h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Though stop-motion has been made obsolete by advances in computer technology..."???

Two words - "Chicken Run"!

Yes, a good and valid point but I think you'll agree that the kind of stop-motion Mr Harryhausen produced is of a totally different style to the equally excellent material Aardman create. The fact that it's fully stop-motion is at the heart of Chicken Run. Al arge part of the films appeal is that it is stop-motion. Aardman are basically a stop-motion animation house (I can't, off the top of my head, recall any cel animation they've produced). Whereas in the Harryhausen-Schneer films, stop-motion was more a means to an end; at the time it was the only method available to achieve those effects. The fact that stop-motion was rejected for Jurassic Park, and that ever since CGI has been the favoured method for creating these scenes, strongly suggests to me that as far as combining live actors and miniatures in the same scene is concerned, stop-motion is regrettably an ex-special effects technique.

Aardman animations took their name from their first cel-animated cartoon, "The adventures of... Aardman", produced as a TV "filler" sometime in the late 1970s. They've been around a long time!

You also neglect to mention the use of stop-motion in "The Terminator" and "Robocop", both of which owe a huge debt to the legacy of Harryhausen...

I just got back in from seeing Chicken Run. My local cinema had Brian Sibley (well known film bloke, wrote a book about the making of the film) in for a chat afterwards. He said that the official cost of making the film was under £500,000! I'm assuming that's just Aardman's production budget and doesn't include any promotion, but even so it's staggeringly low - the studios keep telling us how expensive animation is.

(I guess there are a lot of aspiring animators who are desperate to be able to say they have worked for Aardman...)

It's been a long time since I've seen any of the films mentioned here, but my memory of them is as looking really quite clunky compared with Nick Park's work. Of course Aardman aren't trying to produce anything that looks like something real - they're trying to make stuff that looks like an Aardman production...

The "Clunkiness" comes from the fact that Harryhausen didn't have a computer frame-grabber pointed through the viewfinder, allowing him to play back the last second or so to see if the latest movement was smooth enough before committing it to film - he had to do it all "in his head". Let's face it, computers make a difference even in plasticene animation!

I suspect that if the Chicken Run chickens had been matted into the screen opposite flesh-and-blood actors they might have come out looking pretty clunky too! My point was really that fully stop-motioned films in the Aardman style aren't quite the same thing as live-and-animated-combined action, which was really what Harryhausen did better than anyone else. (I'm familiar with the original 'Aardman' cel animation, but I'd never heard of it before the BBC's omnibus documentary - it's not one of the company's commercial products.) Terminator and Robocop were both pre-1993, which is when CGI really took off. If I'd namechecked every film that was influenced by Ray Harryhausen, from The Mummy to Planet of the Dinosaurs to Carnosaur, the entry would've been three times as long!

In one scene in Jurassic park the main characters are going down a staircase talking about what the ability to clone dinosaurs will mean to their work gathering the ancient bones and one character (sam neill I believe) says they're an endangered species, but another (Jeff Goldblum) says "Don't you mean extinct" and of course since they used cgi rather than stop motion to animate the dinosaurs the comment is meant for the stop motion animators as well as the dinosaur hunters. Actually stop motion is very much alive I think, it's just that the models now exist inside a computer rather than as physical objects.

Mmm - a bit like saying people are still making silent movies, you just have to put earplugs in at the cinema...

I think Jurassic Park just switched off life-support for a technique that had been moribund since the early 80s. The last major stop-motion project was Clash of the Titans in 1981, after that I think directors avoided it as much as possible as effects had moved on in every other department - there's about 3 minutes apiece in The Terminator and Explorers, for example. I understand Spielberg thought about using it for Jurassic Park until he realised how advanced CGI had become.

CGI is so straightforward (and cheap!) these days you'lll probably only see stop-motion used for ironic purposes (eg the League of Gentlemen movie, which at one point Ray Harryhausen was going to do the effects for).

Tim Burton still favours stop-motion.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121164/

Yeah, but to reiterate, I was talking about Harryhausen-style stop-motion which fuses animation with flesh-and-blood actors - nobody does that any more; CGI is quicker and easier (and gives more polished results, thougb the desirability of this is another question).