When Ray Harryhausen first began to sketch the fantastic creatures he would later bring to jerky stop-motion life as one of the pioneers of movie animation, he never dreamed that one day he would be sitting in the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, surrounded by more than half a century of celluloid history.

Harryhausen, 86 next month, is the special effects guru who has thrilled generations of film fans with his wonderful creations.

Top of his CV are the deadly-eyed Medusa and the sea-soaked Kraken from Clash of the Titans; six-armed, sword-wielding dark goddess Kali from the Golden Voyage of Sinbad and, of course, the seven animated skeletons who made Jason and the Argonauts' day a little more complicated in the 1963 film of the same name.

Now the NMPFT is beginning a four-month exhibition of Harryhausen's work, featuring the original models that he animated by the painstaking stop-motion technique - taking a single cell of film of a fantastic beast, moving it a tiny distance, filming it again, moving again, and so on until the finished film appeared to show the monster moving and alive.

Harryhausen has lived in London since he came to shoot a movie on location more than 40 years ago and decided he liked it so much he wouldn't bother going back to the States.

Despite his currently "living legend" status, he was always a solitary worker, spending hours poring over his figures and creating sequences such as the giant man of bronze, Talos, creaking into life to attack the Argonauts.

"The 1950s was at the tail end of the golden age of Hollywood and, while I did spend a lot of time around the studios and met a lot of the actors, my job was essentially spent working alone.

These days, of course, they have a whole team of people doing special effects, " he said.

The exhibition consists of many of his monsters, dinosaurs and creatures from mythology, rendered in minuscule detail, plus his sketches and drawings for some of the movies he made - and some that he didn't.

One series of drawings on the walls details Harryhausen's ideas for a movie of HG Wells's War of the Worlds.

He recalled: "No-one wanted to invest in it. Of course, they made it recently with Tom Cruise.

My story would have stayed truer to the source material and I would have kept it in England."

Another recent remake that had resonance with Harryhausen was Peter Jackson's King Kong. It was the original King Kong, in 1933, which set Harryhausen off chasing his dream to be an animator.

Jackson has publicly acknowledged the debt he owes to the original and even provides a foreword to a new book called the Art of Ray Harryhausen, written by Ray and Tony Dalton and published by Aurum Press.

Technology in movies has moved on a tremendous amount since Harryhausen's day and he commented: "I wish I could have had the budget for my movies that they spend on a single 30-second advertisement these days."

He's philosophical about the explosion of computer-generated imagery, or CGI, which dominates today's action flicks.

He said: "CGI is a wonderful tool but its not the be all and end all."

Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton will be signing copies of their book in the NMPFT shop today between 2-3pm, while the exhibition, Myths and Visions - the Art of Ray Harryhausen, opens tomorrow and runs until September 24. Admission is free.

See Saturday's Telegraph & Argus for an indepth interview with animation legend Ray Harryhausen.

FILMS FILE Some of Ray Harryhausen's best: It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955) 20 Million Miles To Earth (1957) Mysterious Island (1961) Jason and the Argonauts (1963) One Million Years BC (1966) The Valley of the Gwangi (1969) The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) Clash of the Titans (1981)