Ray Harryhausen is a legend. The man created some of the great movie action sequences in cinema. He usually did it by himself, taking months to create the effects using stop-motion effects. A genuine labour of love and passion.
In today’s movies, I’m not saying there isn’t any love for filmmaking, but when you had someone like Harryhausen doing all the creatures in one movie. Nowadays, 15 people worked on the CG for Ironman’s right leg.
However, there are still people out there who want to make movies with stop-motion animation. The Primevals is one of those movies and it has an interesting story behind it. David Allen, who won an Oscar for his stop motion work on Young Sherlock Homles, started making the movie in 1994.
He had the idea of making a live-action movie, with stop motion mixed in, to tell a story of time travel, giant lizards, yetis and robots. He worked on the stop motion up until his death in 1999 and the project then laid dormant. This was until Charles Band, from Full Moon, and one of Allen’s former associates, Chris Endicott, finished the movie for him. It will now be released, by Full Moon, on the 20th July at Fantasia International Film Festival.
David Allen and Chris Endicott and some of their animated monsters
The official blurb on the movie is:
Deep in the Himalayas, a group of Sherpas subdue and kill a towering humanoid creature. Its remains — including a brain that appears to have undergone some kind of surgery — wind up under the supervision of Dr. Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), who believes it to be one of the legendary Yeti. Joined by her former student Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), a longtime believer in the creatures’ existence, big-game hunter Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), and others, Dr. Collier leads an expedition into the mountains to track down more of the abominable snowmen. Their trek results in an encounter with a tribe of primitive hominids — which in turn leads to the far more frightening discovery of beings they never could have expected or imagined.
And here is the trailer. It’s a little cheesy, but at the same time, it looks glorious. I love the stop motion look and this looks really well animated and composited well. I’m totally up for seeing this.
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