Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Animation
King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, 1933) featured stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien. EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
Harryhausen’s legacy is great, but George Pal, his
one-time employer, also produced fine work. His
‘‘replacement’’ technique was slightly different from
Harryhausen’s method: whereas Harryhausen manipulated
his models by small increments and recorded them
frame by frame, Pal created replacement pieces of his
models—faces, arms, legs, and so on—which progressed
the cycle of movement he was creating, and which he
inserted and changed, once more recording the incremental
progression frame by frame. Though a more
cumbersome technique, it survives into the modern era,
particularly in clay animation, and has been used in films
by Aardman Animation in England. After making early
films in Germany, Pal moved to Holland, fleeing the rise
of Nazism, and established the biggest puppet studio in
Europe, principally making striking advertisements for
sponsors such as Phillips and Unilever. His Puppetoons,
made in Hollywood, included Jasper and the Beanstalk
(1945), Henry and the Inky Poo (1946), and Tubby the
Tuba (1947). They were highly successful, though
sometimes they fell afoul of what might be termed
‘‘cultural difference’’ in regard to the representation of
race issues and the interpretation of Western humor.
These films nevertheless secured Pal a reputation that
enabled him to produce and direct feature-length
science-fiction and fantasy films such as The War of
the Worlds (1953), Tom Thumb (1958), The Time
Machine (1960), and The Wonderful World of the
Brothers Grimm (1963). These films all included tourde-force
sequences of puppet animation—‘‘the yawning
man’’ from Tom Thumb being one of the most remembered.
The quality of the animation by Harryhausen
and Pal overshadowed similar efforts in the field such
as, for example, Jack the Giant Killer (1961) by Tim
Barr (1912–1977), one of a number of variations on
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) that sought to cash
in on its popularity. Barr later joined up with Gene
Warren (1916–1997) and Wah Chang (1917–2003) to
work on visual effects for Pal and on their own work in
Projects Unlimited.
88 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM