Awesome Stop Motion

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 “DariusTwin” 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.

Filmmakers Paul Bush and Lana Tankosa Nikolic created this inventive short film entirely from everyday plastic items. It’s a colorful statement on just how much plastic we use as a society and was created for Plastic Change, a Danish organization working to reduce our dependence on difficult to recycle plastics.

Artist and filmmaker Andrea Love created this gigantic bullfrog sculpture using a wire armature, foam, and needle-felted wool. She captured the two-day process as a stop-motion video, and the frog would go on to appear in the award-winning short film Tulip, a collaboration with children’s book author Phoebe Wahl.

Stop-motion animator Omozoc created this short film which makes it look like wood can be chopped up as easily as vegetables, nails can be tapped in with a spoon, and sanding could be done with a butter knife. The animation was made from 2854 individual images, and no computer visual effects were added.

Stop-motion animator Kevin Parry shows off a neat rig he built using LEGO pieces. The highly-articulated dinosaur skeleton looks amazing as it comes to life in this brief frame-by-frame sequence. Given the green screen, we imagine he’ll be adding a background to the scene.

During the 2020 lockdowns, Alexandre Poncet of StopMotionFrance took some time to play with his action figures. While he was at it, he created this smooth animated short that features Robocop trapped in a time loop paradox with ED-209, Captain Kirk, Pac-Man, and Kylo Ren.