The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

Chris and Alex return once more to the pioneering work of stop-motion animator and effects artist Ray Harryhausen, this time looking at his 1973 fantasy film collaboration with director Gordon Hessler, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. For Episode 80, the focus is on the quasi-parasitic relationship between live-action and animation filmmaking, and the spectatorial fantasy engendered and invited by each form of moving image technology. Topics include psychoanalytic film theory and the ‘internal object’; the ontological integration of Harryhausen’s ‘Dynarama’ effects with the fantasy of location shooting; animation discourse and the problem of essentialist understandings of medium specificity; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’s orientalist imaginary and problematic constructions of race; the materiality of stop-motion, and the ‘weighty’ qualities to the film’s army of mythical homunculi; and the big-screen trend of casting ‘animators’ as villains in their control and manipulation of suddenly sentient fictional worlds.