+ intro by Alan Friswell, the conserver and restorer of Ray Harryhausen’s models (Sunday 4 August only)
When Sinbad and his crew find a piece of golden tablet carried by a tiny winged creature, they are soon pitted against the dark magic of Koura, a formidable sorcerer. The tablet, when complete, forms a map that leads to unimaginable treasures.
The sword-wielding, six-armed Kali, a gryphon and a centaur are just some of the Harryhausen creations that these foolhardy souls meet on their thrilling adventure.
bfi.org.uk
In a sense, this Sinbad film began many years ago, when an American teenager was taken by his mother to see a film that had just been released. All she knew in advance was that it was about a gorilla, and since her son liked gorillas, she was certain that he would enjoy it.
In fact, it turned out to be more than a matter of enjoyment, because the film was King Kong and the teenager was Ray Harryhausen. For Harryhausen, the experience of seeing King Kong was ‘a startling revelation’, and the beginning of a lifetime’s career. ‘To see the way that Kong and the dinosaur moved was the illusion of a lifetime. I came out of that cinema stunned and haunted’, he recalled years later. ‘I expected Kong to be played by a man in a gorilla suit, but that is not what I saw.’
What stunned Harryhausen in King Kong was Willis O’Brien’s technique of stop-motion photography as a way of bringing miniature rubber models to life. A few years later he got a job as one of O’Brien’s assistants, and learned the stop-motion craft himself, with the result that in 1949 he shared with O’Brien the credit for the special visual effects on another gorilla picture, Mighty Joe Young.
These gorilla films were however in black and white, and Harryhausen set himself the task of developing O’Brien’s process so that it could be used with colour, and with mythological creatures as well as zoological ones. The first fruit of this quest was the 1958 Technicolor film The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, which was an overwhelming public success. At that time Harryhausen called his process Dynamation – a mixture of the words ‘dynamic’ and ‘animation’ – but by the time today’s sequel was produced he had changed it to Dynarama.
One of the Dynarama creations that Sinbad meets on his Golden Voyage is Kali, who serves well as an example of Harryhausen’s approach. Kali is the Goddess of Destruction in Indian mythology, and is usually portrayed in Indian paintings as having four arms, and a belt of jangling skulls. Harryhausen had long wanted to bring her to life, and steered this screenplay so that it gave him his chance. In putting Kali on the screen he left out the jangling skulls but, perhaps to compensate for this omission, made his task of animating her even more difficult than it need have been by giving her six sword-wielding arms rather than four.
The staging of the sword fight between Kali and the sailors was a complicated operation. The actors had to learn to fight an opponent who was not there, because at that time the bronze, six-armed, eight-foot statue existed only as a design on Harryhausen’s drawing board. Months later Harryhausen turned his Kali design into a one-foot jointed model, blending her movements with those of the live-action sailors, and making her look taller than them.
Because Dynarama was such a time-consuming business, each film made by Harryhausen and producer Charles Schneer used to be in production for up to three years. This made them very expensive, but Schneer and Harryhausen refused to cut corners. As Schneer explained: ‘When you combine the real with the unreal, the audience must think that everything is real. If they don’t, we’ve failed.’
Terry Staples
THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD
Director: Gordon Hessler
Production Companies: Morningside Productions, Columbia Pictures Industies, Inc
Producers: Charles H. Schneer, Ray Harryhausen
Production Executive: Andrew Donally
Production Supervisor: Roberto Roberts
Assistant Director: Miguel A. Gil Jr
Continuity: Eva Del Castillo
Assistant Continuity: Lesley J. Silver
Casting: Maude Spector
Screenplay: Brian Clemens
Based on a story by: Brian Clemens, Ray Harryhausen
Director of Photography: Ted Moore
Camera Operator: Salvador Gil
Creator of Special Visual Effects: Ray Harryhausen
Editor: Roy Watts
Assistant Editor: Jeremy Thomas
Production Designer: John Stoll
Art Director: Fernando González
Set Decorator: Julian Mateos
Costumes: Verena Coleman, Gabriella Falk
Make-up: José Antonio Sanchez
Special Masks: Colin Arthur
Music: Miklós Rózsa
Sound Recording: George Stephenson, Doug Turner
Dubbing Editor: Peter Elliott
Cast
John Phillip Law (Sinbad)
Caroline Munro (Margiana)
Tom Baker (Koura)
Douglas Wilmer (Vizier)
Martin Shaw (Rachid)
Grégoire Aslan (Hakim)
Kurt Christian (Haroun)
Takis Emmanuel (Achmed)
John D. Garfield (Abdul)
Aldo Sambrell (Omar)
Robert Shaw (creature) *
USA 1973©
105 mins
Digital
* Uncredited
STOP MOTION: CELEBRATING HANDMADE ANIMATION ON THE BIG SCREEN
Fantastic Mr Fox
Thu 1 Aug 12:30; Fri 2 Aug 20:30; Sun 25 Aug 16:15
The Tale of the Fox Le Roman de Renard
Fri 2 Aug 18:15; Tue 13 Aug 20:30
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas
Sat 3 Aug 14:00; Thu 29 Aug 20:50
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
Sat 3 Aug 15:50; Sun 25 Aug 14:30 BFI IMAX; Fri 30 Aug 18:20
Frankenweenie
Sat 3 Aug 18:00; Sun 11 Aug 14:30 BFI IMAX; Fri 30 Aug 20:30
Jason and the Argonauts
Sun 4 Aug 12:10 (+ intro by Alan Friswell, conserver and restorer of Ray Harryhausen’s models); Wed 14 Aug 18:00
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Sun 4 Aug 14:50 (+ intro by Alan Friswell, conserver and restorer of Ray Harryhausen’s models); Wed 14 Aug 20:30
Chicken Run
Sun 4 Aug 13:00; Sat 24 Aug 11:40
The Emperor’s Nightingale Císaruv slavík
Sun 4 Aug 20:30; Tue 13 Aug 18:20
ParaNorman
Mon 5 Aug 12:20; Thu 15 Aug 12:10; Wed 28 Aug 12:20
The Boxtrolls
Tue 6 Aug 12:20; Mon 12 Aug 14:10; Sat 17 Aug 12:00
Journey to the Beginning of Time Cesta do praveku
Tue 6 Aug 20:30; Thu 22 Aug 18:30
Isle of Dogs
Wed 7 Aug 12:10; Sat 10 Aug 20:30; Sun 25 Aug 18:30
Kubo and the Two Strings
Thu 8 Aug 12:20; Sat 10 Aug 18:15 (+ Q&A with Travis Knight, director and President & CEO of LAIKA); Fri 30 Aug 12:20
Missing Link
Fri 9 Aug 12:30; Mon 26 Aug 15:20
Coraline
Fri 16 Aug 12:30; Sat 17 Aug 15:30; Wed 21 Aug 12:15; Thu 22 Aug 14:20
Stop-Motion Shorts Scene – BFI Backed + Q&A
Fri 16 Aug 18:10
Funday: Stop-Motion Children’s Favourites
Sun 18 Aug 12:20
Stopmotion + Q&A with director Robert Morgan
Wed 21 Aug 20:40
Aardman Shorts
Sat 24 Aug 14:30
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Tue 27 Aug 20:40
LAIKA: Frame x Frame
Embark on a journey behind the scenes of LAIKA, one of the world’s foremost pioneers in stop-motion animation. This immersive new exhibition will transport you into the boundary-pushing art and science behind every one of the nearly one million meticulously constructed frames that bring each of LAIKA’s five groundbreaking feature films to life.
Opens Mon 12 Aug
Thanks to Jez Stewart, BFI National Archive
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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