The first stop-motion film to receive wide-scale appreciation baffled audiences in 1907 with a table setting itself, devoid of visible wires or tricks. J. Stuart Blackton's The Haunted Hotel, released on the 23rd of February 1907, marked a pivotal moment where the illusion of life was granted to inanimate objects, creating a sensation that rippled through the early film industry. Before this, the concept of moving objects frame by frame existed only in theoretical experiments or crude mechanical toys like the zoetrope. Blackton's work, which combined live-action with practical special effects and a puppet, proved that objects could exhibit independent motion when manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames. This technique, now known as stop motion, relies on the physical manipulation of puppets, models, or clay figures built around an armature to create the illusion of movement. The mystery of the magic tricks was kept secret by filmmakers to prevent competitors from using the techniques and to maintain audience interest in the illusion. The principles of animation were often hidden, and whether any scene was created with stop-motion techniques remains unclear in many extant descriptions of lost silent films. The oldest known example of the stop trick, a precursor to stop motion, was used for the beheading in Edison Manufacturing Company's 1895 film The Execution of Mary Stuart, where the camera was temporarily stopped during the recording of a scene to create a sudden change. This technique of repeatedly applying the stop trick formed the foundation of stop motion animation, allowing filmmakers to create changes that were logically absent or replaced with a fake cause suggested in the scene.
Pioneers of the Silent Era
Before celluloid film base was established in 1888, animation could only be presented via mechanisms such as the zoetrope, but the seeds of stop motion were sown in the late 19th century. In 1849, Joseph Plateau published a note about improvements for his Fantascope, suggesting that a combination of the fantascope and Charles Wheatstone's stereoscope could advance the illusion further. Plateau believed that constructing a sequential set of stereoscopic image pairs would be the more difficult part of the plan, yet he concluded that 16 plaster models with 16 regular modifications would be worth the time and careful effort. The plan was never executed, possibly because Plateau was almost completely blind by this time. In 1852, Jules Duboscq patented a stroboscopic disc that contained stereoscopic photograph pairs of different phases of the motion of a machine, which had to be assembled from separate photographs due to long exposure times. By 1874, Étienne-Jules Marey created a large zoetrope with a series of plaster models based on his chronophotographs of birds in flight, demonstrating that suitable stereoscopic photographs could be made by recording a series of models. The Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón, often compared to Georges Méliès, made many trick films in France for Pathé, including La maison ensorcelée in December 1907, which featured stop-motion-animated cutlery and food. Chomón's work, along with that of Edwin S. Porter and Wallace McCutcheon Sr., who released The Sculptor's Nightmare on the 6th of May 1908, demonstrated that heaps of clay could mold itself into detailed sculptures capable of minor movements. These early pioneers, including Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, whose Matches: an Appeal was produced in 1899, laid the groundwork for a technique that would evolve from simple tricks to complex narratives. The principles of animation and other special effects were mostly kept secret, not only to prevent use of such techniques by competitors but also to keep audiences interested in the mystery of the magic tricks. The oldest known example of the stop trick was used for the beheading in Edison Manufacturing Company's 1895 film The Execution of Mary Stuart, where the camera was temporarily stopped during the recording of a scene to create a sudden change.
Willis O'Brien's expressive and emotionally convincing animation of the big ape in King Kong, released in 1933, is widely regarded as a milestone in stop-motion animation and a highlight of Hollywood cinema in general. O'Brien, who learned under O'Brien on the film Mighty Joe Young in 1949, went on to create many memorable stop-motion effects for a string of successful fantasy films over the next three decades. These included The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953, It Came from Beneath the Sea in 1955, Jason and the Argonauts in 1963, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in 1973, and Clash of the Titans in 1981. O'Brien's work was recognized as a technique to create lifelike creatures for adventure films, and he further pioneered the technique with animated dinosaur sequences for the live-action feature The Lost World in 1925. The collaborative film The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, released in 1918, combined live-action with animated dinosaur models in a 45-minute film, but after the premiere it was cut down to approximately 12 minutes. Producer Herbert M. Dawley did not give O'Brien credits for the visual effects, and instead claimed the animation process as his own invention and even applied for patents. Despite this, O'Brien's stop motion work was recognized as a technique to create lifelike creatures for adventure films. The Soviet stop motion-animated cartoon The New Gulliver, released in 1935, made an extensive use of puppet animation, running almost all the way through the film. The film was released to widespread acclaim and earned director Aleksandr Ptushko a special prize at the International Cinema Festival in Milan. The first British animated feature was the stop motion instruction film Handling Ships in 1945 by Halas and Batchelor for the British Admiralty, which was not meant for general cinemas but did become part of the official selection of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. The first Belgian animated feature was an adaptation of the Tintin comic The Crab with the Golden Claws in 1947 with animated puppets. The first Czech animated feature was the package film The Czech Year in 1947 with animated puppets by Jiří Trnka, which won several awards at the Venice Film Festival and other international festivals.
Claymation and the Rise of Television
In 1955, Karel Zeman made his first feature film Journey to the Beginning of Time inspired by Jules Verne, featuring stop-motion animation of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Art Clokey started his adventures in clay with a freeform clay short film called Gumbasia in 1955, which shortly thereafter propelled him into the production of his more structured TV series Gumby, which ran from 1955 to 1989. In partnership with the United Lutheran Church in America, he also produced Davey and Goliath, which ran from 1960 to 2004. The theatrical feature Gumby: The Movie, released in 1995, was a box-office bomb. In Hungary, Hungarian, French puppet designer and animated film director, Éva Balla-Falus, began her series of 6 animated films with various collaborators, including Megy a juhász szamáron in 1948, and Vitamin ABC in 1950. On the 22nd of November 1959, the first episode of Unser Sandmänchen was broadcast on DFF, a 10-minute daily bedtime show for young children that features the title character as an animated puppet. A very similar Sandmänchen series, possibly conceived earlier, ran on West German television from the 1st of December 1959 until the German reunification in 1989. The East German show was continued on other German networks when DFF ended in 1991, and is one of the longest running animated series in the world. The theatrical feature Das Sandmännchen , Abenteuer im Traumland, released in 2010, was fully animated with stop-motion puppets. In the 1960s and 1970s, independent clay animator Eliot Noyes Jr. refined the technique of free-form clay animation with his Oscar-nominated 1965 film Clay, or the Origin of Species. Noyes also used stop motion to animate sand lying on glass for his musical animated film Sandman in 1975. Italian director Francesco Misseri created the clay animation TV series Mio Mao, which ran from 1970 to 1976, and The Red and the Blue, which ran from 1976 to 2002, 2007. The British artists Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall produced two stop-motion animated adaptions of Enid Blyton's Noddy book series, including the original series of the same name from 1975 to 1982 and Noddy's Toyland Adventures from 1992 to 2001. They also produced a documentary of their production techniques, Making Frog and Toad. In 1975, filmmaker and clay animation experimenter Will Vinton joined with sculptor Bob Gardiner to create an experimental film called Closed Mondays, which became the first stop-motion film to win an Oscar. Will Vinton followed with several other successful short film experiments including The Great Cognito, The Creation, and Rip Van Winkle, which were each nominated for Academy Awards. In 1977, Vinton made a documentary about this process and his style of animation which he dubbed claymation, and soon after this documentary, the term was trademarked by Vinton to differentiate his team's work from others who had been, or were beginning to do, clay animation. While the word has stuck and is often used to describe clay animation and stop motion, it remains a trademark owned currently by Laika Entertainment, Inc. Twenty clay-animation episodes featuring the clown Mr. Bill were a feature of Saturday Night Live, starting from a first appearance in February 1976.
The Modern Masters and Global Reach
In the 1970s and 1980s, Industrial Light & Magic often used stop-motion model animation in such films as the original Star Wars trilogy, including the holochess sequence in Star Wars, the Tauntauns and AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, and the AT-ST walkers in Return of the Jedi. These were all filmed using stop-motion animation, with the latter two films utilizing go motion, an invention from renowned visual effects veteran Phil Tippett. The many shots including the ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Dragon in Dragonslayer, and the first two feature films in the RoboCop series use Tippett's go motion. In the UK, Aardman Animations continued to grow, with Channel 4 funding a new series of clay animated films, Conversation Pieces, using recorded soundtracks of real people talking. A further series in 1986, called Lip Sync, premiered the work of Richard Goleszowski, Barry Purves, and Nick Park. Creature Comforts won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1990. In 1986, they also produced a notable music video for Sledgehammer, a song by Peter Gabriel. In 1980, Marc Paul Chinoy directed the first feature-length clay animated film, based on the famous Pogo comic strip, titled I go Pogo. It was aired a few times on American cable channels but has yet to be commercially released. Stop motion was also used for some shots of the final sequence of the first Terminator movie, also for the scenes of the small alien ships in Spielberg's Batteries Not Included in 1987, animated by David W. Allen. Allen's stop motion work can also be seen in such feature films as The Crater Lake Monster in 1977, Q - The Winged Serpent in 1982, The Gate in 1987 and Freaked in 1993. Allen's King Kong Volkswagen commercial from the 1970s is now legendary among model animation enthusiasts. In 1985, Will Vinton and his team released an ambitious feature film in stop motion called The Adventures Of Mark Twain, based on the life and works of the famous American author. While the film may have been a little sophisticated for young audiences at the time, it got rave reviews from critics and adults in general. Vinton's team also created the Nomes and the Nome King for Disney's Return to Oz, for which they received an Academy Award Nomination for Special Visual Effects. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Will Vinton became very well known for his commercial work as well with stop motion campaigns including The California Raisins and The Noid. Jiří Barta released his award-winning fantasy film The Pied Piper in 1986. From 1986 to 1991, Churchill Films produced The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Runaway Ralph, and Ralph S. Mouse for ABC television. The shows featured stop-motion characters combined with live action, based on the books of Beverly Cleary. John Clark Matthews was the animation director, with Justin Kohn, Joel Fletcher, and Gail Van Der Merwe providing character animation. The company also produced other films based on children's books. From 1986 to 2000, over 150 five-minute episodes of Pingu, a Swiss children's comedy, were produced by Trickfilmstudio. In 1989, Park introduced his very popular clay characters Wallace and Gromit in A Grand Day Out. Three more short films and two feature films, and multiple spin-offs would follow. Among many other awards, Park won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the feature-length outing Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Park also worked on the Chicken Run movie, which was another film from Aardman Animations.
The Digital Renaissance and New Frontiers
In 1992, Trey Parker and Matt Stone made The Spirit of Christmas, a short cutout animated student film made with construction paper. In 1995 they made a second short with the same titled, commissioned as a Christmas greeting by Fox Broadcasting Company executive Brian Graden. The concepts and characters were further developed into the TV hit series South Park, which has been running since 1997. Except for the pilot, all animation has been created on computers in the same style. The Nightmare Before Christmas, released in 1993, directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton, was one of the more widely released stop-motion features and became the highest grossing stop-motion animated movie of its time, grossing over $50 million domestic. Henry Selick also went on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, and Tim Burton went on to direct Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie. The stop-motion feature The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb was released in 1993. In November 1998, the first episode of Bob the Builder was released on BBC. Bob the Builder was a popular British stop-motion television series created by Keith Chapman and produced and owned by HIT Entertainment. In 1999, Will Vinton launched the first US prime-time stop-motion television series called The PJs, co-created by actor-comedian Eddie Murphy. The Emmy-winning sitcom aired on Fox for two seasons, then moved to the WB for an additional season. Vinton launched another series, Gary & Mike, for UPN in 2001. In 1999, Tsuneo Gōda directed 30-second sketches of the character Domo. The shorts, animated by stop-motion studio Dwarf, are currently still produced in Japan and have received universal critical acclaim from fans and critics. Gōda also directed the stop-motion movie series Komaneko in 2004. In 2003, the pilot film for the series Curucuru and Friends, produced by Korean studio Ffango Entertoyment, was greenlighted into a children's animated series in 2004 after an approval with the Gyeonggi Digital Contents Agency. It was aired in KBS1 on the 24th of November 2006, and won the 13th Korean Animation Awards in 2007 for Best Animation. Ffango Entertoyment also worked with Frontier Works in Japan to produce the 2010 film remake of Cheburashka. Since 2005, Robot Chicken has mostly utilized stop-motion animation, using custom made action figures and other toys as principal characters. Since 2009, Laika, the stop motion successor to Will Vinton Studios, has released six feature films, which have collectively grossed over $400 million: Coraline in 2009, ParaNorman in 2012, The Boxtrolls in 2014, Kubo and the Two Strings in 2016, Missing Link in 2019 and Wildwood in 2026. Directors like Tim Burton and Wes Anderson are still using stop-motion animation in some of their live action films. In 2019 and 2020, cinematographer Jeffrey Gardner won back-to-back Daytime Creative Arts Emmy Awards for Outstanding Cinematography on the stop-motion series Tumble Leaf, marking one of the rare instances where a director of photography has been recognized for work in stop-motion television. While stop-motion histories often highlight animators and directors, Gardner's awards underscore the vital role of cinematography in the medium, where lighting, lenses, and miniature set design create the show's distinctive visual storytelling. In November 2024, Disney released Mickey & Minnie's Christmas Carols, a series of five stop motion shorts featuring Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Goofy and Pluto.
Techniques Beyond the Frame
Stop motion has very rarely been shot in stereoscopic 3D throughout film history. The first 3D stop motion short was In Tune With Tomorrow, also known as Motor Rhythm, made in 1939 by John Norling. The second stereoscopic stop motion release was The Adventures of Sam Space in 1955 by Paul Sprunck. The third and latest stop motion short in stereo 3D was The Incredible Invasion of the 20,000 Giant Robots from Outer Space in 2000 by Elmer Kaan and Alexander Lentjes. This is also the first ever 3D stereoscopic stop motion and CGI short in the history of film. The first all stop-motion 3D feature is Coraline, released in 2009, based on Neil Gaiman's best-selling novel and directed by Henry Selick. Another recent example is the Nintendo 3DS video software which comes with the option for Stop-Motion videos, released on the 8th of December 2011 as a 3DS system update. Also, the film ParaNorman is in 3D stop motion. Another more complicated variation on stop motion is go motion, co-developed by Phil Tippett and first used on the films The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Dragonslayer in 1981, and the RoboCop films. Go motion involved programming a computer to move parts of a model slightly during each exposure of each frame of film, combined with traditional hand manipulation of the model in between frames, to produce a more realistic motion blurring effect. Tippett also used the process extensively in his 1984 short film Prehistoric Beast, a 10 minutes long sequence depicting a herbivorous dinosaur, Monoclonius, being chased by a carnivorous one, Tyrannosaurus. With new footage Prehistoric Beast became Dinosaur! in 1985, a full-length dinosaurs documentary hosted by Christopher Reeve. Those Phil Tippett's go motion tests acted as motion models for his first photo-realistic use of computers to depict dinosaurs in Jurassic Park in 1993. A low-tech, manual version of this blurring technique was originally pioneered by Władysław Starewicz in the silent era, and was used in his feature film The Tale of the Fox in 1931. The reasons for using stop motion instead of the more advanced computer-generated imagery include the appeal of its distinct look and the notion that it accurately displays real-life textures, while CGI texturing can look more artificial and isn't always quite as close to realism. This is appreciated by a number of animation directors, such as Guillermo del Toro, Henry Selick, Tim Burton and Travis Knight. Guillermo del Toro aimed to praise the benefits of stop motion in his movie Pinocchio, saying that he wanted the expressiveness and the material nature of a handmade piece of animation, an artisanal, beautiful exercise in carving, painting, sculpting. Many young people begin their experiments in movie making with stop-motion, thanks to the ease of modern stop-motion software and online video publishing. Singer-songwriter Oren Lavie's music video for the song Her Morning Elegance was posted on YouTube on the 19th of January 2009. The video, directed by Lavie and Yuval and Merav Nathan, uses stop motion and has achieved great success with over 25.4 million views, also earning a 2010 Grammy Award nomination for Best Short Form Music Video. Stop motion has occasionally been used to create the characters for computer games, as an alternative to CGI. The Virgin Interactive Entertainment Mythos game Magic and Mayhem in 1998 featured creatures built by stop-motion specialist Alan Friswell, who made the miniature figures from modelling clay and latex rubber, over armatures of wire and ball-and-socket joints. The models were then animated one frame at a time, and incorporated into the CGI elements of the game through digital photography. Scientists at IBM used a scanning tunneling microscope to single out and move individual atoms which were used to make characters in A Boy and His Atom. This was the tiniest scale stop-motion video made at that time. Replicating the distinct tactile look of traditional stop motion has gained popularity in contemporary media through the use of CGI. This approach can often provide a more cost-effective and accessible means of achieving the stop motion aesthetic. Noteworthy among such endeavors is the work of Blender animator Ian Worthington, exemplified by his 2021 short film Captain Yajima. Another prominent example of this trend includes The LEGO Movie, which uses CGI to replicate the visual style and imperfections of stop motion.