Bunin animatedtwenty-five separate models simultaneously. He

BELOW

Several images showing Bunin, or at least his hands, at workon a model of a horse or mule. They show the mould, thelatex model being extracted and the painting of the model.

BOTTOM

Bunin’s greatest achievement, the very ambitious andbrilliant Alice in Wonderland (1951). Aside from the lastimage, all the scenes show Alice (Carol Marsh) combinedwith the models, which were all designed by Bunin.

BELOW

Nine scenes from the US propaganda film Bury the Axis(1943) by Lou Bunin. The three leaders of the Axis – Hitler,Mussolini and Hirohito – are lampooned in this original andstill very amusing animated slapstick film. It begins with a stork delivering Adolf, then has Mussolini as Hitler’sobedient dog and Hirohito as a ‘snake in the grass’.

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the bright idea of animating real cigarettes and,following tests, he asked the manufacturers if theyminded if the commercial featured actual ciga-rettes rather than drawn ones. Pal was given aninstant go-ahead and he spent three weeks ani-mating the cigarettes to music. He recalled, ‘Theyliked it so much that they ordered other filmswhere cigarettes spoke. So we put little mouths onthem – no face yet, just mouths. And then we putfaces on them, and put hats on them, and putarms and legs on them. I built wire legs with but-tons for feet and made a series of legs that way.And that was the birth of Puppetoons.’2

By 1933 the Nazi party was in power in Ger-many and, as both he and his wife wereHungarian nationals, Pal found himself beinginvestigated by the Gestapo. With the littlemoney they were able to scrape together they leftGermany for Prague where Pal wanted to openan animation studio. He searched Prague tryingto buy an animation camera and found thatthere were none, so he designed and built hisown stop-motion camera, which, in those days ofuncertainty, was so versatile that it could bepacked away in a suitcase. It wasn’t long beforePal moved again, this time to Paris where he setup a makeshift studio in his hotel room. Here hefilmed model stop-motion films for Philips Radiowho were based in Holland. After he had pro-duced a number of these very successful films forthem Philips asked if Pal would consider basinghimself in Endhoven in Holland, which he did.There, working in a garage, he photographed incolour the short film The Ship of the Ether (1934)in which a glass spaceship (made from real glass)is propelled by ether waves. Moving his studio to

a marginally more up-market butchers shop, heproduced more commercials for Philips, Hor-licks, Unilever and the US-based advertisingcompany J. Walter Thompson Amongst the bestof these shorts are Philips Cavalcade (1934), TheSleeping Beauty (1935), Vier Asse (1936), Sinbad(1936), What Ho, She Bumps (1937), Sky Pirates(1938), Radjorør – revolusionen (1938), PhilipsBroadcast of 1938 (1938) and Love on the Range(1939). It was during this period that he, alongwith an American film-maker, Dave Bader, cameup with the title Puppetoons.

Gaining a visa to visit America in 1939, justbefore the outbreak of the European war, Pal wasasked to be a guest lecturer at Columbia Universityand to exhibit the shorts he had made in Europe.As luck would have it, whilst he was in New YorkBarney Balaban, the President of Paramount Pic-tures, saw Love on the Range at a party and was so


sions of the story and that the novel was by thenin the public domain. Sadly, Bunin’s adaptationand execution of the novel is mostly forgottentoday, although it is far more enjoyable than Dis-ney’s sterilized version. Right up to his death in1994, aged 89, Bunin was still struggling to getthe film restored and out to a wider audience.

Following Alice in Wonderland Bunin didn’tmake another animated feature but concentrat-ed, for the remainder of his working career, onanimated short subjects, inserts and credits forUS television programmes, industrial films andAmerican commercials. Although his body ofwork was considerable Bunin, like so many otheranimators, will be remembered for a single film,the technically innovative Alice.

Towards the end of the 1930s a project thatObie and Harry O. Hoyt, the director of The LostWorld, had begun in 1926 at First Nationalreared its head again, although this time withoutany input by Obie. Lost Atlantis was to be aboutthe legendary lost continent of Atlantis on whichdinosaurs co-existed with humans. In 1938, Hoytteamed up with special effects technician FredJackman to develop and film this adventure forColumbia Pictures. Twenty-five model dinosaurswere reputedly built (at a cost of $600 each),including a tyrannosaurus rex, a stegosaurus, aceratosaurus and an allosaurus, all or most ofwhich featured in ten minutes of test footagewhich was shot at the studio. Sadly, eitherbecause of costs or for some other reason, theproject was cancelled by the studio head, HarryCohn. Then in 1940 the same studio again resur-rected the project, this time as a Technicolorproduction, with models designed and con-structed by Edward Nassour and Walter Lantz,but once again, after some test footage had beenshot, the production was cancelled.

Rather surprisingly, during the war yearsvery little model animation was used in propa-ganda film-making. Ray had made attempts toshow the medium’s versatility by making twofilms, How to Build a Bridge (1941) and Guadal-canal (1945), but there was little or no interest.However, aside from Bunin’s Bury the Axis therewas another rather odd little film called Revolu-tion in Toyland (1942), which we think it isworth a mention because of its bizarre story.The eight-minute black and white film madefor Sterling Films tells of a toy-maker who isusing toys to smuggle out secrets to the Allies.One day a Gestapo officer comes calling andthe toy-maker escapes out of the window. Theofficer falls over one of the toys and then, in adaze, the nasty Nazi is attacked by the toys. Inthe end the toys win. The model toys wouldappear to be made of wood and wire and theanimation is somewhat basic. The name of theperson or persons responsible for the anima-tion is sadly unknown to us; but the number ofanimated models in the film is impressive –

there is one scene of the toys breaking out of acupboard in which there appear to be in excessof twenty separate models.

The 1940s would see the appearance of anumber of key figures associated with model ani-mation. The most important of these wasanimator, director and producer George Pal. Palwas born Györy Pál Marczinsák in Cegléd, Hun-gary in 1908, his mother and father wereentertainers and his grandparents had beenmembers of the Hungarian National Theatre. Itbecame apparent from an early age that GeorgeJr. also had a leaning towards the arts, in his casearchitecture, which he studied at the BudapestAcademy of Arts. However, whilst there he alsostudied drawing and carpentry, both of whichwould be extremely useful to him when he beganmaking films. At the age of twenty, he graduatedfrom the Academy and went to work at HanniaFilms in Budapest, designing and making titlecards and posters. It was during his time at Han-nia that he became fascinated with cartoons,especially American cartoons, and began toresearch how they were made. Eventually he builthis own equipment and started to produce hisown two-dimensional shorts.

In 1931 he left Budapest for Berlin where,within only a few months and despite the fact thathe could not speak German, he became head ofthe UFA Studios. Pal was ambitious and in the fol-lowing year he left UFA and set up his owncartoon studio, which rapidly flourished. It was atthis point that he first ventured into model ani-mation when he was commissioned to produce acommercial for a cigarette company. After spend-ing hours and hours drawing cigarettes, Pal had

RIGHT

A rare photograph taken during the early days ofPuppetoons. George Pal is on the left, reaching over theminiature table, Willis O’Brien is on the right with his armson the table and Ray is behind him. The cameraman, PaulSprunk, is behind Pal and someone called Jordan is in thecentre, behind the light. The camera assistant betweenJordan and Sprunk is unknown.

BELOW

The great George Pal in his office with the Strauss modelfeatured in Mr. Strauss Takes a Walk (1943).

BOTTOM LEFT

George Pal looking through a miniature of the ParamountPictures Studios gateway.

BOTTOM RIGHT

Ray animating the models for Hoola Boola (1941). Workingon Pal’s Puppetoons was Ray’s first paid job in the world ofanimation.

ABOVE

Three images of the unrealized Lost Atlantis.

Top left. Two styracosaurus (or possibly arrhinoceratops or anchiceratops).

Bottom left. Two unknown technicians (one could possiblybe Fred Jackman) animating and photographing thetyrannosaurus rex in its miniature set. These are the onlyknown photographs showing the effects for the film.According to Stephen Czerkas in his book Cine-Saurus,‘Almost twenty minutes of animation were filmed but themovie was never completed and the footage has been lost.’

Above. The same tyrannosaurus rex or allosaurus standingin an ancient gateway.

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audiences and is still shown on television atChristmas, it was not a huge success at the timeof its release.

However, Pal’s next venture would not onlybreak box-office records but also set a new trendin science-fiction films. Destination Moon (1950)was written by science-fiction author RobertHeinlein with Alford ‘Rip’ Van Ronkel andJames O’Hanlon. The film contains a lot of spe-cial effects but there are only two sequences thatfeature model animation. The first is a long shotthat occurs whilst the crew of the spaceshipLuna are on their way to the moon in which sev-eral animated models of spacemen are seenwalking on the outer hull of the spaceship. Thesecond is the long shot of the spacecraft after ithas landed upright in the Harpalus crater inwhich we once again see tiny animated figures,this time climbing down the exterior ladderonto the moon’s surface. Both sequences wereanimated by the same technicians who had

worked on The Great Rupert but this time John S.Abbott was credited as ‘Director of Animation’with Fred Madison as animator. Destination Moonwent on to earn Pal the 1950 American Acade-my Award ® for special effects in 1951.

Pal’s next two films were also extremely popu-lar at the box office and have become science-fic-tion cult classics. When World’s Collide (1951) andThe War of the Worlds (1953) raised the technicalaccomplishments of the genre to a new level andmade Pal the top fantasy producer, but neitherutilized model animation. Nor did his three sub-sequent pictures, Houdini (1953), Naked Jungle(1954) and The Conquest of Space (1955) – anotherventure into science fiction, or as Pal saw it sci-ence fact. It wasn’t until 1958 that he returned, at least in part, to model animation.

For over twenty years Pal had wanted tomake Tom Thumb and in 1957 he took the proj-ect to MGM who readily agreed to back it with abudget of one million dollars on one condition:


excited by it that he made some enquiries aboutPal and discovered he was visiting the US. Hequickly contacted him to ask if he would considermaking puppet films for Paramount, basing him-self in Hollywood. It was a dream come true forPal and he eagerly accepted the offer.

Once established in Hollywood, Pal opened asmall studio in a converted garage on WestMcCadden Place and called his company GeorgePal Productions. He immediately set about plan-ning a series of Puppetoons, which he described as‘Color cartoons in three dimensions’.3 The pro-duction process would begin with a script, usuallywritten by Pal and Jack Miller, the story-sketchartist, following which the music was composedand recorded, along with dialogue and soundeffects. Pal and his artists would then produce aseries of sketches showing the action in eachscene and these would be filmed to ensure thatthe action would flow. Whilst this was going on ateam of technicians, including wood carvers,would make the puppets, each of which would beequipped with a range of heads with differentexpressions, a range of legs for walking and rub-ber latex arms and hands with wire cores.

Pal produced one Puppetoon every six weeks,beginning with Western Daze (1941) followed inthe same year by Dipsy Gypsy, Hoola Boola, The GayKnighties and Rhythm in the Ranks. It was at thisembryonic stage in the development of Pal Pro-ductions that an enthusiastic young animatorarrived. His name? Ray Harryhausen. Ray recallsthat George was a congenial, kind and generousman who always seemed to be looking out fortalented technicians, hence Ray’s employment.

He was very easy to work with and was a perfec-tionist, working throughout the night readingthe next project for the next day. He would takebetween ten to twenty-five weeks to plan andmake copious sketches of each film. Pal was athorough person, Ray recalls, his drawings weremeticulous and his calculations of timings formusic and dialogue were exact to the last sec-ond. When the twenty-year-old Ray started atWest McCadden Place he and George shared theanimation work between them, with Ray animat-ing on one set whilst George worked on anotherto save time. Ray worked on thirteen of the Pup-petoons, including the five titles mentioned aboveas well as Sleeping Beauty (1941), Jasper and theWatermelons (1942), The Sky Princess (1942), MrStrauss Takes a Walk (1942), Tulips Shall Grow(1942) (which was nominated for an Oscar ®),The Little Broadcast (1942), Jasper and the HauntedHouse (1942) and Jasper and the Choo-Choo (1942).Later, other technicians, including the cine-matographer John Abbott and animators likeWah Chang, Gene Warren, Phil Kellison andWillis O’Brien (who only stayed a week or so),were employed. By 1945, when Ray left, the teamhad swollen to forty-five.

Pal received an Academy Award® in 1943 forthe ‘Development of Animation Techniques’ andthe Puppetoon series continued until 1947 whenPal filmed Romeow and Julicat, an insert made forthe Paramount feature Variety Girl. In all, Pal pro-duced forty-two Puppetoons, although thisnumber should be compared to the two hundredshorts he is said to have made in Europe beforehe emigrated to America.

By the time Paramount called a halt to theproduction of Pal’s innovative but stylized Pup-petoons he had already decided to try andproduce feature films, some of which he hopedwould use his animation techniques. He had sev-eral projects in mind and when Peter Rathvon, afriend of Pal’s, set up his own production com-pany, Eagle-Lion, he signed Pal to a two-picturedeal, the first of which would be The Great Rupertto be followed by a project that had the workingtitle of Operation Moon.

The Great Rupert (1949) is a sentimentalblack-and-white film about a squirrel calledRupert who has been trained to dance a Scot-tish reel for a Vaudeville act. With Christmasapproaching, a down-and-out family of acro-bats, led by the hugely enjoyable JimmyDurante, rent the apartment formerly occu-pied by Rupert’s trainer and Rupert accidental-ly helps them by stealing money from thelandlord’s secret horde. The film was directedby Irving Pichel and, in addition to Durante, itstarred Terry Moore (who had appeared inMighty Joe Young), Tom Drake and QueenieSmith. However the ‘real’ star of the film wasthe squirrel. Although most people believed itto be real (there were some cutaways of livesquirrels), it was in fact an articulated puppetanimated by ex-Puppetoon animator, Fred Madi-son4 assisted by cameraman John S. Abbott.The animation of the model (and some otheritems such as juggled walnuts) is at times errat-ic but for the majority of Rupert’s brief appear-ances the creature is believable and amusing.Although the film was popular with family

FAR LEFT

A page from Popular Mechanics magazine showing Rayand others working on the Puppetoons. The photograph at the top left of the page shows two technicians buildingminiatures for what would become Gaye Knighties (1941)and at top right a young lady is painting one of thepuppets. At the bottom left are some of the 6-inch knightmodels and in the bottom, right Ray is looking at assortedreplacement sets of hands. The caption claims that 6,000miniature figures were required for each short film of which2,000 were for the ‘leading man’. Ray never liked to countso we must except that this is correct.

LEFT

Ray reaching over a beautifully constructed miniature setto move the models for Gaye Knighties (1941).

ABOVE

The Puppetoon production crew outside George PalProductions Inc on West McCadden Place in 1940. Thefigure in the center with his mouth open and hand raised, is George Pal and behind him, just looking over his head, is a youthful Ray.

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Pal, the film starred unknowns Rod Taylor andYvette Mimieux with Alan Young playing the time-traveller’s friend.

Once again the film contained several modelanimation sequences, though far fewer than TomThumb. To render the effects and animation, Palagain approached Projects Unlimited and it wasWah Chang, Gene Warren and Tim Barr, assistedby George Pal’s son David Pal, who designed, con-structed and executed most of the effects. Thereare various time-lapse sequences, including flow-ers opening and closing, a shop mannequin thathas its clothes frantically changed as the decadesslip by and a candle that melts down as the time-traveller watches it from the time machine. Whatlittle animation the film does contain mainlyoccurs when the traveller is testing his machine inthe laboratory. We see a potted plant with its flow-ers opening (the following shots of flowers aretime-lapse), a snail dash across the floor and

apple blossom fade and apples grow. Much laterin the film, during the final fight with the Mor-locks, the time-traveller kills one and it slumps ina corner of the cavern. When the traveller pushesthe lever to escape we see the disintegration ofthe Morlock’s body, which includes an eye pop-ping out of its socket. Wah Chang constructed thebody of latex and other elements over a full-sizeskeleton and Dave Pal animated the decay. TheTime Machine was another huge worldwide successand it won an Academy Award® for its innovativevisual effects. As so often happens in the film busi-ness, The Time Machine, the high point of Pal’scareer, was followed by a slow and sad decline.

His next picture was Atlantis, The Lost Conti-nent (1960), again for MGM. Because there was awriters’ strike going on in Hollywood at the timeof pre-production, the MGM executives wantedto get the picture under way quickly. Pal tried toargue that the script was nowhere near ready to


that the picture was made at the MGM Studio atBorehamwood in England. Pal, too, had one stip-ulation: because the project contained a hugeamount of special effects, which he could visual-ize better than anyone else, he wanted to direct ithimself. However his first directorial venture wasnot to be a smooth ride: the problems beganwhen he arrived in England, as he explained:

Then the problem of British labor laws came up,and they wanted to put an English director on thepicture. So I reminded them of our tight budgetand said, ‘If you put another director on it, it willtake an awfully long time to get it ready,’ It’s verydifficult for a director who is not well versed inspecial effects to direct a picture like this. And Ihad been producing for so long that it was noproblem for me. Fortunately the head of the unionloved the Puppetoons, and when I showed himmy presentation, he said, ‘We have nobody whocan direct this. You are the one to do it.’ 5

The young American dancer-actor Russ Tamblyn,who had appeared in MGM’s hit Seven Brides ForSeven Brothers (1954) and had been nominated foran Oscar for Peyton Place (1957), was cast in thetitle role, a part that Pal had originally intendedto be played by an animated model. Most of therest of the parts were played by British actors,including June Thorburn, Terry-Thomas, PeterSellers, Bernard Miles, Jessie Matthews, Ian Wal-lace, Peter Butterworth and Peter Bull. Tom

Thumb, based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale,tells of an elderly couple who wish for a little boy,‘even if he were no bigger than my thumb’, andso are sent the miniscule Tom Thumb by the For-est Queen. The remainder of the film relates hisexploits with various unscrupulous charactersending, as one would expect, with everyone livinghappily ever after.

Although he came to realize that his maincharacter had to be a real actor, Pal had alwaysplanned that a number of other key charactersshould be played by models animated in the Pup-petoon style. When the project was given the greenlight, he asked Dutchman Joop Geesink6 to carryout the work, but Geesink’s quote was way overPal’s allocated budget. Pal then considered set-ting up a special studio and leading the workhimself, but as he was already both the producerand the director time would not allow for this. Hethen looked around for some of the animatorswho had worked alongside him on the Puppetoonseries, namely Wah Chang and Gene Warren, butthe company they had set up when the Puppetoonshad finished had gone out of business. However,as luck would have it (and as Hollywood legendtells it), just before Pal was to set out for Englandto begin principle photography he bumped intoGene Warren in the street. Warren told him that,along with Wah Chang and Tim Barr, he had setup another special effects company called Pro-jects Unlimited. On the spot, Pal signed ProjectsUnlimited to do the animation effects. It was

therefore Warren, Chang and fellow-animators,Don Sahlin and Herb Johnson who designed andanimated the characters Jack-in-the-Box, Con-Fu-Shon, the Yawning Man, and all the other toysthat come to life, a task that took a total of fivemonths to complete. The animation of thesewonderfully original characters was superb andthe sequences rate as some of the best stylizedmodel animation ever achieved. Pal was both sur-prised and delighted, as was MGM, when the filmwas a huge success on its release. In the studio’seyes Pal could do no wrong and they told himthat he could make whatever he wanted, so hechose to film H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

The Time Machine (1959) tells the fantasticstory of a time-traveller who journeys from theturn of the nineteenth century into the future.On the way he makes three stops: the first in 1917when the First World War is raging; the second in1940 when London is suffering the blitz; and thelast in 1966 to witness the beginning of a nuclearwar that destroys civilization. The machine reach-es its final destination in AD 802,701 by whichtime mankind has divided into two races; mutatedhumans called the Morlocks, who had originallysought sanctuary below ground after the atomicwar, and the Eloi, humans who stayed and thrivedabove ground. The time-traveller discovers thatthe first live off the second and helps the Eloi todefeat the Morlocks and then travels back to 1899to collect some books and return to helpmankind begin again. Produced and directed by

LEFT

Scenes showing the animated squirrel in Pal’s The GreatRupert (1949). Audiences believed the squirrel to be atrained animal but it was in fact animated by Fred Madison.

TOP RIGHT

David Pal, son of George Pal, animating the elves designedand constructed by Wah Chang for ‘The Cobblers and theElves’ sequence from The Wonderful World of the BrothersGrimm (1962).

TOP FAR RIGHT

Gene Warren animating ‘Con-Fu-Shon’ for Tom Thumb(1958).

BELOW

Don Shalin animating ‘Con-Fu-Shon’ for Tom Thumb.Shalin is holding a second, replacement, head ready to fix on to the main body of the model.

BOTTOM LEFT

Don Shalin animating a section of the dragon featured inThe Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962).

BOTTOM RIGHT

Don Shalin animating the singing elves featured in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962).

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slightly larger than the last. When the monsterreverts back to a tiny creature the entire processwas reversed and this part of the sequence was exe-cuted by fellow animator Pete Kleinow.

Kleinow, nicknamed ‘Sneaky’ Pete, was bornin 1934 in Indiana and had developed an earlyinterest in model animation. His first professionalemployment was at the Clokey Studios working onvarious television series, Gumby, Outer Limits andDavey and Goliath, and The Wonderful World of theBrothers Grimm was his first feature film. However,his ruling passion was for music and during thelate 1960s and early 1970s he worked with TheByrds and Joe Cocker. In 1974 Pete returned toanimation and effects working throughout the1980s and 1990s on features that included Cave-man (1981), Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire StrikesBack (1980), Gremlins (1984), Terminator (1984),RoboCop 2 (1990), Terminator 2: Judgement Day(1991) and Army of Darkness (1992). He died inPetaluma, California in 2007 from complicationsrelating to Alzheimer’s disease.

7 Faces of Dr Lao was another film that didpoorly at the box office and, although innova-tive, it is not too hard to see why. In places it isquite surreal. Today it is seen by some as a land-mark fantasy film but as far as we are concernedit is the quality of the model animation thatmakes this film special.

The failure of the film reflected badly on Paland he was not able to produce another featurefor almost four years. The Power (1967) was hislast for MGM and is fundamentally about humanbeings with superhuman powers. It starredGeorge Hamilton, Susan Pleshette and MichaelRennie. There are several sequences that incor-porate model animation, including some Pup-

petoon-like toy soldiers that threaten Hamilton,and a hallucinatory sequence that includes askeleton falling into blackness, and the freezingand then the melting of Hamilton’s head. Thefilm was an even bigger disaster at the box officethan Dr Lao and in Britain only made it as the sec-ond half of a double bill.

Although George Pal was continually work-ing on other projects, like a sequel to The TimeMachine, he would make only one more pic-

ture, Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze (1975). Thiswas also a box-office failure and a sad end to aproductive and pioneering career. Withoutdoubt Pal gained a place in the history of cine-ma with a number of remarkable films which,in turn, gave the art of model animation a hugeboost in the 1950s. Pal died in 1980 in LosAngeles of a heart attack and his passing wasmourned by a great many people in the indus-try, including Ray who had remained closefriends with him throughout all the years sincehis work on the Puppetoons.

We have made passing mention of WahChang and Gene Warren who worked withGeorge Pal and of their company, ProjectsUnlimited, which did the effects for his laterfilms, we now need to look at their careers inmore detail because of their individual contribu-tions to art of model animation.

Wah Ming Chang was born in 1917 in Hon-olulu, Hawaii. When he was two years old hisparents moved to San Francisco to open theHoHo Tea Room, on Sutter Street. Changrecalled that the tearooms were a haven for vari-ous artists and at the age of seven he met anartist, Blanding Sloan, who encouraged his pas-sion for sketching. It was also at this time thatChang developed an interest in marionette con-struction, which eventually led to him perform-ing in a one-man show with his marionettes.Because of his talent, Chang received a scholar-ship to the Peninsula School of Creative Educa-tion in Menlo Park and whilst there continuedhis marionette performances in company withseveral other students.


put into production and that the miniscule budg-et proposed would not do justice to the scope ofthe story, but in the end he was forced to con-cede. Consequently the film was a disaster. Itcontained an array of special effects, mostlyminiature, all designed and executed by ProjectsUnlimited. There was to have been a sequenceusing model animation in which men flew withartificial wings, but these scenes were cut fromthe final release after unfavourable previews.

Pal’s next picture was The Wonderful World ofthe Brothers Grimm (1962), based loosely on the lifeof the Grimm brothers and their fairy tales. At thetime MGM had a deal with the Cinerama Compa-ny, which had invented an ultra-wide-screenprocess using three cameras and projecting theimages simultaneously onto three screens.7 Theexecutives at MGM were looking around for anappropriate subject for which to use the processand, as Pal had been pushing for the project to goahead for some time, it was chosen to be the firstfeature to be made in Cinerama. Sadly, the film asa whole is disappointing but it does contain a con-siderable amount of excellent model animation.

Pal directed the fairy tales and Henry Levindirected the main Grimm brothers story. Again,the Projects Unlimited team took on the specialeffects, with animator Jim Danforth working onthe dragon sequence in ‘The Singing Bone’ sec-tion, the main animation sequence, together withDon Shalin and Dave Pal. The dragon model,designed and constructed by Chang, used a steelball-and-socket armature covered in latex rubberrather than the usual wooden Pal Puppetoon con-struction. In total, the dragon sequence took four

months to execute, as did the other animatedmodel section, the ‘Cobbler and the Elves’ story.Again Chang designed and constructed the elves,which were approximately twelve to eighteeninches high, but for this section Pal reverted backto his replacement technique with the animationbeing carried out by Don Shalin and David Pal.

Although The Wonderful World of the BrothersGrimm was given a massive amount of publicityand hype by MGM and Cinerama, it was a world-wide box-office failure and, sad to say, it hascome to look more and more dated in the yearssince its release.

In 1963 Pal began work on what would be hislast picture of note, 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964). Againmade for MGM it starred, in a variety of roles, thetalented and versatile Tony Randall. The screen-play was based on a novel by Charles G. Finneycalled The Circus of Dr Lao a story set in the 1920sabout a Chinese showman, one Dr Lao, whobrings his unusual circus to the small mid-westerntown of Abalone, Arizona. The circus exhibits arePan, the Greek god of joy, a giant serpent,Medusa, Merlin, Appolonius, the AbominableSnowman (played by Pal’s other son Peter) andthe Loch Ness monster, all of which play a part in gradually changing the lives of the town’sinhabitants. Projects Unlimited were once moreemployed to design and carry out the effects, thecentrepiece of which was the Loch Ness monstersequence, which in itself took three months to ani-mate. In the film the monster grows from a tinycreature into a huge beast and for the sequenceshowing its growth Jim Danforth constructed andanimated twenty separate articulated models, each

BOTTOM LEFT

Wah Chang with his own Kodak Cine Special camera, circalate1930s. The picture was taken by his wife Glen Chang.

BELOW

The animation models featured in the singing elves sectionof The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962).

BELOW, BOTTOM

A set of the replacement heads, designed by Wah Chang andused for the Yawning Man sequence in Tom Thumb (1958).

RIGHT

Gene Warren and Wah Chang planning an animationsequence for Tom Thumb (1958) with the replacementheads for the character Con-Fu-Shon in front of them.

BOTTOM RIGHT

Wah Chang at home with his model of a tyrannosaurus rexconstructed for the short film Dinosaurs, The Terrible Lizards(1970); it later featured in the television series Land of theLost (1974) as the t. rex affectionately known as ‘Grumpy’.

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the most auspicious start. Projects Unlimited wascommissioned by effects producers Jack Rabinand Louis DeWitt to deliver the stop-motionwork for the picture, although neither the com-pany or Chang and Warren received a credit.Perhaps they didn’t mind. The film featuredscenes of giant wasps and one scene of a fightwith a giant snake, but these were poorlydesigned and crudely animated. The budget did-n’t allow for proper ball-and-socket models soChang and Warren were reduced to using wireas an internal skeleton instead.

Projects Unlimited were then commissionedby George Pal to work on Tom Thumb (1958), thebeginning of an association which, as we havealready seen, was to last for many years. Their pri-mary task was to animate a large number of toysin Tom’s bedroom, so they employed Don Shalinand Herb Johnson to assist. In the sequencethere are a number of shots that show Russ Tam-

blyn (Tom) dancing with the toys, these effectswere accomplished with the aid of split screensand travelling mattes. Chang recalled

The two main puppet characters were Con-Fu-Shon and the Yawning Man, which I made. Bothof those had [a] series of faces or heads and thesewere done in wax. In the Yawning Man’s case awax face was made and put on the head withregistration pins, so that they were alwaysaccurately registered. The average number ofheads will be from twenty to thirty dialogue heads,and faces that smile or laugh or yawn.9

Project Unlimited were again asked by Pal toprovide all the effects, including all the time-lapse and miniature work, for The Time Machine(1960), which understandably won Gene War-ren and Tim Barr an Academy Award ® for bestspecial effects. Unfortunately Chang was left out

of the awards because of the way the credits forthe film were submitted to the Academy.Although upset at the time, Chang was a forgiv-ing man and celebrated the award alongsideWarren and Barr.

For Projects Unlimited 1959/60 was a busytime as they were also commissioned to executethe effects for a dinosaur picture calledDinosaurus! (1960). The film featured a bron-tosaurus and a tyrannosaurus rex (both poorlyconstructed by Marcel and Victor Delgardo) thelatter of which had a fight with a mechanical dig-ger in the climax! It was a slight film redeemedonly by the animation delivered by Chang andWarren, assisted by Phil Kellison, Dave Pal, DonSahlin and Tom Holland

Phil Kellison was one of the many backroomboys who never achieved wide acclaim as an ani-mator but he was in fact a good reliable artist,animator and technician. He, too, worked as an


In 1937 he made his first animated modelfilm and, although an amateur like Ray, hepainstakingly trained himself in art. Two yearslater, aged twenty-two he joined the Walt DisneyStudios as a member of the effects and modeldepartment, where his job was to sculpt woodenmodels of characters to enable the animators tovisualize them from all angles in their drawings.Then in the summer of 1939 tragedy struck. Hewas hospitalized with severe influenza, which wasin fact polio. The result was that Chang lost theuse or both of his legs and it would be a yearbefore he was able to walk with the aid of legbraces, which he was still wearing when Ray methim on the Puppetoons. Although Ray was on theverge of leaving Pal Productions by then, he gotto know Chang very well and, even though thetwo were never close friends, they stayed in touchover the years. Ray remembers Chang as one ofthe nicest men and most articulate animators he

has ever met, who often came over for dinnerwith his wife Glennalla (Glen) in those early days.The last time Ray saw Chang was when he wentup to see George Web, an art director on MightyJoe Young, who lived in Carmel; since Chang livedin the same area they both went to see him. Glenhad recently passed away but Chang was still hap-pily drawing and sculpting.

When the Puppetoons wound up in 1947Chang set up his own production company withGlen to make educational films. Sadly, businesswas slow so he joined Gene Warren to form Cen-taur, an effects company. Warren, who was bornin 1916, had also begun his career as an anima-tor at the George Pal studio working on anumber of Puppetoons, one of which was Date withDuke (1947) featuring the voice of Duke Elling-ton. He was also largely responsible for theRomeow and Julicat sequence that Pal designedfor the 1947 film Variety Girl about the romancebetween a cat and a dog, which used typical Pup-petoons models with wire for armatures and aseries of wax replacement heads.

In 1956/57 one of Centaur’s first featureswas the cheap science-fiction production Kronos(1957) about a giant alien robot. The Kronosmodel, which was very crude and completelyimpractical, was designed and built by Changand animated by Warren. Warren recalled, ‘Allthe action scenes with Kronos were accom-plished with stop-frame photography of thesimple, very unsophisticated puppet (about teninches in height) against process plates withforeground set pieces to allow the puppets tomake actual contact with the ground.’8

After changing the name of their companyto the more descriptive Projects Unlimited,Chang and Warren were joined by Tim Barr whotook a largely administrative role. In 1957 thingsbegan to pick up, although their first featureMonster From Green Hell (1958) was not perhaps

ABOVE

Gene Warren animating the Julicat model for thePuppetoon sequence Romeow and Julicat seen in theParamount Pictures feature film Variety Girl (1949).

RIGHT

The wonderfully sleepy but funny Yawning Man featured in Tom Thumb (1958).

FACING PAGE

Gene Warren animating the Yawning Man for Tom Thumb(1958)

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in 1927 and run by Howard A. Anderson) wascommissioned to carry out the special effectsand they, in turn, asked Projects Unlimited todeliver the model animation. Wah Chang andGene Warren designed a great many of theeffects and models while the armatures wereconstructed by Victor Delgado. The featuredcreatures included a mechanical doll whichgrows into a Cormoran, a horned giant (remark-ably similar to the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage ofSinbad), a dragon/gargoyle-like flying creature,a six-tentacled sea monster and another giantcalled Galligantua, which this time had twoheads. In addition there are various human fig-ures and even a dog. Without exception, themodels look dreadful, which is surprising con-sidering Chang and Warren were usually suchperfectionists. We can’t blame the budget eitherbecause, as Jim Danforth has pointed out, theproduction budget was at least healthy. Themodels seem to possess little or no musculardetail and the skin finishes appear shiny andrubbery, lacking any credibility, even as fantasycreatures. One of the golden rules in animatedfantasy is that the creatures must at the very leastalways look plausible.

The animation was credited to Chang, War-ren and Tim Barr, but in reality it was overseen byPhil Kellison with the animation itself executedby Jim Danforth, Tom Holland, Don Sahlin (whodid several tests for the animation, though noneof his work was used in the final film) and DavePal. Before the release Edward Small announcedthat it had been filmed in a new process called‘Fantascope’, ‘a revolutionary new system of trickphotography’;11 again the reality was rather differ-ent, Fantascope was very similar to Dynamation,utilizing split screens and rear-projection plates inexactly the same way.

The key animation scenes begin with theCormoran mechanical doll, which performs adance with the Princess throughout most ofwhich the lighting flickers during the animation,which suggests the animators had the same prob-lems as Ray did with his first colour film, The 7thVoyage of Sinbad. Next comes the Cormoran grow-ing into a giant and kidnapping the Princess, asequence which concludes with Jack killing it.Torin Thatcher, who plays the evil Pendragon,then conjures up Galligantua, which appears tobe very similar in design to the Cormoran exceptfor his two heads, fair hair and fangs, and thisvery unconvincing creature then does battle withthe awful sea creature that seems to have beendesigned by a plastic toy-maker on a bad day.Finally, the dragon/gargoyle possessed by Pen-dragon attacks Jack’s boat. Again this creature isvery poor in design and resembles somethingmade of Plasticine. Although the animation isnot of the best quality, it does have moments offluidity and occasional glimpses of characteriza-tion, especially during the mechanical toy’s

dance. Jack the Giant Killer did have story potentialbut it seems that Small never realized that thestory depended on the animation and visualeffects, and although Projects Unlimited andtheir animators made brave efforts to enhancethe overall look of the film, the responsibility forits failure has to lie with the producer.

When ‘Jerry’ Juran came to visit Ray in Lon-don in 2001, a year or so before he died, thethree of us talked at length about the films hehad directed for Ray and Charles. At one point Iasked him about Jack the Giant Killer, and helooked at Ray and then me and said that hecould never understand why the film wasn’t abox-office success. Ray and I had no intention ofdisillusioning him. Jerry was a wonderful manand an extremely versatile and talented director,ideally suited to fantasy films. When he directedlive action he was always able to take full acountof the effects which would be added later.

The next production Projects Unlimitedwere involved with was another George Pal film,The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962),which was a prestigious production but wouldonce more prove to be a commercial failure,again not because of poor effects but because ofits story construction. The film was shot in Cin-erama, which entailed the use of threepurpose-made animation cameras, which gaveWah Chang and Projects Unlimited a fewheadaches. The animation was completed by JimDanforth, Don Sahlin, Dave Pal, Tom Hollandand Peter Von Elk who were all uncredited.Although inconceivable today, it was quite nor-mal before the 1970s for technicians to beuncredited, even when their input was not justcrucial to the success of the film but its real‘stars’. The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

consisted of three Grimm fairy tales, beginningwith ‘The Dancing Princess’ which contains onlyone animation sequence of a flower that curls itspetals into a face and yawns. The next is ‘TheCobbler’s Tale’ which features a group of elvesthat look much like characters from the Pup-petoons and even re-used the heads of ‘TheYawning Man’ from Tom Thumb. The models forthis sequence were again built by Chang and theanimation was executed by Dave Pal, Don Shalinand Jim Danforth with good detail in the charac-terization of each model. The third and finalsegment is ‘The Singing Bone’ which featured ajewel-encrusted, fire-breathing dragon designedby Chang and animated by Danforth. It is thisdelightful character that is the overall ‘star’ ofthe film in terms of both animation and charac-terization. In an early scene the creature seizesand gulps down a spear thrown by actor BuddyHackett. When the dragon swallows the spear wesee a bulge caused by the spear’s progress downits throat. Another lovely touch is the dragonlicking its lips as it waits to eat Terry-Thomas.Although the film as a whole doesn’t flow, thereare moments when the animation brings it tolife and at least enables the fairy tale sections ofthe film to be moderately entertaining.

The next project was 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964)which also had its problems. The company wereagain asked by Pal to execute the effects, withChang, Danforth, Warren and Pete Kleinow (thelast two uncredited) working on the animation.There are a number of animated sequences but itis the finale, showing the appearance and growthof the Loch Ness Monster, as animated by JimDanforth, Wah Chang and Pete Kleinow, that is byfar and away the most exciting and enjoyable. Themonster begins as a tiny little fish-like creature and


animator on the Puppetoons, built some of theminiatures for Obie’s The Giant Behemoth, super-vised the process photography on Jack the GiantKiller (1961) and animated many well known UScommercials, for example the ‘Pillsbury Dough-boy’ and ‘The Jolly Green Giant’.

Don Sahlin made a cameo appearance in TheTime Machine as the window dresser and would con-tinue to work for Projects Unlimited as a designerand animator until it folded. He subsequentlyfound true fame when he met Jim Henson at aDetroit puppetry convention and became Hen-son’s main designer and puppet-builder in the1960s and 1970s, specifically for the hugely success-ful Sesame Street and The Muppet Show televisionprogrammes. He passed away in 1978 and in hishonour Henson had a bench dedicated to himand placed on Hampstead Heath in London.

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1961) was pro-duced by American International Pictures (AIP)and Cinemagic, with the live action being shot inSweden. The story concerns a group of astro-nauts who travel to Uranus and encountervarious awful (really awful!) creatures, includinga very silly and badly animated cave monster thattruly defies description. Warren, Chang and JimDanforth were responsible for the animationand received no on-screen credit for their effortsto enhance this truly bad film. In the same yearProjects Unlimited worked on George Pal’sAtlantis, the Lost Continent (1961), which usedmodel animation for the giant crystal weaponand an unused sequence of birdmen.

Next came two major projects, the first ofwhich must have seemed at first glance to be apotential commercial success. Unfortunately,what may look good on paper doesn’t alwaysturn out that way when realized on the screen.After the huge box-office returns for Ray’s The7th Voyage of Sinbad, producer Edward Smalldecided to make Jack the Giant Killer (1962),

which was a blatant attempt to cash-in on theprevious film’s success. It must have niggledSmall that, when the Sinbad project had beenoffered to him some years before, he haddeclined, pointing out to Ray that costumesfilms were not popular and completely failing torecognize that the project’s originality lay in theeffects. To guarantee Jack the Giant Killer’s successSmall commissioned some of the key talent fromThe 7th Voyage, including the director Nathan‘Jerry’ Juran, Kerwin Mathews. who had playedSinbad, and Torin Thatcher, who had played themagician Sekoura. What Small failed to realizewas that he hadn’t employed the one personwho really mattered, the person who haddreamed up the initial storyline and conceivedthe key sequences for The 7th Voyage – Ray him-self. Jim Danforth, who worked on some of theJack the Giant Killer animation, said of the film,

…they tried to copy all the elements which they felthad made Sinbad successful. They got the sameleading man, the same villain and spentconsiderably more money on the film than hadbeen spent on Sinbad; unfortunately, in myopinion, at least, they were not able to make agood film. They were so unhappy about it, in fact,that Edward Small doesn’t want to hear the word‘animation’ again, and would never entertain theidea of doing another one.10

There were, not surprisingly, many problemswith the film. The major ones are that the story-line appears to have been pieced together as thelive-action production progressed and that theeffects were woven around the poor storylinerather than the other way round, which is howRay and Charles always made their films. Anoth-er problem, or problems, are the modelsthemselves. The firm of Howard Anderson (aspecial photographic effects company founded

FAR LEFT

Marcel Delgado putting the finishing touches to thetyrannosaurus rex featured in Dinosaurus! (1960). After thirty-five years of building models, beginning with The Lost World(1925), this was one of the last films Delgado worked on.

LEFT

Don Shalin animating the tyrannosaurus rex for Dinosaurus!(1960).

BELOW

The brontosaurus with a boy on its back, featured inDinosaurus! (1960).

BELOW, BOTTOM

The tyrannosaurus rex (seen in the picture at top left withDelgado) fights the mechanical digger.

RIGHT

The hugely respected Phil Kellison posing with two of thecreatures featured in Jack the Giant Killer (1962). On the leftis Galligantua and on the right is the six-tentacled seamonster.

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O’BRIEN AND HARRYHAUSEN CONTEMPORARIES – 1930-1970 163162 O’BRIEN AND HARRYHAUSEN CONTEMPORARIES – 1930-1970

grows to dinosaur proportions. At one point,when the creature is threatening two humans, itsprouts six heads on long monster-like necks,which are those of the other Dr Lao characters,the purpose of this development is unclear to theaudience but it is, nevertheless, an extremely goodpiece of animation. Overall, the animation in thissequence is superb and the monster’s flicking tailand ungainly walk are perfect.

One of the last major projects Chang workedon would be their last for George Pal. The Power(1967) was a present-day science-fiction thrillerfor which Projects Unlimited executed severalanimation sequences, although all are part ofthe running storyline rather than being keysequences. They depict, amongst other things, amalevolent battalion of toy soldiers (animatedby Dave Pal); the head of the actor GeorgeHamilton freezing and disintegrating followedby his facial skin burning away to reveal his skull(animated by Warren): and finally a skeletonfalling into blackness (animated by PeteKleinow). Warren explained that ‘All the scenesinvolving George Hamilton’s head were accom-plished [by] stop-frame on a wax model ofHamilton taken from a life mask.’12 Athough allthe brief animation sequences were inventivelydesigned and animated they could not save thefilm from box-office obscurity.

Soon after The Power, Projects Unlimited waswound up and Chang went back to freelancing.However, in 1969 Chang and Warren formedanother company called Excelsior! AMP (theAMP stood for Animated Motion Pictures), but inthe following year Chang and his wife moved to ahouse he had designed in Carmel Valley. There

Chang decided to use his feature skills to produceeducational films, amongst them Dinosaurs... TheTerrible Lizards (1970) an eleven-minute documen-tary about dinosaurs, which he made withDouglas Beswick. Chang would continue to workin films and for television, mostly designing propsand creatures rather than animation (he hadbeen responsible for designing various propequipment for the original series of Star Trek), buthis first loves were painting and sculpting.

Wah Chang passed away on 22nd December2003. Warren went on to work on a number oftelevision series, which included Land of the Lost(1974) for which he was the stop-motion direc-tor, and The Man from Atlantis (1977) for whichhe worked on the photographic effects. He con-tinued working in the field of effects until 1996and died the following year. Excelsior! hadclosed its doors in 1980 but Warren’s son, GeneWarren Jr, took over from his father with his owncompany Fantasy II, and won an AcademyAward® for Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991).

One key animator who had a huge influenceon the art and other animators, but whose workdid not combine model animation with live-action, was Jiri Trnka. His work is some of themost respected and innovative in the art. Born on24th February 1912 in Pilsen, in what was thenCzechoslovakia, Trnka had a natural leaningtowards the arts, especially models, which was per-haps enhanced by his grandmother’s talent formaking dolls and toy animals. Aged twelve he par-ticipated as a designer in the Holiday CampTheatre, which was a marionette group run byJosef Skupa, a schoolteacher who later becameone of Czechoslovakia’s most famous marionette

players. Skupa taught Trnka the process of mak-ing marionettes, how to operate them and, mostimportantly, how to instil character into them.Between 1929 and 1936 Trnka went on to study atthe Prague School of Arts and Crafts and aftergraduating he established a marionette theatre ofhis own in Prague, called The ContemporaryTheatre of Puppets, which was extremely success-ful. However, his passion for puppets was soonleading him to experiment with stop-motion ani-mation and articulated puppets and in 1937 hecreated two characters, Spejbl and Hurvinek, whowere to achieve wide acclaim in Czechoslovakia.

The war closed down his theatre and his filmproduction, so for the duration Trnka concen-trated on designing theatrical sets andillustrating children’s books. At the end of thewar in 1945 the Czech film industry was national-ized; so instead of reopening his marionettetheatre, Trnka, along with other friends and col-leagues, began an animation unit which wascalled ‘Trick Brothers’, at the Prague Film Stu-dio. Trnka specialized in model animationbecause of his fascination with puppets – heonce said that they have, ‘more presence’ thandrawings. He liked their slowness of movement(compared with graphic images), their ‘solidityand stillness’. His early short films usually drewfor their subject matter on Czech traditions andfolk tales, which would continue to inspire hiswork throughout his career. Some of his filmsfrom this period were Grandpa Planted a Beet(1945), The Gift (1946), The Animals and the Brig-ands (1946) and The Czech Year (1947). The last(the Czech title is Spalicek) was reputedly hisfavourite and was his first feature film, made insix parts. It was based on the book by AloisJirásek which illustrated traditional Czech folkcustoms throughout the year. The success ofthese films meant that in 1947 Trnka was allocat-ed the complete upper story of an old villa nearthe city centre where he opened the PraguePuppet Film Studio (today called The Studio ofJiri Trnka). In the same year he also won anaward at the Cannes Film Festival.

After the Communist coup d’etat in 1948 thenew government subsidized all Trnka’s work inthe belief that animated puppet films could notcontain anti-Communist messages, but of coursethey did, albeit in a subtle manner that presum-ably escaped the notice of the politicians. ThePrague Puppet Film Studio produced at leastone puppet film a year; amongst some of themost famous are The Emperor’s Nightingale(Císaruv slavík) (1948), Song of the Prairie (1949),Prince Bayaya (1950), The Golden Fish (1951), OldCzech Legends (1953) and The Good Soldier Schweik(1954), based on three episodes from the novelby Jaroslav Hasek in which Trnka experimentedwith commentary and dialogue. In 1959 hemade A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which cap-tured the spirit of Shakespeare’s play and which

BOTTOM LEFT

The great Czech animator Jiri Trnka working on one of hisstylized models.

BELOW

Top row, Two frames from Ruka [The Hand] (1965).

Middle row, from left to right. One of the wonderful modelsfeatured in Císaruv slavík [The Emperor’s Nightingale](1948); Jiri Trnka animating his uniquely styled models;Tnka’s epic folk tale in six parts Spalicek[The Czech Year](1947), possibly his favourite film.

Bottom row, from left to right. Another of the models fromCísaruv slavík ; Jiri Trnka animating; another still fromSpalicek[The Czech Year] (1947). Note the ghostly driver,resembling a character from Tim Burton’s The NightmareBefore Christmas (1993).

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appears at the centre of the projection screen.14

Obtaining the correct colour balance and at thesame time overcoming the hot spot would havepresumably entailed a great deal of testing. Over-all, the animation for The Beast of Hollow Mountainwas crude, awkward, jerky and lacked fluidity. Noattempt seems to have been made to instill anyform of character into either the model (it is sounconvincing, primarily because of its limp-wrist-ed arms) or the animation of the allosaurus (thetail hardly ever seems to move but just lies on theground). The film is a good example of how notto film model animation and, together with TheLost Continent, illustrates how independent pro-ducers, while eager to use the technique, werenot ready to allocate a decent budget and get theright people for the job.

Another major animator (and anotherCzech) who was working in the 1950s and 60sand who is, surprisingly, almost forgotten todaywas Karel Zeman. He designed, directed andanimated a number of key fantasy films thatcombined model animation with live action.Although never mainstream, because of the lan-guage problem, his major films with their surrealdesigns did have a wonderfully exciting andinnovative sense of adventure. Zeman was bornin 1910 in Moravia in Czechoslovakia, and hisinterest in marionettes began whilst attendingbusiness school, although at this early stage ofhis life he had no thought of making it his life’swork. After business school he had a short stintas a shop window dresser after which he trav-elled to France to study at the Art School of

Advertising. Following graduation he secured ajob in an advertising studio in Marseilles design-ing posters and it was here that he had his firsttaste of film-making when he was involved withan animated soup commercial. On completionof the film he realized that this is what he want-ed to do and when he returned to Prague hecontinued making animated commercials usingpuppets. In 1943 he showed some of his films toElmar Klos, another film-maker, who instantlyoffered Zeman a job working in the Bata FilmStudios in Zlín. There he met animator Hermí-na Tyrová with whom he made the puppetanimated film Vánocnî sen [The Christmas Dream],which won an award at the 1946 Cannes FilmFestival for Best Animation. The two would col-laborate on two other short films, Podkova prostestí (1946) and Krecek (1946), before Zemanmoved on to his first solo creation.

In 1947 he began what would turn out to bean extremely successful series of short films fea-turing a character called Mr Prokouk, the first ofwhich was Pan Prokouk v pokuseni (1947). Zemanwas always experimenting with new ways of ani-mation and in 1949 he made the uniqueInspirace [Inspiration] in which all the charactersor figurines were made of glass and were animat-ed by heating them after each frame was shot toallow them to be moved. It is impossible to imag-ine how much time and effort must have goneinto such a process, one that, to our knowledge,he never used again. In 1950 Zeman made KrálLávra [King Lavra], which won a National Awardthe same year, and in 1953 he produced his first


debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960when Tnka was hailed as ‘The Walt Disney of theEast’ (journalists often invoked Disney’s namebecause he was best known for animation, evenif it was not the same kind of animation), a titlehe hated as his work bore little comparison tothat of his American contemporary. Other filmsfollowed. Obsession (1961), Cybernetic Grandma(1962) a futuristic allegory, The Archangel Gabriel(1965) based on tales from The Decameron, MrsGoose (1965) and, perhaps his best known film,The Hand (1965), a parable of an artist workingunder oppression.

At a reception to celebrate the screening ofThe Emperor’s Nightingale in Paris, the model ofthe emperor was shown to the famous Frenchdirector Jean Cocteau. He remarked,

I witnessed a strange thing. Friends were struckwith awe. They were almost afraid of touching themysterious and miraculous little creature, whowas no longer an actor, nor an emperor, nor apuppet, but Trnka’s soul which has assumed theappearance of the emperor. You can no doubtimagine how awful it is to touch a soul and passit on as if it were an ordinary object of art.

A very moving and true assessment, not only ofTrnka but of all animators, many of whom wouldagree with Cocteau that they gave their verysouls and beings to their models or puppets. In1966 Newsday also paid tribute to Trnka and hisunique work by describing him as, ‘second onlyto Chaplin as a film artist because his work inau-gurated a new stage in a medium longdominated by Disney’. Trnka died in 1969 inPrague where he had worked all his life. Hiswork has been called ‘active dreaming’, combin-ing great imagination and poetry with ingenuity,invention, realism and creative vitality.

It would have been interesting to know whatTrnka thought of Walt Disney Studios’ early forayinto the art of model animation, the 1959 shortfilm Noah’s Ark, which was nominated for anAcademy Award that same year. It used Pal-likesurreal stick models, which were animated by BillJustice who, as a two-dimensional animator, hadworked on some of Disney’s most famous titles.Even though it was a relative success, Disneydeclined any further excursions into the modelfield, presumably because he preferred the triedand tested two-dimensional animation. It wasn’tuntil the 1990s that Disney would again producea model animated film with Tim Burton’s TheNightmare Before Christmas.

In the 1950s, films that utilized model anima-tion combined with live action were on theincrease, to the point where independent low-budget film-makers began jumping on thebandwagon. One such opportunist was RobertLippert who produced Lost Continent (1951).Made twenty-six years after The Lost World andeighteen years after King Kong, this was a poorman’s version of the same theme, a lostisland/plateau that contained dinosaurs. Thestory, which has a contemporary setting, tells of amilitary and scientific team who are sent by theUS government to locate a missing experimentalrocket in the Pacific. They trace it to an island, ormore precisely to a plateau (on the top of a veryunconvincing mountain), which is, of course,inhabited by a variety of dinosaurs, including atriceratops, a brontosaurus and a pterodactyl.The animation, which is poor, is credited toAugie Lohman, a highly respected special effectstechnician whose work on this film was not oneof the his finest moments. The models are basicand the animation is certainly very jerky or, at thevery least, intermittently erratic. After variousencounters with dinosaurs the group find the

lost rocket but are confronted by an aggressivebrontosaurus and triceratops, which seem to bejust standing around looking for trouble. One ofthe more exciting animation scenes shows one ofthe men being gored by a triceratops althoughthe actual killing takes place behind a tree, prob-ably because it would have cost too much toanimate the triceratops and a model human.

Little better is The Beast of Hollow Mountain(1956). The storyline, about a Mexican town ter-rorized by a living allosaurus, was based on aconcept by Willis O’Brien, although the finalproduct was certainly not designed or animated byhim. The models had originally been built by Mar-cel Delgardo for O’Brien’s abandoned Gwangiproject and the animation of the allosaurus wasexecuted by Jack Rabin and Louis DeWitt, whoused both a replacement technique and the moreconventional and versatile articulated model ani-mation. The replacement technique used on thisfilm was similar to that used for Pal’s Puppetoons,movement being achieved by replacing onemodel with another in a slightly different pose orposition. The ads screamed that the film was pho-tographed in ‘Regiscope’ (based on an uninspiredcombination of the words ‘register’ and ‘scope’)which would have meant little to most people andwas basically just another gimmick to get the pun-ters into the cinemas. As Obie once remarked, ‘Allthese name tags for animation, I think I’ll callmine “Origimation”’!13

Rabin and DeWitt had many problems withboth the colour (there are many scenes that showsevere image grain and fluctuation between therear-projected image and the lit model) and thefact that producer Edward Nassour had decidedto film in ‘scope’. Any form of anamorphic lens(commonly known as ‘scope’ after Cinemascope)tends to accentuate what is known as the ‘hotspot’, which is an excessively bright point that

FAR LEFT

A poster for Robert Lippert’s Lost Continent (1951),probably one of the most disappointing animated filmsbecause of the soulless models and the lack of imaginativeanimation.

LEFT

A paste-up image that shows two of the dinosaurs featuredin the film. Although the animals are called triceratops, theymore resemble arrhinoceratops.

BELOW LEFT

The really dreadful allosaurus featured in The Beast ofHollow Mountain (1956) with an unfortunate local in his itsclaws. Although the story was originally conceived by WillisO’Brien, he didn’t work on the final film, a fact whichbecomes obvious when you look at this model.

BELOW RIGHT

The poster for The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956).

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pirates and held captive in a laboratory beneath avolcano so that the pirates can extract details ofthe professor’s wonderful inventions. The film isstunning; the backgrounds are made up of Doré-like drawings and engravings which serve as thesettings for both the live action and the modelanimation. The combination creates a totallyunique fantasy world, although one which is not,it has to be said, to everyone’s taste. The Germanfilm historian Dr Rolf Geisen, who has studiedZeman’s work, calls Vynález zkázy ‘the first trulysynthetic movie’, which seems an excellent way ofsummarizing such fantastic backgrounds and ani-mation. Although Zeman designed all the effectsit was Antonin Horák, his cameraman, whoworked out and realized all the optical effects;because the film was even more complex thanCesta do praveku they composited all the imagesin-camera. Another problem was that there wasno Mitchell camera available so Horák wasforced to use Slechta cameras, which were farinferior.17 For some in-camera, bi-pack compos-ites, consisting of five or six different elements, aweek or more was required to complete the live-action, miniatures, cut-out animation and stop-motion. Sadly after completing all the difficulttrick shots in-camera Horák was released byZeman because he thought Horák too slow!

When the picture was released in America18

the posters heralded it as ‘The first Motion Pic-ture Produced in the Magic-Image Miracle ofMystimation’, a phrase which perhaps takes theprize for the silliest-ever coinage to describe thecombination of animation and live action. How-ever, Zeman’s animation for the film is on thewhole superb and features several birds,humans, fish, various machines such as airships,an eccentric submarine, and finally a giant octo-pus that emerges from a dark underwater ravineand attacks a group of divers. This last is perhapsthe most spectacular and Zeman’s animation forthis scene and all of the other incidental anima-tion is fluid and consistently ground-breaking.

For many years Ray had entertained the idea of making an animated version of GottriedBÿrger’s classic stories The Adventures of BaronMunchausen but the project never came tofruition. However, in 1961 Zeman did realize ananimated version of the stories called, not surpris-ingly, Baron Prásil [Baron Munchausen] in which amodern-day astronaut lands on the moon wherehe meets a number of literary space pioneers,including Cyrano de Bergerac, Captain Nichols,Barbican and Baron Munchausen. The Baronrealizes that the astronaut needs to experiencewhat a real adventure is like, so takes him on ajourney back to his own time, the eighteenth cen-tury. There, amongst other adventures, they visitthe Ottoman court, rescue a noblewoman,encounter the Turkish fleet, are swallowed by agigantic fish, visit the bottom of the sea and go tothe North Pole. Zeman once again utilized Goth-

ic Doré-style backgrounds and, to add anotherelement to the fantasy, photographed the film inblack and white but with colour tinted scenes.Animation scenes include a sailing ship pulled byseven flying horses, a sea serpent, a dragon, agiant spider, a flying fish, a huge whale, a hugecarnivorous bird and a sea horse on which theBaron rides. The whole film is a tour de force offantasy adventure and model animation, withZeman again achieving an effortless fluidity.

In 1964 Zeman made his fourth feature film,Bláznova kronika [The Jester’s Tale], which is one ofhis most surreal and rarely seen films. The storytells of a cowardly peasant, a mercenary and afemale jester and their attempts to survive theThirty Years’ War and the stupid generals whoperpetuate it. Although he uses the same inno-vative visual backgrounds of Gothic-styleddrawings there is only a small amount of anima-tion, confined to two-dimensional cut-outs andtiny humans seen in the distance.

Urradená vzducholod [The Stolen Dirigible, TheStolen Airship; The Two Year Holiday, The Two Year’sVacation] (1967) saw Zeman returning to Verne’sVictorian fantasy. Five boys steal an airship fromthe Prague Centenary Exhibition of 1891 and flyit to the Pacific where it crash lands on an islandand they meet the legendary Captain Nemo.

The animation of airships, a car propelled byhorses’ legs and a shark is smooth and seamlesslyflows with the live action.

Zeman’s next film was based on Verne’snovel Hector Servadac and was called Na komete(On the Comet ) (1970), an unusual adventurethat has an underlying moral suggesting thefutility of war and how humans seem to revel infighting each other. It is set in 1888 and tells ofa group of French, Spanish and English sol-diers who are swept off on a comet, which hasskimmed the Earth. When they realize theycannot escape and that the comet is inhabitedby a variety of dinosaurs, they agree to a truceand help each other but when the comet even-tually returns them to Earth they resume theirfighting. Sadly, the film does show a lethargywhich suggests that Zeman felt that he hadbeen here before, although this may be due toan obvious lack of production finance. Onceagain he places his characters into Gothic set-tings which provide the adventure with asuitable surreal quality. The first animatedsequence features a group of dinosaurs, whichinclude sauropods and a tyrannosaurus rex,attacking a makeshift fort, which has beenerected by the soldiers to protect themselvesfrom such monsters. Sadly, although there are


feature film Poklad Ptacího ostrova [The Treasure ofBird Island]. This was followed by Pan Prokouk,prítel zvírátek (1955) the last of the Mr Prokoukfilms, and in the same year Zeman discoveredhis forte with his first pure fantasy feature film,Cesta do praveku [Journey to Prehistory aka Journey tothe Beginning of Time], which would make hisname internationally. The film, like so many ofZeman’s subsequent features, was partiallyinspired by the imagination of Jules Verne andtells of four boys who journey in a rowboat into amysterious cave in Manhattan’s Central Park andin doing so travel back in time through variousages to witness the prehistoric period and, final-ly, to the primordial ocean where life began.

The film was shot in Agfacolor (Technicolorwas too expensive), and had the distinction ofbeing the first feature film made in Europe inwhich stop-motion dinosaurs played a major role.Zeman incorporated a variety of stop-motionmodel animals and dinosaurs, around fifty intotal15, including woolly mammoths, rhinoceros,giraffes, a phororhacos, a deinotherium, a sabre-toothed tiger, brontosaurus, stegosaurus, aphororhacos, styracosaurus, ceratosaurus andpteranodons, some of which he incorporated withlive action by using split screens and mattes.Antonin Horák, who worked with Zeman on thisfilm and subsequently on Vynález zkázy, recollectedthat, ‘the rubber models were fairly small, about50cm. Everything was photographed on the origi-nal negative with mattes and counter mattes.’ Firstthe live-action children who appeared in the bot-

tom section of the frame were photographed by acameraman from Prague with Horák as stand-by.Later, back in Zlin, the dinosaurs where insertedinto the upper part of the frame. Horák goes on,‘For each scene about 10 metres of test footagewas shot to determine the matte line for thecounter matte and special filters to match the live-action and lighting animation.’16

Although some of the shots are rudimentary,the inventiveness of many of the scenes, for exam-ple the boys being attacked by pteranodons, areexciting and occasionally spectacular, especiallywhen one considers that the film is shot in colour.There are some mechanical props employed, butthe bulk of the creatures are animated and mostare animated with fluidity, style and originality.The models themselves are good, although not asdetailed as either Delgado’s fine work or Ray’s.The success of Cesta do praveku permitted Zemanto indulge his passion for fantasy and allowed cer-tain of his subsequent features to find favour andeven bigger success with audiences abroad.

In the same year as Cesta do praveku wasreleased, Zeman had already begun work onanother fantasy film, this time almost entirelybased on the fictional adventures of Zeman’shero, Jules Verne. Vynález zkázy [The Invention of Destruction, The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, The Diabolic Invention, Weapons of Destruction, The Deadly Invention] (1958), is an extraordinaryachievement and is perhaps Zeman’s mostaccomplished feature. The story tells of a profes-sor and his assistant who are kidnapped by

TOP LEFT

The remarkably talented and inventive Karel Zemananimating glass figures for the film Inspirace [Inspiration](1949). The amount of painstaking work involved in heatingup each figure so that it could be moved for the next frame,was simply extraordinary.

TOP CENTRE

The charming short film Vánocnî sen [The Christmas Dream](1946), which was animated and directed by Karel Zeman.

TOP RIGHT

A mammoth watching the children row along the river oftime in Ceste do proveku or Journey to the Beginning ofTime (1954).

ABOVE CENTRE

Karel Zeman, left, directing a sequence of the boys in theboat for Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955).

ABOVE

This rare still shows what is possibly a cerotosaurus facing upto a stegosaurus in Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955).

RIGHT

Karel Zeman, left, directing actor Milos Kopecky who playsBaron Munchausen, in Baron Prasil [Baron Munchausen](1961).

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His first films of note were as puppeteerassistant to his mentor Jiri Trnka and theseincluded Román s basou [The Story of the BassCello] (1949) and Cisaruv slavik [The Emperor’sNightingale ] (1949). In 1951 he made his direct-ing debut with Perniková chaloupka (1951) and,although he continued assisting Trnka, he alsoproduced his own films which included Lev sizaridit byt [The Lion and the Song] (1959), whichwon the Grand Prix at the first annual AnnecyFestival in 1960.19 The following year Pojar leftCzechoslovakia for Canada where he began along association with the National Film Board ofCanada and it was during his time there that heproduced some of his best-known work. Pojarwas, and still is, an animator who loved breakingboundaries and experimenting with new tech-niques to enhance the art of animation, whetherit was two- or three-dimensional. After the fall ofCommunism in Czechoslovakia he moved backto what is now the Czech Republic and his lastfilm to date is Filmfám 2 made in 2006.

To complete this chapter we have kept oneof the most respected and underrated modelanimators till last. Although mentioned earlier,Jim Danforth is perhaps not a name that would

instantly trip off everyone’s tongue; but to ani-mators the world over he is up there withO’Brien and Ray. Danforth is a master animatorand matte painter who has worked hard in thedark back rooms refining his animation and allthe tricks of the trade that accompany it.

Danforth was born in 1948 in Ohio and grewup near Chicago, Illinois. At the age of twelve hisparents moved to California which is where hefirst saw King Kong and The Thief of Bagdad (1940)and, like Ray, became fascinated and obsessedwith the fantastic images in both films. Intriguedby how Kong moved, he began experimentingwith ventriloquism and then marionettes, givingpuppet shows to the local kids. It wasn’t until threeyears later, aged fifteen, that he found out aboutstop-motion animation via some Kodak publica-tions. Although he had no idea about armaturesand latex, he began tentative experiments usinghis father’s 8mm Keystone camera that didn’t haveany stop-motion facility; only when he had savedup enough money could he progress to a moreprofessional 16mm Bolex. Like Obie and Raybefore him, the course of Danforth’s life wasdetermined by his early experiments and the won-der of seeing inanimate objects come to ‘life’.


a large number of models, none interact withthe live action. Other creatures encounteredare a sea serpent, pterodactyls, a dimetrodonand styracosaurus.

Karel Zeman went on to make more highlyoriginal and inventive feature films amongstwhich were Pohádky tisíce a jedné noci [Tales of a Thousand and One Nights] (1974) which consist-ed of seven stories about Sinbad, Krabat,carodejuv ucen [The Sorcerer’s Apprentice] (1975)

and the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale O Honzíkovi aMarence [Hansel and Gretel] (1980). However,they didn’t surpass or indeed equal any of hisJules Verne-influenced fantasy classics. By 1970he had completed and delivered his best.Zeman’s last film was made in 1979/80 and hedied in Prague in April 1989 before he was ableto witness the advent of the Velvet Revolution.His unique styles of visualization, storytellingand animation have survived him and, althoughnot in the same league as O’Brien and similaranimators, his work is now highly respected andhas, gratifyingly, found a new audience withtoday’s fantasy-loving public.

It is quite extraordinary how many modelanimators were born in Czechoslovakia. Perhapsit was the Czech tradition of puppetry thatinspired them to experiment with puppets andcinema or perhaps it was the Czech love of story-telling. Whatever the reasons, there are far toomany Czech animators to mention them all, butwe feel that we have to give credit to one finalexample. Bretislav Pojar was closely associatedwith Jiri Trnka and is famous for his two- andthree-dimensional short films but his forte seemsto have been the latter. Born on 7 October 1923in Susice, he studied architecture at the Acade-my of Fine Arts but when the Nazis closed theuniversities he went to work in the AFIT Studio,a pivotal point in his life. Following the end ofthe war, Pojar, along with Trnka and other ani-mators such as Jan Karpas, Bohuslav Srámek andStanislav Látal, became part of a new animationdepartment at the Prague Film Studio, whichwas affectionately called ‘Trick Brothers’.

ABOVE TOP

A young Bretislav Pojar in the process of animating circa1950s.

ABOVE LEFT

Pojar’s Velryba-Abyrlev [Elahw the Whale] (1977).

ABOVE CENTRE

More wonderful Pojar puppets featured in O te Velké Mlze[Thick Fog] (1975).

ABOVE RIGHT

Bretislav Pojar back in Czechoslovakia working on a project,circa 1990s.

RIGHT

The versatile and extremely talented Jim Danforth workingon When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1971). A giant crab isseen on the animation table in the foreground.

TOP LEFT

The wonderfully eccentric submarine featured in VynálezZkázy [The Fabulous World of Jules Verne ] (1958).

ABOVE, TOP PICTURE

Karel Zeman animating the submarine for The FabulousWorld of Jules Verne.

ABOVE, MIDDLE PICTURE

A giant octopus rears up from a deep abyss to attackdivers in The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.

ABOVE, BOTTOM PICTURE

The interior of the submarine that shows the gothic or Doréstyle of the backgrounds against which Zeman set all hischaracters and models.

LEFT

An American poster for The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.

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visited Ray during the final stages of productionof The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. ‘I suggested that theyuse the system of split screens in conjunctionwith process projection – a system which I freelyadmit was “stolen” from Ray Harryhausen, whodevised it. No one there knew about that system,and there really had never been any intention ofusing it in the film.’25 Ray remembers Danforthvisiting when he was animating the dragon andCyclops fight. Danforth was a very intense andknowledgeable young person who arrived carry-ing a notebook and throughout the time he wasthere showed an interest in absolutely everythingand made copious notes.

In 1962 Projects Unlimited worked with Palagain, on the effects for The Wonderful World of theBrothers Grimm on which Danforth, along with theother animators, was forced to struggle with thethree-camera Cinerama process. There were twocameras constructed specially for the film ‘whichshot the frames in succession’; Danforth recalledthe frighteningly time-consuming method ofshooting the animation. ‘A panel was exposedthen the camera was moved to a click stop. Bpanel was shot. The camera was moved into athird position and C panel was shot. Then it wasall racked back to the beginning again. In somecases we were shooting six exposures for oneframe on the screen.’26 Danforth helped Dave Palwith a few of the elf scenes for ‘The Cobbler’sTale’ and also a scene in ‘The Dancing Princess’that showed a flower going to sleep. However, thekey sequence to which he contributed was the onefeaturing the dragon in ‘The Singing Bone’ story.

In preparation for the task he studied animalmovement at the local zoo where he would sit forhours watching the exhibits in their cages. Alongwith George Pal and Gene Warren, he worked outthe dragon’s human-like character that allowedthe creature to be the most entertaining elementof the movie. It seems extraordinary that Danforthdidn’t receive a screen credit for his extensivework on the picture, an omission that he admitsmade him extremely angry.

In the summer of 1962 Danforth went towork for another company, called Film Effects ofHollywood, on a short animation sequence forStanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World(1963). He was employed to construct somemechanical miniatures and to shoot some high-speed miniatures and seventeen animation shots,of which only a few were used in the final cut. Herecalls: ‘I did that [the film] because I had hopedto work with Willis O’Brien who was working onthe film. However, between the time that I madethe arrangements and the time I actually startedworking, Obie had died.’27 Danforth had first metObie at Projects Unlimited when the pioneerhad come in for a visit, and subsequently whenhe had his interview at Film Effects.

Danforth returned to Projects Unlimited inearly 1963 to work on the pre-production for 7Faces of Dr Lao designing and then on the anima-tion of the Loch Ness monster, which began in thelate summer of 1963.28 In total, the sequence tookthree months to shoot and required the exposureof some 12,900 frames for the nine minutes thecreature appears on the screen. Danforth recalled,


When he finished high school, aged eight-een, he looked around for a job in theanimation field and found one with a small com-pany called Clokey Productions (run by ArtClokey) working on The Dinah Shore Show televi-sion series, including a sequence for an Easterspecial in which Dinah ‘danced with an animat-ed rabbit that appeared to be about five feettall’.20 This was followed by six months of workon a number of fourteen-minute films for theLutheran Church called Davey & Goliath. Mak-ing full use of what little spare time he had,Danforth got to know Wah Chang and Gene

Warren at Projects Unlimited and helped out asan uncredited assistant animator on GeorgePal’s The Time Machine. This led to him beingoffered a job working for the company full time.Two years before, Danforth had begun workingon a personal project called The Princess of Marsfor which he had produced a range of drawingsand paintings. George Pal had presumablythought these visualizations good as he helpedDanforth to ‘stage a presentation at MGM forHulbert Burroughs and ERB Inc, Attorneys’.21

Sadly, despite Pal’s enthusiasm, this intriguingproject remained unrealized.

His first film as animator at Projects Unlimit-ed was La Vendetta di Ercole (Goliath and the Dragonor Hercules’ Revenge or Vengeance of Hercules)(1960) followed by the disappointing science-fic-tion adventure Journey to the Seventh Planet(1961). However, his first big break came in1961when he worked on much of the animationundertaken by Projects Unlimited for the fantasyadventure Jack the Giant Killer (1962). Ironically,at an earlier date Danforth had independentlyquoted $3000 to Howard Anderson22 for theconstruction of the models for the film but itwasn’t accepted. The models were designed andmade by Wah Chang and Danforth hasremarked that ‘I didn’t like the puppets. It’squite difficult to animate a puppet when youdon’t find it aesthetically pleasing. Especiallywhen you have to look at it with intense concen-tration, day after day.’23 Almost the climax of themovie (and perhaps the best sequence) is thefight between Galligantua (the two-headedgiant) and the sea monster. Danforth recalledhow the sequence came about: “The battlebetween the two-headed giant and the sea mon-ster was shot once by two other animators and[Edward] Small didn’t buy it. So it was re-shot. Ididn’t do all the second fight; we used a coupleof shots from the first and the other animators[working on the project] re-did a few shots. But Idid most of the second fight myself.’ Like Ray,Danforth prefers working on his own. ‘It’s mucheasier that way, especially when they’re [themodels] are all tangled up as they were with thetentacled sea monster. It’s hard to co-ordinate itwith two people and you find you’re trippingover each other.’24

The effects took nearly ten months to com-plete and the production was Danforth’s firstexperience animating with professional rear pro-jection, a process he had witnessed when he had

TOP LEFT

Jim Danforth animating the complex sea monster sequencefor Jack the Giant Killer (1962). The rear-projection screencan be seen behind him whilst the model sits on a miniaturerock that will exactly match the one on the rear-projectionplate.

FAR LEFT

The dragon/gargoyle creature featured in Jack the GiantKiller animated on wires to react to the rear-projectedimage of the escaping boat.

LEFT

Jim Danforth at work animating the jewelled dragon featuredin The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962).

ABOVE

Another shot of Jim Danforth animating the dragon fromThe Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. In this and inthe previous image the all-important surface gauge can beseen.

ABOVE RIGHT

The jewelled dragon as it appears in the film withactor/comedian Buddy Hackett.

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The fish [the first tiny model] was a little claything that we just flopped around. Then six solidclay models were substituted in series to grow intothe first wire-armatured Loch Ness monster. Thatwas positioned and animated for a second or two.Then the next six series were used for it to changeinto its second intermediary stage, which was awire-armatured puppet animated for anothersecond or two. Then finally it was the full-grownpuppet, which had a ball-and-socket armature.The camera was tracking in to make it grow also.Then the monster was matted in over the liveaction. The shrinking of the beast was shot just thereverse. That was animated by Pete Kleinow.29

Although Danforth was not pleased with thefinal design of the model, the sequence remainsthe best and most complete model animationsequence in the film for which Danforth wasnominated for an American Academy Award ®but lost out to Mary Poppins.

Between 1964 and 1969 Danforth workedon various projects, all uncredited, buildingthe miniatures on Father Goose (1964), as ananimator on I’d Rather be Rich (1964), as amodel-maker on Strange Bedfellows (1965), as amatte artist and animator on That Funny Feeling(1965) and designing and constructing minia-tures for The War Lord (1965). He returned toProjects Unlimited to work on several episodesof the television series Outer Limits, a creditsequence for Hallmark Hall of Fame for designerSaul Bass, a few commercials and educationalfilms and then, finally, the last film ProjectsUnlimited made, Around the World Under the Sea(1966) for which he designed and built severalminiatures.

The day Projects Unlimited closed down hewent over to Cascade Pictures to design and ani-mate the ‘Pillsbury Dough Boy’ and ‘Nestles Man’commercials and an animated sequence for a television episode of Here’s Lucy (1968). In all,Danforth was at Cascade for about three years. Inbetween the projects at Cascade he worked on anamateur project called Equinox (1967) with DaveAllen and Dennis Muren30 and Raiders of the StoneRing (1968/69), an uncompleted feature that wasresurrected in 1978-84 as The Primevals. The storywas to begin with an adventurer relating his tripinto a lost world inhabited by Vikings anddinosaurs which included a giant lizard and agiant ground sloth, with the climax showing aflock of pterodactyls attacking a Zeppelin.

In March 1968 Danforth heard about a proj-ect to be made in England by Hammer Films, afollow-on rather than a sequel to One Million YearsBC (1966) called When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth(1971). However, it wasn’t until later that yearthat he was contacted by the distributor WarnerBros to see if he was available to animate thecreatures for it. Of course he said yes, but wantedto get his other commitments for Cascade out ofthe way first. He travelled to England in Augustto talk with Hammer and then returned again inSeptember for the live-action photography in theCanary Islands and at Shepperton Studios. It was-n’t until January 1969 that he began animationand effects, which took him a total of seventeenmonths, ending on 17 June 1970.

When Ray was working on One Million YearsBC, he demanded and was given involvementwith the screenplay. But the script for WhenDinosaurs Ruled the Earth had already been writ-ten by Val Guest and J. G. Ballard and had

BELOW LEFT

Two more armatured heads (Appolinius and Medusa) outof the seven seen sprouting from the body of the LochNess monster in 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964).

BELOW RIGHT

Two frames showing the Loch Ness monster on the rampagein 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964). In the top image he has a victimin his mouth. This was one of the finest and smoothestanimated sequences to appear in any of the Pal productions.

RIGHT, IMAGES FROM WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH (1971).

Top left. A beautifully designed and sculptured, butunnamed, dinosaur protecting its young from cave girlVictoria Vetri.

Top centre. A baby dinosaur just hatched. This was one ofthe best sequences in the film.

Top right. The dinosaur with its back to the camerathreatening cavemen on the rear-projection screen. In thisshot the realistic wrinkles and folds of skin can be seen onthe back and neck.

Second row left. The beach cavemen try to capture therampaging plesiosaur. Although in black and white this is anexcellent example of the use of split screen. The foregroundcavemen and hut are part of the bottom section matte whilethe cavemen in the background are part of the rear matte.

Second row centre. Jim Danforth animating the plesiosaur.

Second row right. Another shot of the plesiosaur lumberingalong the beach towards the cavemen.

Third row. Three frames showing the giant crabs (designedand animated by Jim Danforth and built by David Allen)attacking the beach village.

Fourth row. The model rhamphorhynchus (a pterosaur),designed and animated by Jim Danforth. Therhamphorhynchus aerial scenes were some of the best inthe film because Danforth tried to avoid a strobing effect. InNeil Pettigrew’s book The Stop-Motion Filmography hestates, ‘In most of the flying shots, he [Danforth] tapped thepuppet’s wings, causing them to swing slightly on the wiresduring the long camera exposure, thereby suggesting a blurand eliminating much of the offensive strobing that hadmarred similar sequences.’

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creature on a stone staircase, which is reminis-cent of the stone spiral staircase in The 7th Voyageof Sinbad. The final creature is the Great GodPorno or Nesuahyrrah (Harryhausen spelt back-wards and Ray has never been too sure whetherthis was a compliment or otherwise) who climbsto the top of a tower with the girl much likeKong did before him. The excellent animationfor this model was mostly done by Robert Maine,with James Aupperle and David Allen animatingseveral scenes. Also involved on this sequencewere Dennis Muren and Danforth who workedon the lighting set-ups for some shots.35 Asidefrom executing the animation for the Beetle-Man sequence, Jim also did the superb mattepaintings seen in the film. There was a sequelmade in 1990 called Flesh Gordon 2 – Flesh GordonMeets the Cosmic Cheerleaders but Jim didn’t workon that. The first had obviously been enough.

In 1974/75 Danforth was working again atCascade Pictures. In addition to that he wasoffered more work as a matte artist on The TrueStory of Eskimo Nell (1975) and The Reincarnationof Peter Proud (1975). Although Danforth pos-sessed a reputation as a multi-talented artist whocould turn his hand to painting, model andminiature construction and animation, the ani-mation jobs seem to have been few and farbetween. In 1976 he was offered a small amountof work, although uncredited again, on TheCrater Lake Monster (1977) a rural version of the1950s monster-on-the-rampage craze but thistime with a plesiosaur. David Allen was creditedas the Stop-motion Supervisor with Danforth,Randy Cook, Phil Tippett and Jon Berg (morefuture names) all uncredited. Allen did almosthalf the animation but brought in Randy Cookand Phil Tippett to help, with Danforth beinginvolved with only a few shots. There was onlyone model (fifteen inches long and designed byAllen and Tippett with an armature designedand built by Jon Berg) so using multiple set-upswas not a possibility; they had to shoot themodel scenes one by one.

In 1980 Danforth was asked to help Ray onClash of the Titans (1981) alongside Steve Archerwhen Ray began to get badly behind scheduleafter problems with the animation film stock.36

Based at Pinewood Studios in England Danforthexecuted a large amount of the animation of theflying horse Pegasus and most of that featuringthe two-headed guardian Dioskilos, with Archerassisting when necessary. Ray had set ideas abouthow the characters should react and so what yousee on the screen is how Ray storyboarded thesequences but Danforth’s animation is, as always,fluid and realistic.

Immediately after Clash Danforth returnedto the US to work on Caveman (1981) as a visualeffect supervisor although he was once againuncredited, allegedly because he left the projecttwo-thirds of the way through production.37 The

film was a silly comedy that never rose abovezany schoolboy humour and it seems a pity thatso much good design and animation was wastedon such a poor storyline. Danforth’s contribu-tion was to design and construct various models,including the horned lizard and a superb tyran-nosaurus rex which was mostly animated byRandall Cook. Caveman was followed thirteenyears later by Dragonworld (1994) about a drag-on discovered and captured in the ScottishHighlands and put on exhibition in a themepark called Dragonworld. The armatures wereconstructed by Jeff Taylor and most of the ani-mation was executed by Danforth, Paul Jessel,Joel Fletcher and Harry Walton and shot at theDavid Allen Studios with Chris Endicott super-vising. The cartoon design of the dragon sadlylets the film down but the animation doesachieve charm.

Although Jim Danforth’s talents far sur-passed that of many contemporary artists, theopportunities to work with his first love, modelanimation, were coming to an end. Danforth’slast picture to date was The Prophecy (1995) forwhich he worked as a matte artist and executedthe matte photography. He once commentedthat ‘Animators and trick film-makers wereconsidered by Hollywood to be techniciansrather than performers, or artists, or film-mak-ers,’38 a sentiment that would be echoed by Rayand, we suspect, most other animators. Howev-er, there were other animators working andwaiting in the wings, animators who had everyintention of changing the face of model ani-mation and the way in which it was perceivedby producers.


received final approval. The creatures, too, hadalready been selected31 although Danforth didget to design and construct them and wasallowed some leeway when sequences requiredexperience and creativity.

The original death of the plesiosaur was to havebeen achieved by having several men stand oneach other’s shoulders in a human pyramid topour fat on the back of the monster and try toignite it. When that didn’t work out they triedtheir second plan, which was to grab a dead tree,which is lying on the beach. They all run forwardtowards the plesiosaur, which obligingly sticks itsneck down and opens its mouth so that they canshove it down its throat. I just couldn’t see that onthe screen. Besides, a plesiosaur thrashing around

with a tree sticking out of its mouth seemed a bitludicrous so I talked them into a fire death.32

Creatures featured in the film included a ptero-dactyl, a chasmasaur (a horned dinosaur, part ofthe triceratops and styracosaurus family), a ple-siosaur, huge man-eating crabs and an unnameddinosaur and its newly hatched baby. There wereto have been other sequences including adimetrodon, a triceratops, sea monsters (thatone would have included the monsters beingswept up by a tornado) and giant ants but thesewere all cut before the final script. The screen-play was way too ambitious in terms of both thebudget and the time constraints set out in theschedule. Even with scene cuts, Danforth wasforced to bring over another animator, DavidAllen, whilst he concentrated on producing glassshots and matte paintings (needed becauseHammer had cut back on sets). Allen executedapproximately 80% of the chasmasaur sequenceand several of the baby dinosaur shots.

Just after the film was completed, Danforthcommented on the animal motion.

It depends on the animal. If it’s a realistic animal– something specific – then it would have to movein a specific way. Of course no one has ever seen adinosaur, but we do know the proportions of thelimbs and, roughly, how they were articulated. Soyou try to conform to that and you go to thenearest living animals that might be similar andthese won’t always be reptiles. You might look atan elephant. For the chasmasaur sequence wespent a lot of time studying films of baboonsbecause it’s one of the few animals in which thelegs are jointed in the same way.

He went on, ‘It tends to inhibit your style if you justcopy the action. There might be time when youwould want to do that, like if you were duplicatinga human figure. But usually it’s better to under-stand the action thoroughly and then do it.’33

Although the animation work on the pic-ture by Danforth and David Allen is exemplary,the picture is, as already suggested, ultimatelylet down by a less than competent script and theuse of general stock footage, including lizardsmade up to look like dinosaurs (from the 1960version of The Lost World). Costing far morethan its predecessor, the film didn’t achieve thesuccess of the One Million Years BC; although theeffects were nominated for an American Acade-my Award® Danforth was again unsuccessful,losing out to yet another Disney film, Bedknobsand Broomsticks (1971).

Although there had been constraints, Dan-forth had now had, to a degree, the opportunityof designing and animating his own feature film,which provided him with an international profile.Regrettably, neither the film nor the Oscar nomi-nation led to another such offer and he spent thenext few years working on a series of mediocrefeatures as a matte artist. Although a feature ofsorts, Flesh Gordon (1974) is one that Danforth isallegedly not pleased to own up to, which perhapsaccounts for his name being spelt on the creditsas Mij Htrofnad (Jim Danforth backwards). Thissoft porn film was a spoof of the old 1930s BusterCrabbe Flash Gordon serials, complete with wires,shaky miniatures and ill-proportioned smokeeffects; but the list of those involved is also aWho’s Who of future effects and animationartists, including David Allen, Dennis Muren,Doug Beswick, James Aupperle, Stephen Czerkasand Laine Liska (see Chapter 6).

The film includes three key animationsequences. The first features a seven-foot crea-ture called a penisaurus, a cross between asnake-like cyclops and a triceratops, which wasanimated by Bill Hedge. The second involves acreature called a BeetleMan,34 a robotic creationmade of metal and constructed by Rick Baker(who would become famous as a makeup artist),which was animated by Danforth. The conclu-sion of this sequence shows Flesh fighting the

FACING PAGE, TOP

This is an advertisement that Cascade Pictures puttogether circa 1975 to show the creative talent pool atStage 6. Stage 6 was the home of the animation and visualeffects division of Cascade Pictures of California. Standingto the right is Jim Danforth; lying down in front is DennisMuren; sitting in the middle row are, from left to right, BillHedge, Laine Liska and Mike Minor; in the back row, fromleft to right, are David Allen, Ken Ralston, Tom Scherman,Harry Walton and David Stipes.

FACING PAGE, BOTTOM LEFT

Jim Danforth executing one of his superb matte paintingsfor the finale of Planet of Dinosaurs (1978).

FACING PAGE, BOTTOM RIGHT

Jim Danforth, Ray and an unknown technician posingduring the production of Clash of the Titans (1981).

ABOVE

Jim Danforth, one of the industry’s most respectedanimators posing with a key drawing he executed for anunrealized project called Dark Continent (1994) (subtitled A Sherlock Holmes Adventure) in which the detective was tohave stumbled into a prehistoric arsinotherium in darkestAfrica. In the foreground is the maquette of the creature.

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CHAPTER FIVE O’BRIEN AND HARRYHAUSEN CONTEMPORARIES – 1930...

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