Harryhausen's Munchausen (1950)

 


We think of Ray Harryhausen as a model-maker, animator and film-maker, which of course he was. But he was also an artist. Here is a watercolour sketch he produced for his planned film of The Adventures in Baron Munchausen, from late 1949 or 1950. In the event the movie was never made, but the designs, paintings and models Harryhausen created remain. The above is a fine image in its own right, owing something compositionally to Caspar David Friedrich's Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, 1818), although all fog has been blown-away from Harryhausen's scene—even the Earth, looming larger-than-life and displaying the Americas, is entirely cloud-free—and the Baron stands on his barren eminence, looking across the unobscured lunar wilderness. A breeze appears to be blowing his coattails back. Another sketch sees the Baron fleeing, on a penny farthing bicycle, across the same landscape, pursued by a giant three-headed eagle.


The monstrous eagle is in the original story; the penny farthing is not. John Walsh's Harryhausen: The Lost Movies (Titan Books 2019) discusses the unmade film. Here is Harryhausen's model of the Baron himself.


He modelled his Baron on Gustave Doré's edition of Les Aventures du Baron de Münchausen (1862). ‘Gustave Doré, it has always seemed to me,’ Harryhausen said, ‘was a motion-picture art director born before his time. In the early days of film production his influence on many directors, certainly on art directors, was immense. The director Cecil B. DeMille was so impressed by Doré that he borrowed groupings from Doré’s biblical images for use in several of his films.’ Harryhausen's unmade movie would have been a Doréan work; and Terry Gilliam's completed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) followed in the same visual tradition.




The ‘actual’ Baron Munchausen—that is, Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen, a Hanoverian aristocrat and soldier, who had a reputation for telling tall tales, some of which were written up by Rudolf Erich Raspe as The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen in the 1780s—looked like this:


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