Stop Motion Animation: Physically Posing Objects One Frame at a Time

Stop motion (also called stop frame) is an animated filmmaking technique in which physical objects are moved in small increments between individually photographed frames. Played back in sequence at a standard frame rate of 24 frames per second, the still images create the illusion that the objects move on their own. **Main forms.** Puppet animation uses jointed puppets built around an armature (an internal metal skeleton). Claymation uses malleable clay figures. Object animation moves everyday items, cutout animation shifts flat materials like paper, and pixilation uses live human actors posed frame by frame. **History.** Stop motion dates to the dawn of cinema: J. Stuart Blackton's *The Haunted Hotel* (1907) was an early widely seen example, Ladislas Starevich animated insect puppets in the 1910s and completed the first stop-motion feature, *The Tale of the Fox*, in 1930, and Willis O'Brien's work on *King Kong* (1933) was a landmark in model animation. Art Clokey's *Gumby* (from 1955) and Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit (from 1989) brought the form to wide audiences. **Modern era.** Aardman Animations (UK) and LAIKA (US) are the leading feature studios. *Coraline* (2009) was the first feature animated entirely in stop motion and shot in stereoscopic 3D. A signature modern innovation is 3D-printed replacement faces: studios print thousands of subtly different facial expressions so a puppet's face can be swapped frame by frame, dramatically expanding expressive range. The technique remains prized for its tangible, handmade texture—directors including Tim Burton, Henry Selick, Wes Anderson, and Guillermo del Toro continue to choose it over CGI. It is also extremely slow and costly per finished minute; see Why Stop Motion Is So Expensive: The Per-Shot Labor Bottleneck.