After animator Ray Harryhausen completed his quartet of
Mother Goose Stories in the mid-forties, he was preparing to begin another children's series when he was offered work on
Mighty Joe Young (1949), a
King Kong-like fantasy adventure that won the Oscar® for Best Special Effects that year. Despite the interruption, the money he made from
Mighty Joe Young enabled him to produce a much more ambitious project that afforded him bigger and better sets and more versatile technology such as dolly shots and in-camera mattes.
"Little Red Riding Hood," the first in his
Fairy Tales series, was a collaboration with his former teacher Charlotte Knight, who assisted in the writing of the screenplay. "I had been surprised that whilst researching the original stories of Red Riding Hood," Harryhausen wrote in his autobiography (
Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, co-authored with Tony Dalton, for Billboard Books), "some of the versions were very lascivious, gory, horrific and most unsuitable for educational subjects. In the end my version follows a traditional scenario, with the exception that the grandmother escapes rather than being eaten by the wolf." This more children-friendly approach to the popular fables was typical of each installment in the
Fairy Tales series that included "Hansel & Gretel," "Rapunzel," "King Midas," and "The Tortoise & the Hare." Unlike the
Mother Goose Stories, Harryhausen decided he "needed to background the project with narration and a synchronized music track, which I felt would give the film a more professional look and therefore make it more commercial."
The success of "Little Red Riding Hood" in 1950 enabled Harryhausen to continue his
Fairy Tales project intermittently between other movie projects over the next few years, often collaborating with Charlotte Knight on the scripts and his father and mother on production details. Designed as ten minute features, the
Fairy Tales were not only ideal for the educational market but also television, a popular new entertainment medium.
One of the standout entries was "Hansel & Gretel" which featured a gingerbread house made out of real candy and cookies but also a host of new visual effects which would pre-figure similar techniques used later in a
Star Trek TV episode and Harryhausen's own feature,
Clash of the Titans (1981). According to Harryhausen, one "effect occurs when the witch opens the oven door and we see real flames from rear projection, and an anticipation of what would be Dynamation. In addition to the flames, I had to reflect the flicker of the fire on the witch, achieved by a light and a rotating disc with slots cut into it. When animated with the model and the rear-projected flames, this gave the impression of a real fire."
While "Rapunzel" (admittedly Harryhausen's least favorite in the series) and "King Midas" possess equal amounts of charm and innovative stop-motion animation techniques, "The Tortoise & the Hare" is probably the most ambitious title in the collection. After all, the eleven-minute short was begun in 1952 and not completed until 2003. In his autobiography, Harryhausen stated, "...because of feature commitments, I sadly only shot about three minutes of footage and then I just didn't get time to complete it. For nearly fifty years those three minutes of colour footage languished in my cellar in London, although it was never forgotten...and one day I received an offer from two young animators, Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh, who are based in Burbank, California. They offered to finish the film as far as the building of the sets and animation were concerned." The finished film is completely faithful to Harryhausen's original design and seamlessly combines Harryhausen's original footage with the new scenes created by the three filmmakers.
One thing to note while watching Harryhausen's
Fairy Tales is to look for his trademark in background scenes - birds. If you look closely, you'll notice a bird or a flock of birds flying across the sky. Harryhausen admits he inserted this effect more times than he was aware of, obviously influenced by the use of bird imagery in two of his favorite films,
King Kong (1933) and
The Hounds of Zaroff (1932), aka
The Most Dangerous Game.
The Academy Film Archive was responsible for the restoration of
Fairy Tales and in their DVD presentation of the films preservationist Mark Toscano noted that "a variety of elements were available for restoration. Only
Little Red Riding Hood survived as a usable Kodachrome camera original, but we did have first generation Kodachrome prints of
Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel and
King Midas, all struck directly from Ray's camera originals."
Producer/Director/Animator: Ray Harryhausen
C-51m.
by Jeff Stafford
