This morning I started Ray Bradbury’s “Dinosaur Tales” as the first book I wanted to read in the new year. It is actually a collection of several stories.
Even though I have read a lot of his work and adopted his mentality, he still surprises me every time. He wanted to write about dinosaurs, the thing that fascinated him most as a child (which many of us researched and read excitedly in encyclopaedias). He devoted some time to them at certain times and ended up with some interesting stories, but I haven’t read them all yet.
I think the attraction of the work is that it deals with a main factor such as dinosaurs, which at first glance is not very unusual. Dinosaurs are usually the most fantastic-looking real-life creatures that peak our interest as children. But after a certain point, their impact fades almost immediately.
Nevertheless, it seems wonderful to me that an adult can take this seemingly childish subject and write stories about it, and that he can do it in all seriousness and manage to make the story exciting. You can say: “Here is a real writer.”
Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash
On the other hand, the preface is written by a friend of his. His name is Ray as well and the only thing they have in common is dinosaurs. One loves to write, the other wants to bring them to the cinema and works on producing stop-motion animations. Over time, they become a very close duo and both are able to achieve their goals.
Today, while I was spending some time on watching videos, some of the videos I had saved to watch later came back on the screen. Suddenly a name caught my eye, but I thought I was mistaken because you know how words you haven’t seen for a long time or words you’ve seen for the first time sometimes catch your eye during the day.
But it was no illusion, the name I saw was Ray Harryhausen. I mean Harryhausen, Bradbury’s friend. I remember it was a video I had saved years ago, and the video itself was uploaded ten years ago. I thought this was the best day to do it, and I finally gave the almost 40-minute video a chance.
He was one of the masters of this kind of work. As I didn’t have much interest or knowledge of this kind of art, I had no idea who was doing what. It was made as a documentary and included other names working in this art form.
Everyone said he was the best, the most famous and the most admired in his field. We are talking about someone who was born in 1920, and in the years he worked, this technology and this working style were just beginning to emerge. When you consider that we are talking about the pioneering work of computer animation, which ushered in an era in cinema, it is not hard to see how difficult a task he overcame.
Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, James Cameron, George Lucas, Wes Anderson, Peter Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro are some of the most famous names in their genres who have been influenced by Ray Harryhausen. So we can see that the praise he has received is not out of place.
Photo by Krzysztof Maksimiuk on Unsplash
I find it very interesting that both Ray and Ray, like two children who were interested in dinosaurs when they were young, went their separate ways and worked together when necessary. A single dinosaur opens doors for one of them to become one of the best animators in cinema and for the other to write the stories he always wanted to write.
I think the most important thing is to find like-minded people. Even if their aspirations and skills can find common ground, they have their own creations. But the theme that brings them together for a pleasant conversation is one. Two creative people who inspire each other and develop in such a way that their names will be engraved in history in two different places.
That’s right, we need people in our lives who don’t drag us down and who can contribute something of themselves. Of course, we should not forget that we have to give something in return.
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