Guadalcanal

While animator Ray Harryhausen was working for Frank Capra on the Why We Fight series during World War II, he managed to produce a short film devoted to the war effort entitled Guadalcanal. It was made at a time when Harryhausen was striving to improve and diversify his animation techniques. To accomplish this, he began to pay regular visits to the cartoon division of the Army Pictorial Service where the "Private Snafu" series was being developed under the supervision of none other than Dr. Seuss - Major Ted Geisel. Guadalcanal is a more ambitious and technically accomplished film than How to Bridge a Gorge and shows the rapid development of Harryhausen's technique over a short period of time. In his autobiography, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, co-authored with Tony Dalton, for Billboard Books, Harryhausen describes the conditions under which Guadalcanal was made: "Whilst I was working in the Special Service Division I was able to live with my parents, and went home after a day at the studios to work in my hobby house on another project called Guadalcanal (1943). It was a 10-minute colour short about the battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific using model ships and planes. I hoped to demonstrate the usefulness of model animation in illustrating events and techniques for wartime use, much as I had tried to do with my earlier How to Bridge a Gorge. However, unlike the previous effort, this was a much more sophisticated project that used wipes, sound effects and music 'borrowed' from Max Steiner and Miklos Rozsa. For the sea I used a huge sheet of frosted ripple glass lit from below with a blue light, and for the waves on the glass I animated 'waves' of sand. The final touch was to show a Japanese ship sinking, and to simulate the distressed water I used salt, animated like the sand into ripples of white 'sea'." Producer/Director/Animator: Ray Harryhausen by Jeff Stafford