Focus Features

Perhaps nothing realizes the promise of cinema more than stop motion animation. The magic of film, that dream we project onto the white space between images, is most clearly realized in the painstaking process by which filmmakers animate the inanimate and breathe life into the lumps of clay and sticks of wood. Indeed stop motion touches on almost medieval fantasy, the alchemy of bringing the dead to life. In truth, it is an arduous art, shooting scenes frame by frame, changing only a small movement with each shot.

Stop motion animation is among the earliest forms of filmmaking, and for good reason. The basic manipulation of time and space necessary for stop motion is also necessary for narrative film. Some track its origin to a mistake. In 1896, Georges Méliès’ camera jammed, and when the film was developed objects magically disappeared on screen. Quick to exploit this error he and many others began to stage their own illusions. While much of technique has gone into special effects, some artists have refined the general grammar of stop motion into creates its own genre. Indeed now stop motion has many different schools and directions. There's clay animation (or “claymation,” for short), in which malleable clay characters are used as subjects; time lapse animation, where single frames are taken at periodic intervals to show, for example, the changing weather over the course of a day; puppet animation, where wired character creations are used; and pixilation, which employs human subjects moving infinitesimally from frame to frame.

In the following article, we will take a whistle-stop tour through the history of stop motion animation, taking in the most famous and influential figures in the field and looking at examples of their excellent work.

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Perhaps nothing realizes the promise of cinema more than stop motion animation. The magic of film, that dream we project onto the white space between images, is most clearly realized in the painstaking process by which filmmakers animate the inanimate and breathe life into the lumps of clay and sticks of wood. Indeed stop motion touches on almost medieval fantasy, the alchemy of bringing the dead to life. In truth, it is an arduous art, shooting scenes frame by frame, changing only a small movement with each shot.

Stop motion animation is among the earliest forms of filmmaking, and for good reason. The basic manipulation of time and space necessary for stop motion is also necessary for narrative film. Some track its origin to a mistake. In 1896, Georges Méliès’ camera jammed, and when the film was developed objects magically disappeared on screen. Quick to exploit this error he and many others began to stage their own illusions. While much of technique has gone into special effects, some artists have refined the general grammar of stop motion into creates its own genre. Indeed now stop motion has many different schools and directions. There's clay animation (or “claymation,” for short), in which malleable clay characters are used as subjects; time lapse animation, where single frames are taken at periodic intervals to show, for example, the changing weather over the course of a day; puppet animation, where wired character creations are used; and pixilation, which employs human subjects moving infinitesimally from frame to frame.

In the following article, we will take a whistle-stop tour through the history of stop motion animation, taking in the most famous and influential figures in the field and looking at examples of their excellent work.

Willis O'Brien

The first use of stop motion was right at the dawn of cinema, when Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton made The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1898. However, it wasn't until 35 years later that America truly woke up to stop motion animation, and it was down to one man: Willis O'Brien. An ex-newspaper cartoonist, O'Brien had been hired by the Edison Company in the mid-1910s to make short films on prehistoric subjects and in 1925 had worked on his first feature, The Lost World. A man with a gift for creating stop motion creatures, he never completed his pet project, Creation, though the awe-inspiring work he did on it did get O'Brien the job of visual effects guru on King Kong, which electrified audiences in 1933.

The film's success was dependent on O'Brien creating realistic creatures, not only the giant gorilla Kong but also the dinosaurs with which he battled. O'Brien was obsessive about details, basing his dinosaur models on the most exact paleontological studies and, most importantly, creating a Kong that was not just a model, but a character. Unlike previous projects where the creatures had been simply foes, Kong was a complex being who the audience had to sympathize with and who had to display emotion. O'Brien studied facial expressions and body language to fully bring Kong to life, and then the stop motion sequences filmed using miniatures were rear-projected to integrate the footage with live action sequences.

Ray Harryhausen

As the video below explains, the young Ray Harryhausen became a disciple of O'Brien who ultimately carried on the work that O'Brien had started.

O'Brien hired Harryhausen to work on the 1949 Mighty Joe Young (basically a remake of King Kong), but after that point the protégé stepped out of the shadow of his master. Still today, Ray Harryhausen's name is synonymous with stop motion creatures, and he has put his distinctive stamped on many memorable films including Jason and the Argonauts, One Million Years, B.C., and Clash of the Titans. Harryhausen honed and perfected many of the techniques that O'Brien had originated and, like his mentor, viewed his job as to integrate his work into the fabric of the film as much as possible. To this end, he created DynaMation, which split the live action footage into foreground and background shots so that, using rear projection, he could “sandwich” his own work into the very center of the film. Following the 1981 release of Clash of the Titans, special effects technology has utilized computer graphics rather than models, and though he has not made a film since, Harryhausen's popularity is as great as ever.

Wladyslaw Starewicz

Outside of America, the Polish animator Wladyslaw Starewicz was one of the most significant innovators in the field of stop motion. Fascinated by natural history, he stumbled across stop motion in 1910 while trying to make a live action film about beetles but discovered that they never moved when he wanted them to. He then detached the beetles’ legs and reattached them with wax, creating an insect he could make “move” at will. Subsequently, insects and animals became the primary subjects in his stop motion work and he learned to manipulate them so well that one British viewer apparently thought the creatures on screen were trained insects. Working in Moscow before the Russian Revolution and in France after the falls of the Romanovs, Starewicz ultimately opted to become an independent director. He embarked on a series of self-funded projects, most notably the feature The Tale of the Fox, which he completed in the early 30s but was only screened for the first time in 1937. He died in 1965, while working on another feature, Like Dog and Cat, which remains unfinished to this day. At the time of his death he was one of the very few famous animators, despite the fact that The Tale of the Fox had still not been released in some countries, including America.

Jan Svankmajer

Following in the footsteps of Starewicz came Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, another Eastern European who also has a fairy tale sensibility to his work but, unlike Starewicz, also a dark and macabre quality. Though Svankmajer, still working at 75, has recently produced features that rely much more on live action, he is best known for his stop motion work. In both features and shorts, he has displayed his surreal perspective in portraying vivid, unsettling imaginary worlds. His films, which often are from the point of view of a child, are not only impressive technical achievements but are truly vivid, lifelike affairs. Svankmajer's way into stop motion was through puppetry, but he has also worked with clay and, as can be seen in the clip below from his 1988 feature Alice, is skilled at animating animals. (The idea of an inanimate object – such as a stuffed rabbit – coming to life is a common trope in Svankmajer's work.) With features like Alice and Faust to his name, plus a huge number of shorts, Svankmajer is one of the foremost global animators working today.

The Brothers Quay

While Svankmajer has been a huge influence on such figures as Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton––both of whom have a comparable dark, fairy tale-like quality to their work––his most obvious successors are the American-born, British-based animators Stephen and Timothy Quay (commonly known as the Brothers Quay). Indeed, the siblings' debt to Svankmajer is so great that they named one of their films The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, a nod to both the 1919 German expressionist horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the Czech master craftsman whose work they so revere. Their work is almost exclusively without dialogue and they almost always make their films to fit a pre-existing score rather than vice versa. (As a result, they have more recently begun making music videos for artists whose work they like.) The Quays' work is highly complex, not only because of its multi-layered, esoterically referential nature (they are influenced by everyone from novelist Franz Kafka, animator Walerian Borowczyk and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen), but also because of its incredible technical intricacy, which often requires them to use tweezers to infinitesimally adjust the tiny objects they are animating. Their most famous works include The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, their only feature so far, and the short Street of Crocodiles, which was deemed by Terry Gilliam to be one of the ten best films ever made.

Gumby & co.

Let's not forget that cartoons are, you know, for kids, and stop motion is no exception. In America, the children's character who has been entertaining audiences since 1953 is, of course, the little green claymation king, Gumby. The character was created by Art Clokey, then a student at USC studying under film professor Slavko Vorkapich, a friend of Sergei Eisenstein. Clokey used Vorkapich's Kinesthetic Film Principles––which supposedly used camera movements and editing to massage the eye cells––in creating Gumbasia, the first Gumby short. Clokey made the short on a ping pong table in his father's garage, but just a few years later both he and Gumby hit the big time. In 1957, Gumby was commissioned by NBC and its popularity was such that 233 episodes were created over 35 years. Still today, Gumby is as popular as ever and continues to be an integral part of American childhoods.

While new episodes of Gumby were being made well into the 90s, in the mid-1980s the Swiss animator Otmar Gutmann began collaborating with writer Silvio Mazzola on a claymation show about an eponymous penguin living in Antarctica, Pingu. The show has had international success because of its lack of dialogue (the characters converse in penguin honks, or “Penguinese”) and its simple, often quirky stories which can be easily understood by youngsters in any country. The show got a boost in 1989 when David Hasselhoff released the single “Pingu Dance.” (Though the song was only sold in Switzerland, the music video can be easily found online.) Up to this point, there have been 157 episodes of Pingu, and the show recently got some odd publicity when Madonna criticized it on a Swedish talk show.

Nick Park

There is possibly no contemporary name more famous in the field of stop motion animation than Nick Park. The British animator and creator of the immortal characters Wallace and Gromit was the son of a dressmaker and an inventor, and inherited painstaking attention to detail from the former and creative vision from the latter. In 1989, while at Aardman Animation, he completed his first Wallace and Gromit short, A Grand Day Out, and also Creature Comforts, in which claymation zoo animals talked about their lives. Creature Comforts won him an Oscar, A Grand Day Out got a British Academy Award (beating fellow nominee Creature Comforts), and Park was suddenly a very hot commodity. Since then, Park has directed three more Wallace and Gromit shorts, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and A Matter of Loaf and Death, turned Creature Comforts into a hit TV series, and helmed two highly successful features, Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. In the process, he has won another three Oscars plus countless more awards internationally. However, the precarious nature of Park's creative work was underlined when, in 2005, a fire destroyed the Aardman warehouse which stored all the sets and models from Chicken Run; as claymation models, they stood no chance of survival. Fortunately, the Wallace and Gromit models were stored elsewhere and so survived.