Plagiarized (anyone who’s anyone’s doing it!) from Wikipedia – Mighty Joe Young won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects (a category that did not exist in 1933 for King Kong); the only other nominee that year was the film Tulsa. At the time, the rules of the Academy dictated that the producer of the winning film receive the Oscar. However, in recognition of his work on this picture and on King Kong, producer Merian C. Cooper presented the award to Willis O’Brien.

Ray Harryhausen was hired in 1947 on his first film assignment as an assistant animator to O’Brien. O’Brien, however, ended up concentrating on solving the various technical problems of the production, delegating most of the actual animation to Harryhausen; Pete Peterson and Marcel Delgado also animated a few sequences in the film.