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''The Valley of Gwangi'' — here's one part Ray Harryhausen hated animating
Luckily, he figured out a way to make it work!
"Process" is one of those things that can take a lifetime to refine. No matter how expertly a task is tackled, it seems like there's always a more diligent way of doing it. That perfect intersection of skill and efficiency is such a rare meeting point that even the most wizened experts need to stay open-minded. You never know when a better way might come along.
Technology changes, too. Whether or not the encroaching advancements actually improve our lives or help us thrive is up for debate. But there have been many developments that genuinely do make our daily chores a bit simpler. Especially in filmmaking, as time goes by, there are more and cheaper ways to capture images each year.
Ray Harryhausen is still, to this day, one of the most evocative storytellers in Hollywood history. His stop motion animation brought the fantastical to new, palpable levels unseen before his time. Compared to today's blockbusters, Harryhausen's work may lack fidelity, but his creations were tangible in a way that CGI can never be. He's truly a once-in-a-generation talent, and any movie featuring his work is at least worth a glance.
It's interesting, then, that part of The Valley of Gwangi caused the special effects legend a headache during production. Even with the experience he'd built over the years leading to that movie's 1969 release, there was one aspect that left Harryhausen wishing for another way.
The 1977 book From the Land Beyond: The Films of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen includes a passage in which Harryhausen explains the segment in Gwangi that he wished he could've done differently.
"I had always rememberd O'Bie [King Kong artist Willis O'Brien] saying in the early days, when I first met him, that he hated to animate anything that could possibly be done in live action. And I quite agree with that, up to a point. But we ran across this problem in two pictures, both involving elephants— Valley of Gwangi (1969) and Twenty Million Miles to Earth— where we wanted a big elephant, an eleven-foot elephant, to make it look impressive. As Barnum and Bailey used to say, 'People won't go to see a flea circus, but they will go to see Jumbo!' So, we wanted as big an elephant as possible. And around Hollywood, you could only get about an eight- or nine-foot elephant at the most, trained. I often wish I had been born at the time of Jumbo. It would have saved me months of animation, except in the actual contact sequences between the monsters and the elephants."
Fortunately, according to From the Land Beyond, Harryhausen found a clever way to save himself from over-animating in this particular case, expertly shaving off a ton of time it would've otherwise taken. The SFX wiz devised a way to film a normal-sized elephant next to a four-foot man to create a forced perspective, tricking the audience into believing his pachyderm was gigantic!
