The 92-year-old Harryhausen, the legendary American film-maker of movies about legends, became hooked on stop-motion animation when he saw King Kong at the age of 13. After a sort of apprenticeship to its special effects designer, Willis O'Brien, he became the greatest figure in the business, working first in Hollywood on pictures like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and then in Britain since the late 1950s on such films as Jason and the Argonauts, which features the classic swordfight between the Greek adventurers and seven skeletons.

A modest, amusing, articulate man, Harryhausen is the animator as auteur, a craftsman and artist of genius, whose work is superbly illustrated in this riveting film by a French movie historian and rightly celebrated by a roster of distinguished admirers, among them Steven Spielberg, Terry Gilliam, Nick Park, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton. A continual delight.