Ray Harryhausen seems genuinely surprised - a little put-out, even - when I tell him that the classic sequence he animated in the 1963 classic Jason and the Argonauts, in which the seven skeletons spring from the sown dragon's teeth used to frighten me to death when I was little.

"But why?" he says, a sharp twinkle in his eye. "What's so scary about skeletons? You have one inside you."

I tell him that the skeleton inside me isn't prone to attacking me with a sword and he laughs.

When the T&A photographer Mike wanders over and offers his own childhood shudders at the deadly bones.

"Perhaps it was a bit scary, " concedes Harryhausen. "In fact, when the film was first shown in the UK, the censors cut out that entire sequence."

Harryhausen is in Bradford for the launch of an exhibition at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. The exhibition, which is free to view and open until September, features the original models of some of his best monsters from creature features such as the Golden Voyage of Sinbad (including the many armed Kali, left), Clash of the Titans, Valley of the Gwangi and a host of characters from Bank Holiday staples.

Harryhausen turns 86 next month, but is as sharp as one of Kali's evil-looking scimitars and - astonishingly, given a lifetime spent making models and then animating them in painstaking stop-motion movement - has only just been fitted with his first pair of glasses.

Harryhausen, who came to London to shoot a film in the Sixties and never went back to his native USA, had his imagination fired by the original King Kong movie in 1933, when he was just 13. Despite his father having a friend at RKO studios, Hollywood in those days was a closed shop so the young Ray set about teaching himself the techniques of stop-motion animation and soon earned his big break working on a series of animated shorts called Puppetoons for the celebrated producer George Pal.

Once he had a foothold in the industry he was able to meet his hero, King Kong animator Willis O'Brien, who invited Harryhausen to work on another big monkey picture - Mighty Joe Young.

Of course, movie special effects technology has moved on in leaps and bounds since then, the biggest change being the introduction of computer generated imagery, or CGI, in the past decade.

Harryhausen is obviously used to having his opinion on CGI elicited, and he has grown diplomatic about current on-screen technical wizardry.

"It's a wonderful tool, " he says, "but it isn't the be all and end all of special effects."

In fact, he's a little worried that audiences are so bombarded by big-screen magic that they become a little desensitised to the wonders of celluloid.

"There's more money spent on a 30 second TV advert than I ever had to spend in a whole movie, " he says.

"But I think that working with a low budget makes you more creative. You have to think about how to overcome the problems and you spend more time on telling the story."

Today, movies employ whole teams of special effects technicians to produce a single sequence. Harryhausen worked largely alone, and the time and work involved in clips such as the animated skeletons meant that he mostly had once chance to get it right.

Despite his view that we're becoming harder and harder to impress, Harryhausen still believes that cinema can work magic on us.

He speaks fondly of the productions he has worked on, likening the studios of the Golden Age of Hollywood to the alchemist's cauldron, in which the talents of directors, actors and technicians were mixed and merged and a concoction of pure wonder resulted.

Jason and the Argonauts was famously passed up for an Academy Award. Is Harryhausen saddened his movies never got the recognition he would have liked?

"They called what we did B pictures at the time, " he says. "But they've lasted longer than a lot of the so-called A pictures which were around.

"I get fan letters from young people who say they love my films more than the modern ones, which is very gratifying."

With a new coffee table book out co-written with Tony Dalton, The Art of Ray Harryhausen (available at the NMPFT shop) and the exhibition of his work set to draw thousands, Ray Harryhausen is enjoying his continuing time in the limelight. In fact, with that twinkle in his eye and a veritable spring in his (albeit caneassisted) step, one might even say that he was quite animated. . .