Stop motion

• 1. Introduction

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  Stop motion is a filmmaking technique with a deceptively simple premise: photograph an object, move it a tiny amount, photograph it again, and repeat until you have enough frames to fool the eye into seeing movement. The result, when played back, is a world where inanimate things come alive. Puppets walk. Cutlery dances. Dead beetles fall in love.

  But behind that simple premise lies more than a century of obsession, secrecy, and invention. How did a Victorian scientist's failed experiment with plaster models point toward a medium that would one day gross over $400 million for a single studio? Why did the earliest filmmakers guard their animation secrets so jealously? And how did one Polish-Russian naturalist's problem with uncooperative stag beetles give birth to some of the most technically startling films the silent era ever produced?

  Those answers live in the long, strange history of stop motion, a technique that predates cinema itself and refuses, even now, to be replaced by the computers that were supposed to make it obsolete.

• 2. Before the Camera

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  In 1849, the Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau published a note about improvements to his Fantascope, a spinning disc that created the illusion of movement. The improved version was translucent and could be viewed by several people at once. Plateau described an idea passed to him by the inventor Charles Wheatstone: combine the Fantascope with Wheatstone's stereoscope to produce three-dimensional moving images. To do it, Plateau calculated, a maker would need sixteen plaster models, each showing a slightly different position of the same figure. He thought the project would take much time and effort but would produce marvellous results. It was never built, possibly because Plateau was nearly completely blind by that point.

  The concept refused to die. In 1852, Jules Duboscq patented a stroboscopic disc he called the Stéréoscope-fantascope ou Bïoscope, containing stereoscopic photograph pairs of a machine caught in different phases of motion. Because photographic emulsions of the period required very long exposure times, the sequence could not be recorded live; each position of the machinery had to be photographed separately. In 1855, Johann Nepomuk Czermak described in print his Stereophoroskop and explained how a series of models, such as a growing pyramid, could be photographed to create three-dimensional animation. On the 27th of February 1860, Peter Hubert Desvignes received British patent no. 537 for twenty-eight variations of cylindrical stroboscopic devices. His Mimoscope earned an Honourable Mention for ingenuity of construction at the 1862 International Exhibition in London. Desvignes noted that he had used models, insects and other objects instead of pictures, with what he called perfect success.

  By 1874, Jules Janssen had built a photographic revolver and was using a model planet and a light source to rehearse recordings of the passage of Venus. Some of those practice discs survived, and the images from one were eventually turned into a short animated film decades after cinema had been invented. Étienne-Jules Marey, in 1887, constructed a large zoetrope using plaster models derived from his chronophotographs of birds in flight. All of this happened before anyone had projected a moving image onto a screen for a paying audience.

• 3. Secrets of the Silent Era

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  By the mid-1890s, cinema existed, but animators had strong reasons to say nothing about how their films worked. An estimated eighty to ninety percent of all silent films are lost, and the technical methods behind the surviving ones were rarely documented. Filmmakers kept their special effects secret both to block competitors and to preserve the sense of mystery that kept audiences coming back.

  The French trick-film pioneer Georges Méliès claimed to have invented the stop trick, a related technique in which the camera is briefly stopped mid-scene to allow a sudden unexplained change. He reportedly used stop-motion animation as early as 1899 to produce moving letterforms. The oldest known use of the stop trick itself appears in Edison Manufacturing Company's 1895 film The Execution of Mary Stuart, where it is used for the beheading scene.

  Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón, who lived from 1871 to 1929, made numerous trick films in France for Pathé and was frequently compared to Méliès. His 1907 short La maison ensorcelée featured stop-motion-animated cutlery and food alongside other paranormal effects. His Sculpteur moderne, released on the 31st of January 1908, shows heaps of clay molding themselves into detailed sculptures capable of minor movements; the final figure, an old woman, actually walks around before being squashed and remolded.

  American pioneer J. Stuart Blackton achieved something different with The Haunted Hotel, released on the 23rd of February 1907. It combined live action with stop-motion objects, a puppet, and a scale model of the hotel. A close-up of a table setting itself by invisible means baffled audiences; no wires or familiar tricks were visible. The film made a significant impression in Paris, where it was studied carefully by filmmakers working for Gaumont. One of those filmmakers, Émile Cohl, reportedly cracked the technique and released his own first stop-motion work, Japon de fantaisie, in June 1907. Cohl went on to make the landmark hand-drawn film Fantasmagorie on the 17th of August 1908, along with many other animated films, including Les allumettes animées in 1908 and Mobilier fidèle in 1910, the latter in collaboration with Romeo Bosetti.

• 4. Insects, Puppets, and Dead Beetles

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  Ladislas Starevich, who was born in 1882 and died in 1965, began his film career around 1909 in Kaunas, Lithuania, with an unusual scientific problem. He wanted to document rutting stag beetles on film, but the creatures would not cooperate under the bright lamps required for filming, and some simply died. His solution was to use wire for the limbs of dried beetles and animate them frame by frame. The resulting short film, probably titled by the Latin name for the species, Lucanus Cervus, was produced in 1910 and is now considered lost.

  Starevich then moved to Moscow and began casting dead insects as characters in narratively complex stories. His ten-minute The Beautiful Leukanida, released in March 1912, and his twelve-minute The Cameraman's Revenge, from October of the same year, drew audiences who were reportedly amazed at the supposed training of live insects, because so few people understood how stop motion worked. The five-minute The Grasshopper and the Ant followed in 1913, and The Insects' Christmas that same year introduced new puppet types including Father Christmas and a frog. Starevich fled Russia in 1918 and by 1920 had settled in Paris, where he resumed stop-motion work. His Dans les Griffes de L'araignée, finished in 1920 and released in 1924, featured hand-made insect puppets precise enough to convey facial expressions with moving lips and eyelids.

  Alexander Shiryaev arrived at stop motion from an entirely different starting point. A ballet dancer and choreographer, he began making papier-mâché puppets on poseable wire frames twenty to twenty-five centimeters tall as a tool for planning his performances. He bought a movie camera and between 1906 and 1909 produced many short films including puppet animations. Animator Peter Lord later assessed Shiryaev's work as decades ahead of its time. That work is documented in Viktor Bocharov's 2003 documentary Alexander Shiryaev: A Belated Premiere.

  Willis O'Brien arrived via a different path again. His first stop-motion film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy, dates to 1915. It featured clay models of a dinosaur, an ape-like missing link, cavemen, and an ostrich-like bird he called a desert quail. That debut led to a series of prehistoric comedy shorts for Edison Company, after which producer Herbert M. Dawley hired O'Brien to direct, write, and co-star in The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, a 1918 film combining live action with animated dinosaur models. The film originally ran forty-five minutes but was cut to roughly twelve after its premiere. Dawley refused to credit O'Brien for the visual effects and applied for patents on the animation process as his own invention. O'Brien's recognition would come later, first with animated dinosaur sequences in the 1925 live-action feature The Lost World.

• 5. Clay, Puppets, and Postwar Features

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  Starevich completed the first feature-length stop-motion film, Le Roman de Renard, in 1930, but problems with its soundtrack held the film back for years. A German-language version was released in 1937, the French version not until 1941.

  Hungarian-American filmmaker George Pal took a different structural approach. Rather than moving a single puppet through its poses, Pal replaced the puppet itself, or parts of it, with similar figures showing changed positions and expressions. He called the method Pal-Doll and deployed it from 1932 onward in his Puppetoons series. In Europe his work was largely promotional, made for companies including Philips. In Hollywood he accumulated a substantial run of Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, including wins for Rhythm in the Ranks in 1941, Tulips Shall Grow in 1942, Jasper and the Haunted House in 1942, the Dr. Seuss adaptation The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins in 1943, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1944, Jasper and the Beanstalk in 1945, John Henry and the Inky-Poo and Jasper in a Jam both in 1946, and Tubby the Tuba in 1947. Many of his Puppetoon films were later selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

  Willis O'Brien's work on the big ape in King Kong in 1933 is widely regarded as a landmark in the technique's history and a high point of Hollywood cinema more broadly. Ray Harryhausen learned under O'Brien on Mighty Joe Young in 1949 and went on to create stop-motion effects across a long string of fantasy films, from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953 to Clash of the Titans in 1981.

  The first British animated feature was a stop-motion instructional film, Handling Ships, made by Halas and Batchelor for the British Admiralty in 1945. Though not intended for general cinemas, it was included in the official selection of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. That same year, 1947, produced the first Belgian animated feature, a puppet adaptation of the Tintin story The Crab with the Golden Claws, and the first Czech animated feature, Jiří Trnka's package film The Czech Year, which won awards at the Venice Film Festival. Trnka continued making stop-motion features for years, including The Emperor's Nightingale in 1949, Prince Bayaya in 1950, Old Czech Legends in 1953, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1959.

• 6. Claymation, Aardman, and the Oscar Race

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  Art Clokey began his relationship with clay in 1955 with a freeform short film called Gumbasia. That experiment led directly to his structured TV series Gumby, which ran from 1955 to 1989 and introduced the iconic green figure. Clokey later produced Davey and Goliath in partnership with the United Lutheran Church in America, a series that ran from 1960 to 2004.

  In 1975, filmmaker Will Vinton joined sculptor Bob Gardiner to make an experimental short called Closed Mondays, which became the first stop-motion film to win an Academy Award. Vinton followed it with several more Oscar-nominated shorts, and in 1977 he made a documentary about his process that he called, and then trademarked, Claymation. The trademark was designed to distinguish his studio's work from other clay animators. The word has since entered general use but legally remains a trademark now held by Laika Entertainment, Inc. Vinton's team also created the Nomes and the Nome King for Disney's Return to Oz, earning an Academy Award nomination for Special Visual Effects. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Vinton became widely known for commercial campaigns including The California Raisins and The Noid.

  At very nearly the same time in the UK, Peter Lord and David Sproxton formed Aardman Animations. In 1976 they created a five-inch Plasticine figure named Morph, who appeared on the BBC television programme Take Hart alongside presenter Tony Hart. Their 1977 film Down and Out, made for a more adult audience, had its soundtrack recorded in a Salvation Army Hostel before the clay puppets were animated to match the dialogue. A series called The Amazing Adventures of Morph aired in 1980. Channel 4 later funded a set of clay-animated films called Conversation Pieces, and a 1986 series called Lip Sync introduced, among others, Nick Park's Creature Comforts. That film won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1990. Aardman also produced a notable music video for Peter Gabriel's song Sledgehammer in 1986.

  Park introduced Wallace and Gromit in A Grand Day Out in 1989. The characters grew into a franchise of short films, feature films, and spin-offs. Park won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the feature-length Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Laika, the stop-motion studio that succeeded Will Vinton Studios, has released six feature films since 2009, including Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, Missing Link, and Wildwood, which together have grossed over $400 million.

• 7. Go Motion and the Visual Effects Pipeline

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  Phil Tippett and his colleagues at Industrial Light & Magic developed a variation called go motion, first used on The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Standard stop motion produces slightly blurry outlines because a puppet sits perfectly still during each exposure; go motion addressed this by programming a computer to shift parts of a model slightly during each frame's exposure, combined with traditional hand movement between frames. The result was a more realistic motion blur effect. Tippett deployed the technique extensively in his 1984 short film Prehistoric Beast, a ten-minute sequence depicting a herbivorous dinosaur called Monoclonius being chased by a Tyrannosaurus. With added footage, that film became Dinosaur! in 1985, a full-length documentary hosted by Christopher Reeve. Tippett's go motion tests on that project served as motion references for his first photo-realistic computer-generated dinosaurs in Jurassic Park in 1993.

  During the original Star Wars trilogy, Industrial Light & Magic used stop motion for 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. Go motion was used on the latter two. The technique also appeared in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dragonslayer, and the first two RoboCop feature films.

  Stop motion continued to appear in mainstream Hollywood productions in the years that followed. It was used for some shots in the final sequence of the first Terminator film and for the small alien ships in Batteries Not Included in 1987, animated by David W. Allen, whose credits also include The Gate and Freaked. Will Vinton's team released an ambitious stop-motion feature, The Adventures of Mark Twain, in 1985, drawing strong reviews from critics and adult audiences even if its sophistication placed it outside the typical children's market. Guillermo del Toro has spoken about what draws him back to the technique: he has described wanting, in his film Pinocchio, the expressiveness and the material nature of a handmade piece of animation, what he called an artisanal, beautiful exercise in carving, painting, and sculpting. That description captures why stop motion still coexists with CGI, even as computers have become far cheaper and faster: the technique shows real textures, and those textures carry a quality that is difficult to manufacture digitally.

• 8. Beyond the Cinema Screen

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  Singer-songwriter Oren Lavie's music video for the song Her Morning Elegance was posted on YouTube on the 19th of January 2009. Directed by Lavie together with Yuval and Merav Nathan, the stop-motion video accumulated over 25.4 million views and earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Short Form Music Video in 2010.

  Stop motion has also found its way into computer games. The 1998 game Magic and Mayhem, published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment, featured creatures built by stop-motion specialist Alan Friswell from modelling clay and latex rubber over wire and ball-and-socket armatures, then animated frame by frame and integrated into the game's computer-generated elements through digital photography. ClayFighter for the Super NES and The Neverhood and Hylics 2 for PC followed as further examples of the technique applied to games.

  In 2013, scientists at IBM used a scanning tunneling microscope to position individual atoms, making characters in a short film called A Boy and His Atom. The technique was described at the time as the tiniest scale at which stop motion had ever been produced.

  The reverse tendency has also taken hold: CGI is increasingly used to replicate the aesthetic of stop motion without using physical objects at all. Blender animator Ian Worthington's 2021 short film Captain Yajima is one noted example. The LEGO Movie deliberately imitated the look and imperfections of stop motion using computer-generated imagery.

  In November 2024, Disney released Mickey & Minnie's Christmas Carols, a series of five stop-motion shorts. The first stereoscopic 3D stop-motion feature, Coraline, was released in 2009 and directed by Henry Selick, based on Neil Gaiman's novel. Selick had already directed The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993, produced by Tim Burton, which at the time became the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film ever made, taking in over $50 million domestically. The trajectory from Plateau's unbuilt plaster models in 1849 to Laika's six features and more than $400 million in gross receipts is one of the stranger arcs in the history of any art form.