Awesome Stop Motion

We’re lovestruck by Patator’s animated music video for French trip-hop group Chinese Man’s poetic track Too Late. The stop-motion clip drops us into a magical world where horses breakdance and scratch records and storied lives play out on a human-sized hamster wheel.

Animator Lee Hardcastle is known for his gory and twisted claymation shorts, including Rick and Morty’s Non Canonical Adventures. In Dreaming Child, we’re transported into the mind of a young boy whose dream starts out joyful but quickly turns into a surreal nightmare.

Visual artist and musician Ellard Devane creates mindblowing animations out of clay. But these are no California raisins, nope. Ellard makes his works by arranging polymer clay into surreal faces and scenes that reveal themselves as he slices away at them, layer by layer, frame by frame. This video compiles highlights from the past couple of years.

Whether or not there was a true rivalry, the media loved to play up the competition between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Dog & Rabbit’s brilliantly executed short film plays out this battle through a series of slapstick collages animated using the dueling rock bands’ album art. Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations were clearly a source of inspiration.

(PG-13) Evan Hallbeck’s short film is as tasteless as it is hilarious. It follows the story of three disgusting items that ended up in the sewer and tells their origin stories through a trio of live-action vignettes. You can pretty much guess where this is going from the thumbnail. Savannah Steiner is responsible for the gross-out animation.

When a creature awakens in the woods, he searches the depths of his memories for clues as to how he got there and why he’s in the condition he’s in. Animator Aiden Whittam and written/director Ryan Oligmueller’s stop-motion short film takes on the difficult topic of depression in an artful and compelling way. Watch the behind-the-scenes footage here.

Not to be confused with the bonkers 1982 film of the same name, Zach Tolchinsky’s stop-motion animated short has a decidedly more coherent plot. It follows a man living in the ruins of civilization when a flash of light appears outside his bunker. He could stay safely inside, but instead, he risks everything and heads into the Forbidden Zone to investigate.

Tomosteen animated this delightful stop-motion LEGO short that of a tabletop nature simulator. With the push of a button, a tree grows from seed and flourishes through the seasons, a penguin plays in the snow, and a festive field of flowers provides a home to bees and butterflies.

After creating their Woodworking without Tools video, animator Omozoc was approached by Casio to create a similar short film for them. While the clip is ultimately a promo to celebrate 40 years of G-SHOCK watches, it’s also a wonderfully-executed example of stop-motion animation and smart product placement.

(PG-13: Animated Nudity) After a power outage awakens a woman, she has trouble getting back to sleep, and ghosts of her past start to appear around her. Ida Melum’s award-winning animated short film explores the lasting impressions that negative experiences can have on one’s psyche, and how we ultimately need to embrace them as part of us.

LEGO fanatic I like home presents an incredible stop-motion video that shows how to break down a brick-built king salmon into a delicious sashimi dinner. The sequence is made up of more than 3000 individual photos. If you thought that looked tasty, be sure to check out his LEGO steak and cheese.

Hypno Motion makes stop-motion animation. In this short clip, they took some brick-built LEGO chicken legs, battered them up in 1×1 bricks,  and fried them in a pot. Of course, you can’t have fried chicken without a side dish, so they also cooked up some french fries. Their Hidden Patterns Inside video series is a fascinating watch, too.

(Flashing images) Filmmaker Conner Griffith created this riveting short video from public domain images found on Wikimedia Commons. It starts with a single-cell organism, and as each frame advances, the subjects evolve into larger and increasingly complex things. Conner’s 2023 showreel is also well worth a watch.

Filmmaker Quek Shio recently put together a slick new office space for working on his videos. Instead of simply sharing a few still images of the setup, he used his editing skills to create a short film filled with invisible cuts and visual trickery that make it look like magic.

There are tons of stop-motion LEGO animations out there, but Legotto’s approach is different. Rather than moving models and minifigs, they create frame-by-frame pixel art animations using 1×1 LEGO bricks. This process requires great patience and attention to detail, but the results are impressive. Check out their octopus, slime, and Pokémon animations.

Animator MootroidXproductions loves to create stop-motion shorts using action figures and toys. This epic battle sequence features a confrontation between multiple building-stomping Godzillas and a powerful human/Pikachu hybrid, all set to a jazzy soundtrack. They followed it up with Godzilla vs. Kong vs. Pexachu.