His works include the animation for Mighty Joe Young (1949) with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien (for which the latter won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects); his first color film, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), which featured a sword fight with seven skeleton warriors.

[2] After having seen King Kong (1933) on its initial release for the first of many times, Harryhausen spent his early years experimenting in the production of animated shorts, inspired by the burgeoning science fiction literary genre of the period.

O'Brien critiqued Harryhausen's early models and urged him to take classes in graphic arts and sculpture to hone his skills.

After studying art and anatomy[6] at Los Angeles City College,[citation needed] Harryhausen secured his first commercial model-animation job, on George Pal's Puppetoons shorts,[7] based on viewing his first formal demo reel of fighting dinosaurs from a project called Evolution, which was never finished, after Harryhausen saw Disney's Rite of Spring montage in Fantasia.

[6] During World War II, Harryhausen served in the U.S. Army's Special Services Division under Colonel Frank Capra, as a loader, clapper boy, gofer and later camera assistant, whilst working at home animating short films about the use and development of military equipment.

[8] Following the war, he salvaged several rolls of discarded 16 mm surplus film from which he made a series of fairy tale-based shorts, which he called his "teething-rings".

[9] In 1947, Harryhausen was hired as an assistant animator (credited as "First technician, Special Effects") on what turned out to be his first major film, Mighty Joe Young (1949).

[10] The first film with Ray Harryhausen in full charge of technical effects was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) which began development under the working title Monster From the Sea.

The filmmakers learned that a long-time friend of Harryhausen, writer Ray Bradbury, had sold a short story called "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (later re-titled "The Fog Horn") to The Saturday Evening Post, about a dinosaur drawn to a lone lighthouse by its foghorn.

Ray's producer/partner Charles H. Schneer coined the word Dynamation as a "merchandising term" (modifying it to "SuperDynaMation" and then "Dynarama" for some subsequent films).

His father did the machining of the metal armatures (based on his son's designs) that were the skeletons for the models and allowed them to keep their position, while his mother assisted with some miniature costumes.

Harryhausen soon met and began a fruitful partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer, who was working with the Sam Katzman B-picture unit of Columbia Pictures.

It was a box-office success, quickly followed by Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), set in Washington D.C. – one of the best of the alien invasion films of the 1950s, and also a box office hit.

Harryhausen refined and improved his already-considerable ability at establishing emotional characterizations in the face of his Venusian Ymir model, creating yet another international box office hit.

Reluctant at first, Harryhausen managed to develop the systems necessary to maintain proper color balances for his DynaMation process, resulting in his biggest hit of the 1950s, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958).

[citation needed] Also, as the 1960s counter-culture came to influence more and more and younger filmmakers, and failing studios struggled to find material that was popular with the new "Boomer-generation" audience, Harryhausen's love of the past, setting his stories in ancient fantasy worlds or previous centuries, kept him from keeping pace with changing tastes in the 1960s.

It was a personal project to Harryhausen, which he had wanted to do for many years, as it was storyboarded by his original mentor, Willis O'Brien for a 1939 film, Gwangi, that was never completed.

[citation needed] Set in Mexico, The Valley of Gwangi is a parallel Kong story—cowboys capture a living Allosaurus and bring him to the nearest Mexican town for exhibition.

Harryhausen fans will readily discern that the armed-and-finned Kraken (a name borrowed from medieval Scandinavian folklore) he invented for Clash of the Titans has similar facial qualities to the Venusian Ymir he created 25 years earlier for 20 Million Miles to Earth.

[citation needed] In spite of the very successful box office returns of Clash of the Titans, more sophisticated computer-assisted technology developed by ILM and others began to eclipse Harryhausen's production techniques, and so MGM and other studios passed on funding his planned sequel, Force of the Trojans, causing Harryhausen and Schneer to retire from active filmmaking.

[citation needed] Harryhausen and Terry Moore appeared in small comedic cameo roles in the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young, and he provided the voice of a polar bear cub in the film Elf.

[30] The BBC also quoted Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright: "I loved every single frame of Ray Harryhausen's work ...

"[31] In November 2016 the BFI compiled a list of those present-day filmmakers who claim to have been inspired by Harryhausen, including Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Joe Dante, Tim Burton, Nick Park, James Cameron, and Guillermo del Toro.

[47] In February 2016, John Walsh and Collections Manager Connor Heaney[48] began a podcast about all things Harryhausen, from the films to the various composers involved on the productions.

[49] To mark his 97th birthday on July 29, 2017, the Barbican posted a guest blog by Heaney, highlighting Harryhausen's lasting influence on science fiction.

In a podcast interview with BritFlicks, Walsh discussed his plans to further develop lost Ray Harryhausen film projects, which includes the follow-up to 1981's "Clash of the Titans", entitled "Force of the Trojans".

[57][58] In July 2018, it was announced that the largest ever exhibition of Harryhausen's models and artwork would take place at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, to mark the centenary of his birth.

[63] Many of Harryhausen's original latex models were repaired for this exhibition: in an interview with the Visual Effects Society, Walsh said that "We’re restoring pieces as we go, trying to get things back as close to how people remember them as possible".

[65] Also entitled Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema, the book looks back on his personal and professional life through Vanessa's 100 favourite objects from his collection, and contains contributions from John Landis, Rick Baker, Phil Tippett, Jim Danforth and others.

[68] After the presentation to Harryhausen, actor Tom Hanks told the audience, "Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane...I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made!