Jason and The Argonauts, 1963 – Don Chaffey


This was one I watched with my dad when I was a kid when I was five I guess. We always used to play the parts; the god Talos (which is the big bronze man in the film) was played by my dad and I would be Jason.

  As a piece of cinema that Ray Harryhausen did, as the animator, it was a time when stop-motion animation was utterly acceptable to us as a proxy for fantasy – it wasn't like “oh it doesn't look very real” – it didn't matter that it wasn’t real, the fact was Harryhausen just masterfully animated these things, put them in, it looked like a special effect but you bought it and you loved it because of that. In a way, I feel like the sheer precision of CG – and this isn't to decry CG because I'm a big fan of it – but because it can give us absolutely anything very, very realistically, we have to suspend our disbelief less and less and I think it's good for us to suspend that disbelief more often than we do now.  

When I show my daughter stuff, it is really interesting to watch her and how she responds to old special effects...if the story is good, they don't mind. It’s when there are holes in the actual storytelling they start to see the cracks in the special effects.