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THE 3 WORLDS OF GULLIVER is the most political of all the Harryhausen films. It was also the first film that didn't rely heavily on stop-motion effects to move the story along. A new system, called the sodium-light process had been developed by the Arthur Rank Organization and this involved a yellow background instead of the standard blue-screen process for rear projection. This new process eliminated much of the black outline around the foreground characters that was typical with the blue-screen process.

The blue screen process had the actor stand in front of a large blue screen while the action was filmed. Using mattes made of the negative of that film, the background was then filmed and optically added to the blue screen sequence. This process, while adequate, had to be aligned just right or images would spill over to one another and often left the blue-screen image with a black outline around it. The Arthur Rank Organization developed the sodium process in 1956 and this new process eliminated the need for created mattes. The Rank Organization also owned the exclusive rights to the process, having only liscenced it out to Disney. After securing permission, Harryhausen began using this process for Gulliver.

Though budgeted between 2 1/2 to 3 million, even this new process would still push the budget for Gulliver way over so Harryhausen decided on using forced perspective. In this process Kerwin Matthews would be filmed close to the camera with the surrounding elements of the shot placed at a distance. Exact camera angles and precision acting was required to pull this off, but it is done extremely successful in this film. Kerwin Matthews recalled that he suggested the idea to Harryhausen, who quickly pulled out a slide-rule and figured out the possibilities on the spot. While Ray concedes that Kerwin may have approached him with the idea, the use of forced-perspective was already decided upon to help trim the budget back down to size-as well as the Liliputians.

Ray's talent at stop-motion was used for two sequence involved a squirrel and an alligator. For the sequence with the squirrel, Ray designed an armature and taxidermist, Arthur Hayward, was brought in to fit the armature over the skin of a real squirrel. For this sequence Ray also experimented with mattes. He would shoot one frame of the creature against a black screen, the lighting on the creature was then dimmed to shoot another frame creating it's own matte. Ray found this process to tedious and unnecessary and returned to his rear-projection process known as DYNAMATION for the second sequence.

The only dissapointing aspect of the second sequence is that is much to short. For this sequence Gulliver must do battle with an alligator. To add realism to this sequence Ray added large-scale props to the action that Gulliver/Kerwin Matthews would pass in front of adding realism to the sequence. Once  again Kerwin Matthews would wield sword and shield against an impossible adversary, as he had done previously in THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD. The action on this sequence flows beautifully and is pulled off with such realism that one hardly realizes this is a special effect truly creating the suspension of disbelief .

The film was released in November in England and then one month later in the US. It was another financial success for the team of Schneer and Harryhausen who had already begun work on his next project based on a work by Jules Verne. MYSTERIOUS ISLAND would prove to be his most ambitious project to date.