A nice companion piece to Harryhausen’s autobiography, An Animated Life (2004).
A collection of drawings, storyboards and photographs of models crafted by the stop-motion animation expert.
Billed as “cinema’s greatest master of fantasy” in an appreciative preface by Lord of the Rings director/King Kong remaker Peter Jackson, Harryhausen was already making puppets in junior high, shooting short animated films in his late teens. (Mom made the costumes and Dad built the sets for his early efforts.) He apprenticed with Willis O’Brien, legendary animator of the original King Kong, but after WWII found ways to adapt Obie’s expensive techniques to the lower-budget films that were becoming the fantasy norm. His brief but informative text frequently notes compromises made to reduce costs: Cerberus having two heads instead of three, photos used instead of hand-painted backdrops for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and One Million Years B.C. Wistful references to never-made projects, including War of the Worlds and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, remind readers how often a movie artist’s dreams go unrealized. Harryhausen had a better track record than most, partly because he knew how to sell an idea; many of the dramatic charcoal and pencil drawings handsomely reproduced here were created for pitch sessions with the money men. Though drawings predominate, fans will particularly relish the less frequent color photos of the intricate models—usually latex rubber covering a metal armature, supplemented by a few bronze casts—of Harryhausen’s most famous monsters: the snaky Medusa in Clash of the Titans, the many-armed Kali and the giant Cyclops from two of the Sinbad movies, the hydra and the amazing skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts. The organization is thematic rather than chronological, putting all the aliens in one chapter, dinosaurs in another; a marvelous section entitled “Masks, Mayhem & Monsters” features a hilariously creepy photo of 21-year-old Harryhausen, wearing a Mr. Hyde mask he designed himself, flanked by a heavily made-up girlfriend with a rope around her neck.
A nice companion piece to Harryhausen’s autobiography, An Animated Life (2004).Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8230-8400-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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