Through the process of “Dynamation,” placing small plastic models in the same frame as the actors with painstaking stop-motion photography, Ray Harryhausen brings to life - down to the shadows they cast! - the Cyclops, the Dragon, the Two-Headed Bird, and other mythical monsters in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Sinbad meets them all on the island of Colossa in his attempt to save a princess, his good-natured companion (hilariously played by Kathryn Grant (later Crosby)), from the clutches of the wicked magician who has already shrunk her to a height of five inches! Set against brilliant backdrops filmed in Spain on the Costa Brava, Granada, Majorca and around Madrid, with pick-up shots (including the interior of the magic lantern) done in Hollywood and traveling mattes in London, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad is what Harryhausen calls “a truly international picture.”
Harryhausen notes, “The skeleton fight was the most talked about sequence of the picture. Bernard Herrmann contributed an outstanding ‘castanet concerto' that helped push the sword fight into classic dimensions. His score for the rest of the picture was just as startling and original. An exceptional musical accompaniment is a ‘must' for a film of fantasy....” --in Harryhausen, “Film Fantasy Scrapbook”