One could enjoy quite a feast from the buffet of stop-motion history. You can find eggs in Charley Bowers’s Believe It or Don’t (1935), an array of fresh fruits and vegetables in Disney’s A Symposium on Popular Songs (1962), beans…
One of the main attractions of stop motion animation is to be found in how the animator plays with materials, since the medium’s specificity, compared to 2D or 3D animation, is to film objects in real space. If any filmic…
Compared to the fluent visual effect of nowadays stop-motion animations with a high frame rate like LAIKA studio’s ones, most of the stop-motion animations from early times shared a much lower frame rate. Stop-motion animators seem to treat the low…
It is an understatement to say dealing with death is a difficult thing. The 2017 short film Negative Space by Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata is reminiscent of the mental headspace where one may try to recall the rose-tinted memories…
Animation is the medium that allows for a dramatization of a skirmish with nature. -Esther Leslie, “Animation and History” In Segundo de Chomón’s Création de la Serpentine (1908), a sorcerer transforms a billowing piece of fabric into a woman…
In this post I examine the increasing trend of creating stop-motion films that metaphorically reveal the artificiality of the medium by exposing and dismantling the filmmaking process within the narrative. These are films that stage elements akin to a “making-of”,…
Animation can be a powerful way to introduce young people to media making. As Yvonne Andersen (1970: 9) notes, “it is dynamic enough to stimulate them and yet easy enough for them to handle.” For several years, I have been…
