ABSTRACT
Ray Harryhausen, the late king of stop-motion animators, took acting lessons in the 1940s, which taught him about movement and building character, and even went out to the zoos to study for hours animals, among them a huge gorilla, for his work on Mighty Joe Young. Ray avoided to use the term puppet or puppet animation and preferred to call it model animation as he was once asked by a man if he was not too old to play with dolls. Hero of Alexandria in the second century wrote manuals on how to fabricate images of god that would move. He would rotate statues and design a miniature puppet theatre, not for entertainment's sake but for religious purposes. Ray once met a famous female marionette maker who carved hundreds of puppets for stage and TV shows. Many of the younger generation of VFX artists were heavily influenced as kids by Harryhausen and so tried to copy him.
