Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 62

Dinosaurs have always been associated with animation and linked with new advances in
technology. To have been the i rst to see Gertie moving, and apparently reacting to a live actor,
must have been extraordinary. O'Brien's creatures, and subsequently those from Harryhausen
and Danforth, probably took the skill of animating them as far as possible. The sublimely realistic
creatures in Jurassic Park have undoubtedly changed dinosaurs and animation in general.
Audiences will hardly accept a stop motion creature masquerading as reality in a live-action i lm
now, unless done with a huge tongue in a huge ironic cheek, as in The League of Gentlemen's
Apocalypse . However, it is clear that the public has an insatiable appetite for a wholly stop
motion world, as in The Nightmare Before Christmas , Corpse Bride , Max and Co . and Wallace and
Gromit. To mix the two techniques is a little uncomfortable, as invariably the seams show.
So many theories exist of how these dinosaurs walked and how agile they were, and credibly
reconstructing their movement would be a fascinating detective story. The stop motion shot in
preproduction for Jurassic Park by Phil Tippett shows creatures with real energy and dynamics,
but still looking heavy: they look utterly credible. After a test screening of footage from King
Kong , Merien C. Cooper was called by a natural history museum suggesting that is was unlikely
that dinosaurs could have roared, as they seemingly didn't have any vocal chords. It's probably
a good thing that i lm-makers often ignore the facts, but it's hard to think of those creatures as
silent, although the giraf e is a silent animal. You may think with a neck that size there would be
all manner of vocal tricks, so maybe it was the same with the dinosaurs. However, i lm-making
is about creating the credible, not the real.
Most i lms about dinosaurs need human characters to drive the i lm, certainly making the
contrasting scales work, and demonstrating the archetypal story of man versus monster, with
the dinosaurs' success dependent on how seamlessly they interact with human actors. The
digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park stampeded across the big screen, chasing and eating the live-
action cast very convincingly. They have since gobbled up television audiences with so many
series along the lines of Walking with Dinosaurs that we'll get Walking with Zimmer Frames
soon. Excuses to feed the dinosaur-hungry audience grow feebler as the dinosaurs get more
credible. A recent programme speculated that we might have tamed them as pets had they not
died out. Cue that especially skilled group of performers acting against beautifully animated
computer graphics (CG) creatures; a skill that stop motion animators have, incidentally.
Dinosaurs will always be useful to kickstart a i lm and to project any manner of subtext. Unlike
the real thing, dinosaurs in i lm are here to stay, although I am happy to see that the dinosaurs
of i lms like Journey to the Centre of Earth (real lizards with stuck-on i ns doing gruesome battle
and being submerged in 'lava') and At the Earth's Core (men in rather dire rubber suits) are an
extinct breed. I'm not sure that we will ever see a stop motion dinosaur i ghting live actors
again, but dinosaurs seem to be a benchmark for each generation's technology and reinvented
for their own purposes. Animated skeletons run a close second here, from Georges Méliès,
through Harryhausen, to The Corpse Bride and beyond.
Ray Harryhausen
So much has been written about Ray's work, and whatever I say will be an
inadequate appraisal of this extraordinary and innovative body of work. Naturally,
I am a besotted admirer of his work, responding more deeply to the creatures that
are inherently inanimate. Talos and the various skeletons thrill me more than the
natural history-themed creatures. This is not surprising, as a huge bronze statue