If you want to see a good example of Ray Harryhausen's work, watch The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
Major spoilers
From the 1940s to the early 1980s, Ray Harryhausen was the undisputed master of stop-motion animation. The genre has grown more slick and polished with the use of computers and other high-tech goodies, but back when it was all done by hand, Ray was The Man. He started early, while still in high school, learning the time-consuming and painstaking work of animating articulated figures frame by frame. In almost every one of his movies, he and he alone handled the animation.
A contemporary of überfan Forrest J. Ackerman and colleague of Theodor Seuss Geisel, the young Harryhausen also struck up an early friendship with a short story author named Ray Bradbury. The two have remained lifelong friends, united in their dedication to fantasy, a love of dinosaurs and a pledge to "grow up, but never grow old." (They also have a sort of mutual admiration society—Bradbury's short story, "The Fog Horn," was used as the basis of the movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, with animation effects created by Harryhausen. For his part, Bradbury wrote a short story called "Tyrannosaurus Rex" in which a stop-motion animator named Terwilliger gets his revenge on a tyrannical movie producer by putting his face on an animated dinosaur.)
Harryhausen spent most of his Hollywood years animating what are now considered B-list movies, but these matinee features were seen by, and had a profound influence on, at least two generations of children—many of whom grew up to become the new breed of Hollywood animators. (Ever notice that the swank sushi joint in the Pixar/Disney film Monsters Inc. is named "Harryhausen's?") Those who now view his animation with a jaded eye, proclaiming it too jerky or unrealistic when compared to the slick smoothness of computer animation, are probably unaware how much his work directly inspired what came after it—without Harryhausen's original vision, modern animation would not have come to exist on the scale it does now.
Speaking of scale, I imagine you've really come here for a film review. I remembered The Three Worlds of Gulliver vaguely from childhood, where it was in regular rotation on KTVU Channel 2, but I hadn't seen it in its entirety since grade school. Some aspects of the film I remembered with fondness, since I had a deep fascination with differences of scale, and this movie let me imagine, in turn, what it might be like to be a giant or a tiny person. Over the years, though, most of the details had faded from memory, and it seemed as good a time as any to revisit this movie.
Now I'm rather sorry I did.
The Three Worlds of Gulliver is a live-action and stop-motion animation film, released in 1960 and loosely based on Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. As with many of the tales adapted from or inspired by Swift's fantastic travelogue, the film confines itself to only the most familiar of Dr. Gulliver's voyages—the three worlds referred to in the film are Lilliput/Blefuscu, Brobdingnag, and England. Lemuel Gulliver (Kerwin Mathews) is a young doctor who desires to come up in the world; his fiancée Elizabeth (June Thorburn) is annoyed with his ambition and constant desire for more money. When he signs aboard a ship bound for the West Indies to make money as a ship's surgeon, she stows away in order to be with him. The sailors discover her hiding place during the middle of a raging storm, in which Gulliver is washed overboard and lost at sea.
In the next scene, we witness star-crossed lovers Reldresal (Lee Patterson) and Gwendolyn (Jo Morrow) embracing on the beach, as Gwendolyn and her father have been banished from Lilliput. This scene is dramatically interrupted as Gulliver is washed ashore; to the Lilliputians, he is a giant twelve times their size, and they flee in fear. Later, after he is bound to the earth by tiny ropes, he speaks with the Emperor (Basil Sydney) and manages to sweet-talk his way into being set free.
The Lilliputians see Gulliver as a great asset, not just in terms of all the helpful things he can do in Lilliput, but as a kind of unstoppable war machine against their sworn enemies the Blefuscans. They expect Gulliver to utterly destroy the tiny people on this nearby island because of their barbaric habit of opening eggs at the big end, rather than the small end. (Let's face it, wars have been started for far more stupid reasons.) Gulliver flatly refuses, citing his oath as a doctor to preserve life. When the Lilliputians threaten to destroy him for his traitorous ways, he escapes in a rowboat he has made.
Rowing and drifting for many days, Gulliver finally lands on the island of Brobdingnag. He sees two human figures on the beach and approaches them, only to find they are life-sized dolls. Presently he meets the owner of the dolls, Glumdalclitch (Sherri Alberoni)—a "little girl" some fifty feet tall.
Glumdalclitch takes her find straight to King Brob (Grégoire Aslan), a man obsessed with collecting miniatures. He has a veritable zoo of Gulliver-sized animals, including a rather vicious tiny crocodile which must be kept to itself for fear it might eat the others. He also has Elizabeth, who apparently washed ashore in Brobdingnag around the time Gulliver got to Lilliput. The two are joyously reunited in a dollhouse palace created just for them (which would probably be perfect if Glumdalclitch didn't keep staring in at the windows).
In the middle of the night, Gulliver and Elizabeth decide they just can't stand it any longer. They wake Glumdalclitch and tell her to get the king, who quickly marries them (hey, cohabiting was still a no-no back in 1960). Everything is bliss and lollipops—except Elizabeth seems perfectly happy to be kept like a tame canary, while Gulliver desires to be self-sufficient. Could it be the seeds of marital strife are being sown?
Meanwhile, the King's royal advisor Makovan (Charles Lloyd Pack) grows jealous of Gulliver, deriding his knowledge of science and medicine as witchcraft, and seeking to burn the doctor in "a brief but colorful flame." In spite of curing the Queen's stomachache and managing to avoid being turned blue by a chemical concoction (apparently a sure sign of witchcraft), Gulliver is sentenced to death by miniature crocodile. But he swashbuckles his way free, killing the Harryhausen-animated beast, and Glumdalclitch scoops both tiny people into her sewing basket and runs away. After a short chase (um, no pun intended), Glumdalclitch throws her basket into the river, and it is swept out to sea.
In the end, our two lovers find themselves back in England, wearing their original clothes. How did they get there? Was it all a dream?
Who cares?
When a film relies heavily on the wow factor of its special effects rather than the subtlety of its storytelling, it is not likely to age well. Although The Three Worlds of Gulliver used state-of-the-art techniques when it was first released, the film is over 40 years old and it looks its age. The sodium lighting techniques used to make Gulliver a giant cause him to radiate a sort of telltale white nimbus from his person in several scenes, and the movie usually "cheats" when it comes to actual interaction between giants and tiny people, pulling the camera away at the moment when they actually connect. There are also several bloopers when it comes to maintaining the illusion of size—such as when Gulliver catches several small fish in his hat and flings them to the Lilliputians. They ought to be huge to the small people, but are simply ordinary-sized fish.
There are other revealing errors as well. When Glumdalclitch grabs our two heroes and places them in her basket, she is clearly grabbing two wooden figures, with no yielding qualities to indicate life. During the storm sequence, you can actually see a hand splashing a bucket of water into the scene.
Set design is relatively pedestrian by modern standards, although the miniatures are usually quite detailed. Characters appear to be clothed in whatever costumes Columbia Pictures could scavenge from the back lot—Lilliputians dress in vaguely Indian clothing, Blefuscans look vaguely Chinese, and Brobdingnagians are vaguely German High Middle Ages. Do not ask me to describe the two utterly banal songs, "Gentle Love" and "What A Wonderful, Wonderful, Wonderful Fellow is Gulliver," both of which are kept mercifully short.
Acting ranges from pedestrian to dreadful. Kerwin Mathews is about as British as Gilbert Gottfried, though thankfully not as annoying, and his characterization of Gulliver is white-bread bland. The primary character of the film, despite being an object of fierce attention everywhere he goes, is practically a non-entity. Few of the female roles are well-played—June Thorburn is ditzy, Jo Morrow seems utterly dead, and young Sherri Alberoni has a lovely face to make up for her terrible, melodramatic delivery. I did like the young actress who plays Makovan's daughter, Shrike; she does not have many lines and is not credited, but she brings a nice nastiness to her role as a vengeful child all too eager to see Gulliver go up in flames.
Columbia Tristar seemed to realize they didn't have a gem on their hands when they released this movie on DVD, as it is only available in pan-and-scan format. The Special Features section of the disc is actually the best thing about it, with a Dynamation featurette and a Harryhausen bio narrated by Leonard Nimoy that's actually quite fascinating.
Fans of Harryhausen's work should know that he animates but two creatures in this film—a ground squirrel and the aforementioned crocodile. It is certainly good work, but not his best. For the record, I watched this movie with the Wee Bairn. She watched the crocodile fight scene with interest; about a minute into the sequence, she turned to me and said, "That crocodile's not real, is it? It kind of looks like a toy." Such is the sophistication of modern childhood.
If you really want to see the master's work in action, I suggest The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or the Medusa sequence in his final film, Clash of the Titans. These are far better examples of Harryhausen in full form; this film was not his finest hour.
I guess sometimes it's better to let memories lapse.