Awesome Stop Motion

This animated short film follows a legendary craftsman who lost his arm and uses who uses a prosthetic arm to take down his enemies. The fight choreography is amazing, and we love the use of sawdust in place of blood. Go behind-the-scenes here, then support their Kickstarter for a feature-length film. (Thanks, Rob!)

We’ve seen a LEGO machine that could make pancakes, so the idea of a brick-built cake bakery isn’t that far-fetched. But Tomosteen made their LEGO cake factory using stop-motion animation. The fanciful facility is run by a team of tiny cats, who surprisingly don’t lap up the batter before it can be baked in the LEGO brick oven.

Artist DariusTwin has made some amazing stop-motion animations using point sources of light and long exposures. This short vertical video transports us to a magical, rainbow-filled world set to the tune of the classic song Dream (When You’re Feeling Blue).

Stop-motion animator tomosteen takes us on a trip inside a unique vending machine that serves up delicious burgers. Each tiny sandwich is prepared with love by a legless skeleton who works with a team of bird and kitty cat sous chefs. And if you think that sounds weird, it’s because it is.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the short film, Nitro WarriorsSpaceCamperBike, Paul Greer’s Vanguard Pictures is back with another action-packed stop-motion car chase. This time, a truck carrying valuable cargo is pursued by a dragon car and a crew of malicious motorists. After the cops show up, a T-Rex gets in on the action.

Animator, LEGO and Batman fan Idan Kotzen created this fantastic animated short celebrating some of the various Batmobiles over the years. The stop-motion and clever use of lighting give the cars a great sense of movement, as LEGO Batman gives chase to the evildoers of Gotham.

Making things from wood takes time. But if you’re a stop-motion animator like Omozoc, everything goes much, much faster. In the latest video from their Stop Motion Woodworking series, they created a small tray using nothing a thumb and an index finger as tools.

This stop-motion film from Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) and Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope) is the perfect addition to your Halloween watch list. It follows a teen (Lyric Ross) who is duped into releasing two demons into the world of the living – and those demons are Key and Peele. Drops 10.28.22 on Netflix.

Unlike the CGI abomination that is Disney’s Pinocchio reboot, Guillermo del Toro’s take on the classic fairy tale was animated by hand using stop-motion puppetry. In this brief video, we get a look behind the scenes at the craftsmanship that went into the movie, and Guillermo’s rationale for sticking with traditional animation.

If you didn’t read the title of this video, you might think it was done with computer graphics. But ClayClaim created this spot-on remake of the familiar “It’s-a me, Mario” intro sequence from Super Mario 64 out of clay. Here’s the original for comparison.

The Flight of the Bumblebee is one of the most notoriously fast pieces of music you can play. Despite performing just a 1-minute excerpt of the classic, Vinheteiro spent 36 hours editing this video to make it look like his keyboard is doing all of the work, and his finger is standing still.

Please enjoy this hilariously weird little stop-motion short of a tiny pig devouring a sandwich, accompanied by the most infectiously irritating music since Nyan Cat. Apparently, this little piggy has quite the appetite.

The late Ray Harryhausen is beloved for his groundbreaking visual effects work in movies like Jason and the Argonauts. The Royal Ocean Film Society delves into Harryhausen’s mastery of stop-motion animation and how he combined it with live-action film footage to bring humans and creatures together on screen.

A stop-motion retelling of the story of the wooden boy who wants to be real. Guillermo del Toro brings his dark sense of wonder with animator Mark Gustafson, and voice acting from Ewan McGregor, Gregory Mann, Ron Perlman, Cate Blanchett, Christoph Waltz, and Tilda Swinton. In theaters 11.22 and on Netflix 12.22.

In 1916, French and German armies battled each other in one of the bloodiest fights of the first World War. JD Brick Productions reenacted a portion of this lengthy and grueling confrontation using LEGO bricks and minifigures in one of the most epic stop-motion shorts of all time.

Anyone who’s watched Netflix has seen their familiar intro with their logo and the “ta-dum” sound. Animator Kevin Parry challenged himself to recreate the logo using stop-motion. He used yarn as his primary material for both the logotype and the colorful lines that emerge at the end of the sequence. Money shot at 5:27.

Setting up a Rube Goldberg machine and getting it to all work perfectly can be quite difficult. Filmmaker Tomohiro Okazaki took a different approach to making their machine, building an impossible chain-reaction sequence using stop-motion animation.

Remember Marcel the Shell? Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp’s adorable and introspective mollusk is getting his own feature film. The movie follows our inquisitive pal Marcel as he sets out on a journey to find his family. Marcel stomps his tiny feet into theaters on 6.24.2022.

This wildly inventive 60-second promo spot for Amazon Music combines a variety of different filmmaking techniques including stop-motion, 2D and 3D animation, rotoscoping, and even puppetry – each executed with top-notch quality. Directed by Stevie Gee & Essy May for Blink.

When it comes to action figures, more points of articulation are usually better – especially when it comes to dancing. But what happens when your figure can only swivel its head and bend at the hips? TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin shows us that it’s not just about your moves, but also your attitude in this charming animation.

Animator Tomohiro Okazaki of Swimming Design offers up a series of soundless stop motion scenes, each of which features matchsticks as its central focus. Okazaki’s fastidious and precise animation work is simply out of this world, and the motion is some of the smoothest we’ve ever seen in a frame-by-frame animation.

Stop-motion filmmaker and artist Andrea Love shared another one of her wonderfully creative short films. Using nothing more than a needle, felt, and her creativity, she baked up a tiny textile pizza that looks good enough to eat. Her Belgian waffles look yummy too.

Visual artist Darren “Darius Twin” Pearson is known for his long-exposure light paintings. He has a particular fondness for skeletons. For the short film Fiat Lux, he captured more than 680 hand-painted scenes, then assembled them into an animation. Each of the 11 scenes is also available as an NFT.