This article examines the first installment in Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit series A Grand Day Out (1989) through the lenses of the oneiric and the Dionysian. While scholarship on Aardman Animations tends to emphasize its stop-motion materiality and British eccentricity, less attention has…
Tag Archive for stop motion
Time for Bed: The Dreamlike world of Dougal and the Blue Cat (1970)
by Cormac O'Kane • March 26, 2025 • 0 Comments
Dougal and the Blue Cat is the 1970 animated film by Serge Danot that features a mysterious voice and a cat named Buxton that plot to take over the world and turn it blue. The animated film is based on…
From Profane Accretion: Mad God’s Holy Animation
by Colin Wheeler • September 10, 2024 • 0 Comments
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…
A Smorgasbord of Substitutions: Food in/as Stop-Motion Animation
by Andrea Comiskey • May 19, 2023 • 1 Comment
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…
A Town Called Panic!’s “Bricolage” Aesthetic and Low-budget Methods: A New Model for Ecological and Resilient Stop Motion Productions
by Cyril Lepot • September 26, 2022 • 1 Comment
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…
Should the Low Frame Rate of Stop-motion Animation Be Regarded as a Defect?
by SHengwei Zhou • September 19, 2022 • 1 Comment
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…
Negative Space (2017)
by Jackie Garza • June 13, 2022 • 1 Comment
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…
Meditations on Metamorphosis: Natural History and Animation in Chomón’s Trick Films
by Colin Williamson • September 17, 2018 • 3 Comments
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…
The Narrative of the “Making-of”: Self-reflexive Narratives in Stop-motion Film Productions
by Vincenzo Maselli • June 26, 2018 • 2 Comments
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”,…
Large Scale Stop Motion Animation with Youth
by John Akre • January 23, 2017 • 0 Comments
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…