Ray Harryhuasen, RIP

There's few on the planet who haven't seen his work ... or the work of his direct descendants.

ay Harryhausen, the stop-motion animation legend whose work on "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," "Jason and the Argonauts" and other science fiction and fantasy film classics made him a cult figure who inspired later generations of filmmakers and special-effects artists, has died. He was 92.

Harryhausen died Tuesday in London, where he had lived for decades. His death was confirmed by Kenneth Kleinberg, his longtime legal representative in the United States.

In the pre-computer-generated-imagery era in which he worked, Harryhausen used the painstaking process of making slight adjustments to the position of his three-dimensional, ball-and-socket-jointed scale models and then shooting them frame-by-frame to create the illusion of movement. Footage of his exotic beasts and creatures was later often combined with live action. ...

In my long-ago youth, Mr. Harryhausen was THE man. You were an adolescent male, you dug the belligerent skeletons, the cyclops, the flying monsters and all the rest. You didn't know exactly how it was done but you sure as shit knew it grabbed you by the neck hairs.

"Anyone in the world of animation, SFX, or fantasy owes everything to Ray Harryhausen," Andrew Stanton, director of "John Carter," said on Twitter. "A true legend. RIP Sir." ...

Harryhausen was "a source of inspiration, the master of stop motion, and even a voice actor in Elf. His work still holds up." -- John Favreau