A Trafford town is about to get a sprinkling of Hollywood glamour

There are a number of two-word phrases which many associate with Ray Harryhausen: Special effects, stop motion, Academy Award, and Hollywood legend. But Greater Manchester hasn’t really ever been one of them - until now, that is.

The animator and producer, born in Los Angeles, is the ‘special effects wizard’ behind iconic films from the golden age of cinema like Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. He has been named by both George Lucas and Peter Jackson as one of their biggest inspirations.

But Ray, who died in 2013 at the age of 92, had lots more projects to his name - and many of them went unrealised, only existing in various sketches, props, concepts and storyboards that have gathered dust since being created.

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For the last few years, It has been up to filmmaker John Walsh, who is also the author behind Harryhausen: The Lost Movies, to dust off and sort through the vast collection, which has been hailed as one of the largest animation archives in history asides from the Walt Disney Company.

“He made 16 films but there were a good few he didn’t make between each one,” John recalls to the Manchester Evening News. “He was quite resistant about telling me about them, because unmade film projects are not necessarily always something to be shouted about - they are often thought of as a personal and a professional failure rather than a treasure trove of unmade wonders."

John’s connection to Ray was decades-long and began in the late 1980s when he was a student at the London Film School and took an unlikely chance that set their relationship in motion.

“For the third term course in the first year, you had to make a 16mm documentary and the usual thing for people was stuff on tattoos or red light districts because the film school was so near to Soho,” John recalls. “I decided that I wanted to do something a bit more like a Hollywood profile.

“I knew Ray lived in London at the time, so I got a telephone directory and looked him up. Thankfully, there was only one R. Harryhausen listed so I thought I’d give it a go and ring it, and he answered it - it was crazy.

“I told him who I was and what I wanted to do and he invited me to his very grand Georgian house in Holland Park. We just talked for hours about films and what I wanted to make, and he agreed to it.”

From then on, the pair regularly kept in touch with Ray often congratulating John on his successes in his film career, including his two BAFTA nominations he received for Channel 4’s Don’t Make Me Angry in 2003 and BBC documentary My Life: Karate Kids in 2010.

Eventually, Ray asked John to become a trustee of the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation to help him ‘preserve his legacy and working practices’.

“Ray’s last film was released in 1981,” John explains. “Around the time he stopped working, his type of animation was falling out of favour - people just weren’t doing stop motion back then.

“But now it’s not only come back but it’s come back bigger. Thankfully, he kept pretty much everything he ever made. There’s like 15,000 items in his collection.”

Now, many of those items are going to go on display for the very first time at Waterside Arts in Sale. Opening on October 26, The Lost Worlds of Ray Harryhausen: Creatures, Martians and Myths exhibition will feature a wealth of unseen drawings and stories from the producer’s biggest films, like and Clash of the Titans and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and ones that never made it to the screen, like People of the Mist and Force of the Trojans. There will also be mentions of his work with Manchester animation powerhouse Cosgrove Hall.

“Hopefully this exhibition will have young animators come into it who may not even know who Ray Harryhausen is,” John says. “People will be able to see there’s a bit of legacy with this type of tactile animation where you move something a little bit, film a frame, move it again and film another frame.

“A lot of what will be on display will be test footage, sketches and some models that were all created to show the movie studios what they could expect if they greenlit a project. When Ray was working, studio executives were not that literate when it came to visual effects - you’d have to physically make something to show them what it could look like.”

With so many unrealised projects within Ray’s collection, John says he has a few favourites amongst them which he believes would have made for ‘phenomenal’ movies - including his take on War Of The Worlds and even an early Marvel Comics film project.

“He wanted to make War of the Worlds in the 1950s and it would have been different to the version which George Pal eventually produced,” he explains. “Ray wanted to have the alien invaders on tripod legs, as opposed to flying saucers.

“I really think his vision would have been a box office smash if he’d got to make it. It’s a real shame he never got the rights to it. But Ray actually knew George very well, who also beat Ray to the rights to The Time Machine.

“Stan Lee also asked him to work on an X-Men movie in the 1980s that would have been phenomenal. It would have just so suited his wonderful style. But Ray wouldn’t have been the producer and he was always reluctant to take on projects where he wasn’t fully involved.

“He was a very astute businessman and, as a producer, he was always able to co-own the projects he worked on.”

The exhibition in Sale will kick off with a special screening of Mighty Joe Young - Ray’s first ever film, where he worked as a first technician - alongside a panel discussion with original The Stranglers lead singer Hugh Cornwell on October 24 (tickets here).

Speaking about the event, John says: “Ray did the actual animation of the ape. Hugh is very famous in himself and has come out as a great fan of Ray’s work - he has spoken about how he would come to the cinema and watch these films growing up.”

John says it’s that creativity at the heart of everything Ray did that has been able to keep Ray’s films just as popular today as they were back when they were first released.

Asked what he remembers most about Ray, he says: “Film people are not usually very generous with their time, but Ray was. Through his generosity with time and spirit, this exhibition and the book have both been made possible.”

The Ray Harryhausen: Creatures, Martians and Myths exhibition, which is free to attend, will be at Waterside Arts in Sale from October 26 to January 4 - more details here. John Walsh's book on Ray Harryhausen can be bought here.