The brilliant stop motion animator, Ray Harryhausen, explains it so well.
"There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.”
Offscreen: Is the long-running debate over computer generated imagery versus stop-motion animation amongst stop motion animation fans and practitioners, like a former colleague of yours, Jim Danforth, still raging or have they all begun to accept CGI?
RH: CGI has its virtues as a tool, but they hype it to the point where everything else should be discarded which I don’t agree with. Thunderbirds brought back string puppets, Kermit the Frog brought back hand puppets which go back to ancient Rome. So it depends on the story you’re telling. Some techniques are better than others for certain types of stories.
Offscreen: Absolutely.
RH: CGI has a tendency now of becoming mundane because you see in a thirty second commercial the most amazing images, so the amazing image is no longer a shock. Because you see that anything can be done on the computer.
Offscreen: Saturation point.
RH: It reaches the point where I think it defeats itself. And that’s why I think different techniques depend on what story you’re telling.
Offscreen: Uh huh… Ok, this one’s a little longwinded: I used to worry that my bias towards stop-motion over CGI was rooted in the fact that since my youth I invested so much energy marveling at how stop-motion sequences were accomplished, as a fan I bought all the books and magazines on the topic that I could find. But once CGI took over, it left me cold because the materials were less tactile, leaving me uninterested as to how it was executed. But although wonderful things are being done via computer, the more I think about it, the more I realize there’s simply a different kind of magic going on in stop-motion, a whole different category unto itself.
RH: Completely. I get a lot of fan mail saying they prefer my films to CGI. But like I said CGI is overexposed and you know anything can be done. On a fantasy film I think it defeats the point if you try to make it too realistic. Half the charm of King Kong was that it was like a nightmare. You couldn’t believe you eyes. You knew it wasn’t real and yet it looked real.
Offscreen: But people’s thresholds have irreversibly evolved to a sophisticated level when it comes to suspension of disbelief.
RH: They’re a little more critical today.
Offscreen: Yeah, like King Kong for example actually made audience members faint when it first came out, but today it’s even difficult to get some viewers through a black and white film.
RH: I know (laughs).
Offscreen: Do you think stop-motion could ever be a viable medium again?
RH: Of course, if it gets the right story.
Offscreen: I’m referring specifically to the kind that tries to emulate “realism” as opposed to cartoony puppet animation.
RH: Yeah but that isn’t the point in fantasy, to make it too real.