Skeleton warriors and plasticine chickens: why stop-motion animation is still going strong a century on

It all started – or stop-started, perhaps – with some tiny pterodactyls. As 1924 drew to a close, Marcel Delgado was putting the finishing touches to 50 model dinosaurs. For months, the sculptor had been meticulously constructing a range of Tyrannosaurus rexes, brontosauruses and pterodactyls. Now he was getting ready to pass them on to pioneering animator Willis O’Brien, who would painstakingly move each creature an almost imperceptible amount, shoot another frame, and then repeat the process.

A year later, The Lost World – the first ever feature film using what was termed “stop-motion” – was released, transforming Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name into an action-packed spectacle. Audiences were astounded, even dumbfounded by its seemingly supernatural special effects.

To modern eyes, the film itself is a bit of a dinosaur. Its technology is prehistoric, its colonialist themes outdated and its animated sequences clunky. But the meteoric impact of these miniature dinosaurs is still felt; a century later, stop-motion cinema is very much alive and flicking.

“Stop-motion animation is often overlooked. But it’s a really important part of cinema history,” says Justin Johnson, lead programmer of a BFI season on the art form, Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen.

Aptly, the genre’s own timeline is a stuttering one. After The Lost World, a golden age emerged; O’Brien became a famed animator, working with Delgado on 1933’s King Kong. Then, in 1940, animator George Pal pioneered the technique of “replacement animation” – designing multiple wooden heads for puppets to facilitate an array of facial expressions. Visual effects auteur Ray Harryhausen took things further with “dynamation” which sandwiched models between live-action footage of a background and foreground. For the first time, it allowed animated characters and real-life actors to interact; in 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, for example, the titular heroes are attacked by a skeleton crew of, well, skeletons.

Stop-motion also took over the small screen, with playful children’s TV series such as Trumpton and Clangers winning over kids and adults alike. Clay animation, too, became popular, thanks in part to the shapeshifting plasticine man Morph. The beloved terracotta character was the brainchild of Aardman Animations, founded in 1972 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. It would go on to craft a string of beloved characters all cast in the same eccentric mould, including Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Rocky Rhodes, Chicken Run’s plucky rooster.

An early hit for the studio came in 1986, when Aardman animated the visuals for Peter Gabriel’s smash hit Sledgehammer. The video was an MTV mainstay in the late 80s and went on to bag a record nine trophies at the network’s VMAs.

But as stop-motion techniques rapidly improved, so did a less laborious new alternative: CGI. Ironically, it was yet another dinosaur film – 1993’s Jurassic Park – that almost killed stop-motion. Steven Spielberg had originally hired animator Phil Tippett to work on the dinosaur effects. But Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s special effects studio, instead proposed a new CGI approach. “I’ve just become extinct,” Tippett quipped.

Tippett was only half right. While CGI has become the go-to way for film-makers to ape reality, 1993 also brought two gamechangers that would demonstrate the technology’s creative possibilities. The first was The Nightmare Before Christmas, Tim Burton’s macabre festive triumph. Directed by animator Henry Selick, the film’s 109,440 frames saw Jack Skellington and the ghoulish residents of Halloween Town come to life in phantasmagoric detail.

Then, on Boxing Day, Aardman’s short film Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers was released in the UK. A commercial smash, it would go on to win the Oscar for best animated short. Among those it inspired was Will Becher, whose fanmail to the studio later landed him a role making plasticine wings for Chicken Run. Now, he is a lead director who helmed the acclaimed A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon. “Aardman’s stories come from a place of character and comedy. They’re very British,” he says. “It’s bold and poppy, all about goofy, googly eyes and brows and big mouth shapes.”

In the 21st century, it’s notable that many of the greatest stop-motion successes have been in children’s horror, with plasticine faces falling in just the right part of the uncanny valley to be both cute and creepy. In 2009, Selick’s Coraline became the third highest-grossing stop-motion film ever, bagging awards for its otherworldly tale of a young girl opening a door to a sublimely strange and unsettling world.

The film was created by Laika Studios, founded in 2005 in Portland by Travis Knight, son of Nike founder Phil. The studio has followed up the success of Coraline ($172m at the global box office) with films including ParaNorman, Missing Link and The Boxtrolls. Laika is at the cutting edge of the art form: in order to make its fantasies a reality, the studio uses 3D printing and some CGI, a tightrope act between tradition and technology. Laika has transported five of its miniature sets over to the UK for the BFI season. Each display represents a reconstruction of a single keyframe from a different Laika film, lasting just one 24th of a second on screen.

For all their irreverence, painstaking, tortuous work goes on behind the scenes of these productions. The art requires extreme dedication and delayed gratification. Every single move is minute; and it takes hours, or often days, to create seconds. It’s why many films end up banished to development hell. “But if you fall in love with the process, you can lose yourself in time,” Becher says.

Having survived two dinosaur attacks, stop-motion animation is now under siege from the robots: AI threatens to leave more time-consuming techniques in the dust. But stop-motion, when used for cinematic effect rather than special effects, is still going strong; more experimental directors have taken matters into their own hands over the last few decades. Wes Anderson, for example, has embraced the form for Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs; Charlie Kaufman used it to explore loneliness and ennui in Anomalisa; and Guillermo del Toro won an Oscar for 2022’s whimsical Pinocchio.

As well as providing the ultimate challenge, these auteurs are using it for the complete control it gives you over set, character and story. “Stop-motion allows you to have a blank canvas and go anywhere your mind takes you to,” Johnson thinks.

Sometimes, that can be somewhere sinister. Last year, Robert Morgan continued his journey into the darker side of the genre with Stopmotion, a horror that sees an animator’s models turn into demonic forms. And with the gift of a new Wallace and Gromit film, Vengeance Most Fowl, this Christmas, Laika’s dark fantasy Wildwood slated for next year and Del Toro’s The Buried Giant on the way for Netflix, stop-motion isn’t slowing down. Even Pixar has shone a spotlight on the art form for the first time ever this year with its new short Self, a fable about a wooden doll wishing upon a star.

According to Becher, the form’s ongoing appeal to audiences is simple – people appreciate the craft. “There is some sort of understanding that what they’re seeing is a bit magic, something inanimate that’s moving by itself,” Becher explains.

But it’s also because the techniques have been eclipsed by new tech that they retain a certain authenticity. “It’s about celebrating imperfection. It’s fine if you have a thumbprint on a plasticine model. It actually enhances it,” Johnson says. “The animators are channelling themselves into the figure. It can’t be replicated with CGI, it just isn’t possible.”

Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen is at BFI Southbank, London, to 9 October.