The death of Ray Harryhausen, earlier this week in London, was, perhaps, more robustly noticed than is often the case for nonagenarian special-effects men whose work was largely confined to B and even C pictures, most of them made more than half a century ago. You know Harryhausen’s work, even if you don’t know his name: he was the artist behind the stop-action, puppet-animated horror and gladiator and adventure movies that passed, in those years, from neighborhood movie houses to “The Late Show” without ever having had a single chic moment. From the late fifties through the mid-seventies, he made “The 3 Worlds of Gulliver,” “One Million Years B.C.,” “Mysterious Island,” “First Men in the Moon,” “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,” and “Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.” His masterpiece, or most ambitious film, anyway, was the first “Clash of the Titans,” which came out in 1981, never to be confused with its twenty-first-century remake.

Harryhausen used a standard technique, pioneered, if not invented, by Willis O’Brien, the guy who made the ape in “King Kong”: articulated “ball-and-socket” miniature models, animated through an achingly slow and painstaking frame-by-frame process, with the intricately choreographed result then laid in alongside live-action actors. The Baghdad sets of Harryhausen’s “Sinbad” movies seem to have been borrowed directly from Abbott and Costello’s “Lost in a Harem”; he worked within budgets so small that even elaborate effects often had to be achieved in a single take. The puppet action in his movies was not only almost always more interesting than the live action; the puppets were generally better actors than the ones in turbans and swords and sandals. Who now recalls that it was Kerwin Mathews who portrayed Sinbad on those voyages (though a buff or two, and not merely a buff, might recall that no less, or other, than Bernard Herrmann wrote the score)? Though who—at least among those who saw her at an impressionable age—can forget the snake woman who emerges, Play-Doh body writhing serpentinely, before the Sultan’s court—and is met by carefully directed gazes of awe and wonder and cries of “Allah, be praised!” on the part of extras who are, rather obviously, looking at nothing.

What was odd about Harryhausen’s work was that it was obviously “fake,” fabricated—even in its heyday, its invented, articulated falseness was as evident as it was bemusing. One wasn’t convinced by his skeleton warriors; one was amazed by them, a different thing. His sword-fighting skeletons didn’t look like skeletons come to life; they looked like models of skeletons, painstakingly animated. And yet something about that truth spoke to some part of us deeper than the merely deluded eye—so that it is the rare lover of fantasy who does not much prefer Harryhausen’s “Clash of the Titans” to the elaborate C.G.I. remake. Indeed, in the many obituaries he received this week, a good number of people, and not all of them oldsters moved by nostalgia, made the case, or registered the feeling, that something in Harryhausen’s work, for all its obvious effort, was better than anything of the kind that came after. Tom Hanks, George Lucas—so many spoke up, or had spoken up before, about how mind-altering and enthralling Harryhausen’s underpowered and underfinanced spectacles remain.

There are, one might say, two theories that attempt to explain the spell his movies still cast despite their obvious deficiencies as illusions. One, which one might call the Whig version of F/X history, is that, though long surpassed by Star Wars-style miniatures, and then by C.G.I., they did look persuasive in their day, and we honor them, so to speak, as we honor ancient Roman orators: we’re not persuaded now, but we’re impressed by the persuasiveness they once possessed. The trouble is that we don’t really appreciate Harryhausen’s movies archivally, any more than we appreciate Georges Méliès’s silent magic archivally; we appreciate them poetically, not for what they did given what they didn’t have, but for what they did with what they did have. We genuinely like them more than things we know are better at doing what they seemed to set out to do.

Why do we? Well, here we enter into territory of speculation, some of it misty, about the nature of illusion that the postmodern mind seems to glom onto—a territory that I, at least, have written about a couple of times before. Some magicians, for instance, refer to the “perfect-trick” theory, in order to explain why a trick perfectly performed and seamlessly achieved can be less affecting—indeed, not affecting at all—compared to one whose deliberately ragged edges in performance open doors to speculation and uncertainty. They supply the edge of doubt that makes us guess. Delight in illusion honors the verbs of accomplishment, not the objects of achievement. Provoked speculation—“How’d he do that?”—gives more pleasure than glutted appetite: “Oh. Now they did that.”

We love Harryhausen, as we do Méliès, in part because his tricks are so plainly imperfect: even if we know just how they’re done, we relish the ingenuity, the labor that went into doing it. Our delight registers our implicit knowledge of difficulty. Even if we can be shown a forty-foot gorilla that sways and moves as giant gorillas really might, we enjoy one that shakes and trembles from frame to frame—because what we really value, and commune with, is not the thing made but the mind and hand of the hidden maker. We admire the dedication of the magician, or special-effects man, as much as his ability to fool us.

For, deeper still, in some primal part of us, there is always a vital role for the not-too-perfect in our pleasures. Imperfection is essential to art. In music, the vibrato we love involves not quite landing directly on the note; the rubato singers cultivate involves not quite keeping to the beat. What really moves us in art may be what really moves us in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”: the vital sign of a human hand, in all its broken and just-unsteady grace, manipulating its keys, or puppets, and our minds. Expressiveness is imperfection, and Harryhausen’s monsters and ghouls are expressively imperfect. “I don’t think you want to make it quite real. Stop-motion, to me, gives that added value of a dream world,” he once said, wisely, himself.

For, after all, fable and myth and fairy tale will always reach us first in the form of bedtime stories—with the parental hemming and hawing, searching for the next bit, as much part of the effect as the tale told. Scheherazade, when she first told the story of Sinbad to that ill-tempered suit of a Sultan, doubtless told it in Harryhausen stop-action, not in C.G.I.—bit by bit, in bursts of invention, not as a seamless unspooling of a mechanically fixed tale. The Sultan admired her for her effort, as we do Ray Harryhausen for his, and rewarded her, as we do him, with love.

Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty.