'UNCLE  RAY'
 

Official Ray Harryhausen website

Ray Harryhausen has a very simple philosophy when it comes to the nature and use of stop-motion animation:

"Animation to me, is you don't expect them to be too real. You know that dinosaurs don't exist. Although you try to make them as real as you can, but if you make them too real, it loses the fantasy. I always felt, like a good painter, if you ask a landscape artist to paint a photographic copy of a scene, yet it's not an interpretation. Anyone can do that. You want to give your interpretation. The modern films try to make it a semi-documentary ... not a melodrama (fiction adventure), like the Sinbad voyages, Perseus and Jason ... rather than just a straightforward ... Look! A dinosaur! Another dinosaur! (audience being entertained). This is what I learned from Willis O'Brien. He was the only one to make the dinosaurs, Movie Stars!"

Another way of what Uncle Ray is saying ... When CGI is composited with live action, it is becoming used so often and maybe trying to display Excessive Reality but perhaps CGI is becoming too mundane or homogenized to the audiences and it loses that Surrealness or Other-worldly look. As Ray has said often, there is "that DREAM-like quality" in which Stop Motion Animation can evoke.
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