According to theater director Peter Brooks, a play becomes holy when it reveals the invisible, reflecting the elements of the world that escape our senses. (Brook 1968, 49) Unlike traditional narrative theater, the holy employs incantations, primal screams, and cyclopean…
If a work of art is the sum of its parts, then the stop-motion animation Mad God (Tippett, 2021) has a very large sum indeed. Director Phil Tippett crafted this cinematic fever dream as a mad god himself, stitching together…
While the trademark thumbprint pressed into Gromit’s snout is the archetypal giveaway of British animation studio Aardman’s distinct material style, I was always more preoccupied by a splodge of jam. In several scenes of The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park, 1993),…
A material ropeway is an aerial device that is often used in coal mining operations to transport goods across long distances. Material ropeways differ from aerial ropeways and other transportation devices in that the contents they carry are not passengers…
In the introduction of the recently published anthology Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft, editor Mihaela Mihailova writes, “Like witchcraft, puppet craft remains poorly understood and frequently branded as a relic of a bygone era — and…
