Neither alive nor dead; but something in-between. Stop-motion FX. The process by which tiny foam rubber models are turned into huge, menacing creatures. Even today, in the era of the computer-generated effect, the spells woven by the FX masters of old are much too powerful to lose their power to beguile.

Thanks to TV and video, Kong still roars his defiance at the fighter pilots and The Argonauts flee in terror from the titan of bronze. But are we about to witness a clash of the technological titans: computer versus latex; the model versus the microchip? Certainly we can thank the computer for one thing: allowing the most realistic portrayal of dinosaurs in movie history. Suddenly, in 1993, the much-neglected dino-movie made a comeback via some astonishing special effects wizardry in Steven Spielberg's hugely successful Jurassic Park. More to the point it reintroduced dinosaurs into the mainstream.

The rip-offs followed -- Carnosaur, Super Mario Brothers, The Flintstones -- at the same time as the inevitable reissues of older, classic dinosaur flicks. One legend in the industry, Ray Harryhausen, has since seen many of his films receive the home video treatment, often for the first time. Classics such as The Lost World are at last available to buy. And a process which many predicted had died with the dinosaurs themselves is popular once more.

That process is stop-motion. Defined as the way in which a static model is moved every few frames of film which when played back at normal speed creates the illusion of movement. Using small models (or armatures), the animator can, in effect, confer life on his subject and, by superimposing the model onto a full-scale, lifelike background -- complete with running, panicking people -- make us believe that dinosaurs do, in fact, exist. However, stop-motion has its share of detractors. For one thing, it's a very expensive, not to mention time-consuming, process, with many FX artists unwilling to put aside months, even years of their lives to produce effects whose actual screen time might be just a few minutes. The Lost World (1925), for instance, needed 960 separate movements of one or more creatures -- a ten hour working day that, at best, might result in 13 seconds of moving dinosaur. Also, films featuring stop-motion FX are real trials for actors who, in effect, are as much puppets as their monstrous co-stars. In a stop-motion picture the actor has to act to thin air as the FX are added in later. Worse still they are often given substandard dialogue (and in the case of One Million Years B.C., no dialogue at all). All of which, one might argue, makes this special effect one of the most impractical in movie history.

But stop-motion has been going for a long time; in fact it dates from about 1915 when King Kong creator Willis O'Brien put together a short film called The Dinosaur And The Missing Link and sold it to the Edison film company. Since then, the process has passed into the more than capable hands of such artists as Ray Harryhausen, Jim Danforth, David Allen and Phil Tippett. It has encompassed colour, replaced expensive sets with back projection and replaced basic models with more convincing and realistically sculpted designs. In fact the most oft-criticised aspect of stop-motion is probably its most endearing feature: that jerky, slightly out-of-synch movement that has caused as many to be repelled as to be won over by its charm. When we watch the Cyclops chase down its human victims in The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, we know it can never be real. It's movements aren't quite ... well ... right. It walks, runs, crouches; yet the way it moves is totally ... inhuman. This makes the creature all the more scary and surreal; despite knowing how the effect was achieved, it's still amazing to see something so big hunt down its victims. Clearly it isn't a man in a monster suit -- but something stranger yet...

Because of the slightly odd-time quality of movement, stop-motion models can be used to frighten adults and children alike. The subtle nightmare quality of the effect only needs slight manipulation to take on an element of unease. Compare the stop-motion television series The Wind In The Willows (shown on ITV), a series made specifically for children, and a children's story adapted specifically for adults: The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (originally broadcast on BBC2). In the latter, the adults -- further distorted by FX trickery -- are the monsters and the stop-motion creatures the heroes. Indeed, the creatures don't have to be giants at all, as in a memorable episode of the classic TV series The Outer Limits called 'The Zanti Misfits'. The stop-motion aliens of this little gem are simply insects with human faces resulting in an extremely creepy hybrid. What starts off as a merely okay episode is transformed into an unforgettably weird experience by its mansect co-stars.

But it's children for whom the power of the stop-motion effect has its greatest impact. As a kid, I, for one, was much more impressed by the stop-motion allosaur of The Valley Of The Gwangi than the rubber-suited monsters that populated the numerous Godzilla movies of the 70s. Nearly all kids love monsters; after all, what is more likely to be imprinted on a young mind: Marlon Brando's performance in On The Waterfront or the sight of a giant Cyclops roasting a sailor over a roaring fire in The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad? I rest my case!

Stop-motion can enliven even the dullest of features. Thus its fans have developed a tolerance for bad movies almost unequalled in movie fandom. Patiently we sit through the most tedious acting; the most inane plot contrivances; the stupidist of character interaction. It doesn't matter -- we know our stamina will be rewarded. With a giant octopus (in It Came From Beneath The Sea); vicious giant scorpions (in The Black Scorpion); or a prehistoric flying reptile (as in Q -- The Winged Serpent).

Of course, there's a downside as well, as anyone who has endured the likes of The Beast Of Hollow Mountain and Behemoth -- The Sea Monster will no doubt be aware. Why this should prove true of the latter, though, is puzzling. This 1958 film featured FX supervised by the godfather of stop-motion, Willis O'Brien. The story -- a direct rip-off of Harryhausen's earlier The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms -- concerns a radioactive paleosaurus that, in perennial monster movie fashion, emerges from the sea and attacks a big city (in this case, London). With, at best, average effects, Behemoth is one of the most disappointing of a whole clutch of similarly veined monster-on-the-loose pics of the 50s.

Strange then that one of the effects contributors on Behemoth should be Pete Peterson, whose stop-motion FX on the aforementioned The Black Scorpion was probably the finest that decade.

The Black Scorpion (1957) -- again supervised by O'Brien -- was filmed in stark black and white (often much more effective than colour in stop-motion movies) and is, without doubt, one of the neglected classics of its time. The story and acting add little to this clichéd tale about giant, man-eating scorpions which lay siege to Mexico City after being released from their lair by an earthquake. But those effects... The first time we get to see one of the monsters close up is, paradoxically, the film's most memorable moment. A scorpion appears from under a bridge, grabs a man off a telegraph pole and stings him to death. The scene is so smooth and so unexpected that anyone seeing it for the first time is unlikely forget it in a hurry. In fact the film is rumoured to have grown out of this sequence which was created as a test reel by O'Brien and Peterson. But perhaps most impressive of all is the fact that despite suffering from multiple sclerosis (from which he died in the 60s) Pete Peterson still produced such great stop-motion effects. An underrated talent.

However, it is Peterson's mentor Willis O'Brien -- OBie for short -- who will be most familiar to those with an even passing interest in stop-motion. O'Brien is, of course, remembered for his ground-breaking FX work on King Kong (1933), possibly the greatest monster movie ever made. King Kong was the result of writer/director Meridian Cooper's interest in gorilla behaviour which he developed whilst on location for Paramount's 1929 picture, The Four Feathers. After viewing O'Brien's stop-motion footage for Creation (1930-31), Cooper teamed up with O'Brien and director Ernest B. Schoedsack and together they created a masterpiece.

Several models of the giant gorilla were produced by Marcel Delgado who used metal armatures (the first to do so) to create a steel skeleton which he then covered with foam rubber skin and finally rabbit hair. Full life-size models were also created of Kong's head and shoulders, his giant paw and his foot.

The story was a marvellous one. Filmmaker Carl Denham and his crew travel to a remote island and discover a prehistoric world which includes, amongst its many monsters, a giant ape -- the eponymous Kong. After capturing the beast and taking him to New York, he escapes, wreaks havoc in Manhattan City, and is finally vanquished atop The Empire State Building.

As well as being the pinnacle of O'Brien's career, the film temporarily saved RKO studios from bankruptcy. King Kong has since become one of the most fondly remembered, not to mention ruthlessly mimicked (it inspired the highly successful Godzilla series, for example) of creature features -- all down to its stop-motion effects which to this day have yet to be equalled.

O'Brien contributed to several films after Kong. Notable among these is 1949's Mighty Joe Young. Although accredited to O'Brien, the FX in the film -- the comic story of a large gorilla who wreaks havoc when taken from Africa and transported to America to be the star attraction at a night-club -- were mostly down to Ray Harryhausen and Pete Peterson. OBie's main role, as in his later pictures, was that of technical advisor. The picture was directed by Ernest Schoedsack and starred King Kong's Robert Armstrong; given the similarities, it was criticised (rather unfairly in my mind) for being a pale shadow of its hairy cousin. However, this neglects to account for the very high quality of animation throughout. One of the major criticisms levelled at Kong is the unnatural 'rippling' effect of Kong's hair from one scene to the next. This was remedied on Mighty Joe Young by using unborn lamb hide (!) and Marcel Delgado was once again hired to create the models -- which this time consisted of more moving parts than the Kong models and which, in turn, made for more convincing animation.

But models in themselves are as nothing. All that matters are the hands that manipulate them. And, in Mighty Joe Young, those hands, for the most part, belonged to Ray Harryhausen.

At the age of 13, Ray Harryhausen saw King Kong at his local cinema. It was to change his life. Indeed he was so impressed that he started to make his own stop-motion animals using a 16mm camera, a hobby that eventually led to O'Brien himself inviting the aspiring artist to work with him on Mighty Joe Young. Working with Pete Peterson and Al Hamm (who orchestrated the Monkey Money sequence), Harryhausen was responsible for the majority of the effects in that picture.

The first film he had personal control over was 1953's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Made for a mere $200,000 it still featured some superb stop-motion sequences. Harryhausen devised a method by which his models could be inserted between the live action background and foreground without recourse to the glass paintings and miniatures utilised in earlier, more expensive stop-motion films. His next film, It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), the story of huge octopus that attacks San Francisco, marked the beginning of a twelve picture collaboration with producer Charles H. Schneer. Most of their monster epics were to be made on surprisingly low budgets; even Jason And The Argonauts, perhaps the pinnacle of Harryhausen's career, only cost $1 million (the average cost of making a film at the time being $3-5 million). Come 1958 and The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, the term 'Dynamation' had been coined, which Schneer described as 'a photographic process which combines a live background, in colour, with a three-dimensional animated figure in combination with flesh and bone actors.' The film, which cost a paltry $650,000, saw a move away from, in Harryhausen's words, 'wrecking cities'. Instead, it had an epic feel which saw Sinbad travel to a mythical island and battle, amongst others, the one-eyed Cyclops and a two-headed bird, the Roc.

As a film, it would influence a whole generation of budding FX artists -- for example, its director Nathan Juran would go on to direct 1961's similarly themed Jack The Giant Killer (with effects by Jim Danforth). The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad was also the first to feature music by the great composer, Bernard Herrmann, whose scores would make such pics as Jason And The Argonauts and Mysterious Island even more memorable.

Harryhausen's later movies include such unforgettable epics as: First Men In The Moon (1964); One Million Years B.C. (1966); and The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (1973). As well as having the role of FX co-ordinator he was also involved from the start in script decisions and even directorial chores. However, it not until 1981's Clash Of The Titans, that he was to work with other animators -- Jim Danforth and Steve Archer. Paradoxically, it was also his final film.

Harryhausen has spoken in the past about why he admires King Kong. The fact that it leads the viewer so convincingly from mundane reality to outright fantasy is a philosophy which might be transferred into the best of his own work. As he has so often said, stop-motion at its best is gripping, scary, but never gratuitous. The thrills, for the most part, should avoid blood and gore; should enthral but never disgust. At its most potent, stop-motion is magic, pure and simple.

One of the best examples of this is Harryhausen's 1969 feature The Valley Of Gwangi. In this dino-western to end all dino-westerns, a group of circus cowboys venture into a forbidden valley where they discover all manner of prehistoric monsters, including 'Gwangi' himself, a ferocious allosaurus which is eventually captured and brought back to civilisation -- with predictably disastrous results. Based on Willis O'Brien's unfilmed Gwangi and The Valley Of The Mist projects, The Valley Of Gwangi is a big improvement over the dire The Beast Of Hollow Mountain from the 50s (based on another O'Brien idea). The film's best remembered sequence is where Gwangi is lassoed, a section measured in minutes of actual screen time but which took five months to complete.

Indeed, the makers of Jurassic Park were so impressed by this sequence that it was studied in order to authenticate their dinosaurs' movements on that movie. To this day, the dinosaur FX on both Gwangi and One Million Years B.C. have rarely been equalled.

In the same way that Harryhausen was influenced by O'Brien, a new generation of stop-motion artists has emerged whose main influence is Ray Harryhausen. Jim Danforth, for example, as well as working on the aforementioned Jack The Giant Killer, also contributed superior effects to 1978's Planet Of Dinosaurs (described in Stephen Jones' The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie Guide as 'amongst the best {dinosaurs} ever seen on screen'). He also worked on John Carpenter's They Live and collaborated with the highly talented David Allen on Hammer's sequel to One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth (1969). David Allen is another FX technician who fell under the spell of Harryhausen. As well as producing the effects for such acclaimed stop-motion pictures as The Crater Lake Monster (1977) and Caveman (1981), he teamed up with George (Star Wars) Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic team to create the stop-motion effects for Twilight Zone -- The Movie (1983), Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) and *Batteries Not Included (1987).

Phil Tippett deserves an honourable mention too. Tippett contributed to The Crater Lake Monster and animated an impressive stop-motion sequence in Joe Dante's Piranha (1978). He also joined Industrial Light and Magic where he animated Star Wars' impressive alien chess pieces. Further involvement in the Star Wars series came when he was asked to animate the Walkers, huge, four-legged war machines, surely the sequence which everyone remembers from The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

The creation of the Walkers marked a new phase in FX animation. This was ILM's 'motion control' process. Pioneered on Star Wars and also known as 'go-motion', the process utilises puppets (attached to rods) which are, in turn, connected to computer-controlled stepper motors. In the long run, this means that movements can be stored in the computer's memory and, with modifications, repeated each time an effect is required.

The process was perfected by ILM on another Tippett-supervised project, Dragonslayer (1981). This otherwise bland and boring fantasy is worth seeing for the scenes in which the dragon is tracked down to its cave. This is animation at its best -- the dragon's movements are extremely fluid and, thanks to the ingenuity of the process, there is a more realistic blurring effect from frame to frame, an innovation which vastly improves on stop-motion's occasional strobing effect.

Despite the fact that technological advances have made stop-motion somewhat redundant, the process was still being modified and utilised in several 80s horror, science fiction and fantasy movies. The following, for instance, all featured significant stop-motion effects: Robocop (Phil Tippett); The Blob (1988 remake); Beetlejuice; The Thing (1982); The Gate; Dreamscape; A Chinese Ghost Story; The Howling and Gremlins 2. At the same time, these and other films occasionally suffer from mixing more than one effects technique within the same movie. Not only can this be jarring for the viewer (for example, the Spider-Gremlin, memorable as it is, is out of place amongst the electronically-controlled Gremlins that feature predominantly throughout Gremlins 2), but by using more than one type of effect, the viewer may find himself less apt to believe in the fantasy element -- commercial disaster for any director whose main task is to suspend belief.

However, the combination of effects in the 90s is much more effectively utilised. Now there are telemetry suits, puppeteering and rod and wire effects. The former is an electronic device which links a human controller to a robotic figure which in turn means that the controller's movements when wearing the suit are replicated, almost instantly, by the robot counterpart. Rods and wires were used on Jurassic Park where the effect was modified to control the dinosaurs' tails. These techniques have, to some extent or other, also been utilised on Super Mario Bros.(1993) (which used cable-controlled dinosaurs) and Roger Corman's 1993 Jurassic Park take-off, Carnosaur (1993).

With the amazing computer-generated effects seen in recent big-budget efforts like Toy Story and Dragonheart it would seem that, for the moment at least, traditional animation has been consigned to the basement. But it's not dead yet. Oscar-winning Nick Park continues to impress viewers world-wide with his imaginative and accomplished Wallace and Gromit stories and stop-motion is regularly used in children's television. Hopefully, in the long run, this will incite an interest in FX; at the very least it should ensure that today's youth will always be able to witness one this century's most mesmerising special effects: stop-motion, the 'magic of movement'.

With thanks to Stephen Laws for his invaluable help with this piece.

Originally appeared in the BFS Newsletter, Vol. 21, No. 1, January/February 1997.