After graduating from UCLA Film School in a ‘golden age’ for this renowned creative factory, he approached Bob Clampett for a job. In those days there was no great library of animation textbooks and he learnt by trial and error. Randys first stop motion efforts in clay were of a ‘Great Mummy’ (as he says ‘not just any old mummy but a great one’) which ‘went nuts and killed people’. Randy Cook had his work cut out and besides he was still only eight years old!!! Harryhausen had a great eye for design and for compositing his vision next to the live action sequences. The difficulty was that Harryhausen had a very supportive Producer and had worked out a matting process that allowed for the gruelling process of stop motion to be produced in a better and cheaper way than Hollywood had hitherto seen. To an eight year old Randy Cook, watching these cinematic miracles he knew this was the way he wanted to go and he ‘foolishly hoped to emulate Harryhausen’. Instead Harryhausen, particularly in the influential ‘Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’, used a fully animated Cyclops and a sword wielding skeleton. Or else they were represented, in the eyes of a young Randy Cook, by the ‘recognisably and disappointingly human’. In the 1950s fantasy creatures in feature films had normally been portrayed by blowing up insects (in the film sense!). Randys animated history is an encapsulation of the recent history of animation itself.Īt an early age as a precocious kid in California, Randy was ‘lucky’ to encounter the work of Ray Harryhausen. He is also the animation genius who breathed life into the Gollum character from Lord of the Rings. Randy Cook is that rarest of creatures, he is a triple Oscar winner.
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