Digital effects have rendered the kind of stop-motion animation of which Ray Harryhausen was a master obsolete. Powerful software and creative artistry can blend fantastic imagery into the middle of an otherwise ordinary scene so well that only a frame-by-frame, pixel-by-pixel examination can tell the difference, and sometimes not even then.
But Harryhausen, whose death at 92 was announced today, came first. Without his willingness to try pretty much anything when it came to putting the wild, weird and way-out on screen, later special effects artists might not have tried the things they did, or developed the new technologies needed to do them.
And it's not hard to make a case that some of Harryhausen's best work exceeded some of the multi-million dollar spectacles of the last couple of decades. Compare The 7th Voyage of Sinbad to any of the Star Wars prequels, and it doesn't require much imagination to see how Harryhausen's eye and sensibility would have improved the latter. Because there's no way that he would have allowed a character like Jar-Jar Binks, and a Harryhausen stop-motion creation would have been a hundred times more lifelike than Hayden Christensen.
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