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First, a little bit of background information is in order. Begun as the sixth entry in his fairy tale series in 1952, “The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare” was abandoned once Ray Harryhausen realized there was more money in making movie monsters than there was in making short films for schools. Flash forward to 2002, two Harryhausen disciples, Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero, contact the master after hearing about his incomplete film, and ask to finish it for him. Despite this pronounced gap and change in directorial hands, the three men managed to make something charming and seamless.
“The Tortoise and the Hare” is a lively, positively lovely little movie with an adorable array of characters and detailed landscapes. It’s also worth noting that not only did this thing take fifty years to produce, but Harryhausen hadn’t worked on a film in twenty years by this point (Clash of the Titans being his swan song up to this point). For all of the history potentially working against the film, it makes like it’s slower hero and ends up a winner by the end.
Yes, the hare does have a strikingly similar appearance to a certain Looney Tunes brand character, and the fox looks quite a bit like he stepped out of Pinocchio, but no matter. That tortoise is an adorable little thing giving credence to Harryhausen’s defense of stop-motion animation; it’s both a real object and a clearly artificial construct creating a sense of fantasy built into the fabric of the film. The prior completed four minutes and the newly constructed six are indistinguishable from each other, and that is a high compliment. This would prove to be Harryhausen’s last completed work, and it’s nearly poetic how his career began and end with these fairy tale shorts. He was a maker of dreams, a creative genius in his field who inspired countless imaginations with his penchant for soulful terrors and frights. It’s nice to see a creator return to his gentler roots to say good-bye.
