After leaving the army in 1945, Ray Harryhausen was looking for new ideas and approaches to animation after his experiences during the war working for the Special Service Division and later Frank Capra's Why We Fight series (he worked on the traveling mattes that linked archival footage together in the Capra documentaries). Using the remainder of his army pay, he set up shop in his own Los Angeles garage studio with lighting equipment and his Cine II camera with its single frame and backwinding functions. Utilizing almost a thousand feet of outdated Kodachrome 16mm color film stock he had retrieved from the Navy years earlier, he decided to experiment with stop-motion model animation and for a subject he picked something simple yet universally appealing. The result was what came to be known as the Mother Goose Stories, consisting of four fables: "Little Miss Muffet," "Old Mother Hubbard," "The Queen of Hearts," and "Humpty Dumpty."

In his autobiography, Ray Harryhausen, co-written with Tony Dalton, the animator described his process for the Mother Goose Stories: "Using models approximately 8 inches in height, I developed a special technique for filming the stories which I ambitiously called Trimentional Multiplane Animation. I had wanted to avoid the George Pal method of constructing fifty heads for every expression and vowel, so I simply did away with dialogue and lip-synchronization and opted for title cards instead. Yet I still needed expressions on the models so I made one head showing a neutral expression and then a short series of heads with extreme expressions all carved from the original neutral expression. Using quick eight-frame, in-camera dissolves from one head to the other, which nobody had done until now, I succeeded in attaining a flexibility that enabled me to instill some essence of character into the models. In all, it took me about four or five months to complete all four stories, taking eight weeks to produce 400 feet of colour 16mm film, with a soundtrack that used synchronized music cues."

Mother Goose Stories was truly a family affair for Harryhausen. His father assisted in the construction of the models and sets while Ray's mother designed the costumes and draperies for the set pieces. Harryhausen even toyed with the idea of creating "professional" names for his crew and eventually settled on credits that listed his father as Fred Blasauf (the last name was taken from his mother's maiden name) and his mother as Martha Reske (her real maiden name). In the end, Mother Goose Stories was a true labor of love and the fun of creating it encouraged Harryhausen to tackle a more ambitious version of it for his Fairy Tales series.

The Academy Film Archive was responsible for the restoration of Mother Goose Stories and in their DVD presentation of the films preservationist Mark Toscano noted that "Mother Goose Stories existed in its entirety only as a 1970s internegative made from the original. In order to minimize loss of picture quality and to better enable the films to be shown theatrically, these master elements were blown up to 35mm by the New York lab, Cineric, Inc."

Producer/Director/Animator: Ray Harryhausen
C-11m.

by Jeff Stafford