Lego stop motion is one of life’s simplest pleasures. For the viewer, anyway. For the creator, it’s immensely complicated, time consuming, and generally very hard to pull off well. Fortunately, some creators do it very well indeed. And now Lego has come to the Infinity War.
The team behind the award-winning stop-motion film Kubo and the Two Strings is moving from Japan to Shangri-La. Laika has announced its next film is Missing Link, a tale about finding living proof of humankind’s primitive ancestry. It’s apparently the studio’s most ambitious film to date.
Wes Anderson’s latest is, for whatever else it might be, a masterwork of stop-motion craftiness. The eponymous dogs, in particular, are remarkable, expressive bits of stop-motion craftsmanship. In a new featurette, the animators behind the film explain how they did it.
Sometimes the best thing to do is just doodle. That’s how longtime Aardman director Nick Park came up with the idea for the company’s latest stop-motion animated film, Early Man. He knew he wanted to do something about cavemen but that was as far as the idea went. Then he started drawing.
What can I say? I’m a sucker for good Lego art. And this, my friends, is fantastic Lego art.
It’s a yearly tradition, at least in my household, to take in the classic Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special from 1964. Surprisingly, some of the old stop-motion puppet figures haven’t crumbled to dust yet! And you can buy them! If you’re Elon Musk, anyway.
For the legendary pirates Bluebeard and Redbeard (aka Barbarossa), it seems that nothing could be better than sharing a growler of rum among friends. However, as this new stop-motion animated short film shows us, there is one thing that will turn pirate against pirate.
Though I’m not sure if anyone will ever get to see the insane film I saw last month called Junk Head, there is some good news. First up, there’s a trailer for the film. Second, a prequel is in the works.
Animator Steve Warne has worked on movies like Frankenweenie and the upcoming Isle of Dogs, and his gorgeous stop-motion style is put to perfect use in his new short, Pombo Loves You. It delves into the mind of a man troubled by his long-ago past playing a costumed superhero on a scifi TV show.
The world is ending. Humans no longer have the capacity to reproduce. For the answers, they’ll send people below the surface of the Earth, where the clones humans used and discarded thousands of years ago have taken up residence.
Frankly, I’m an easy woman to impress. But even so, stop motion animation is next level. Each frame takes meticulous care, craft, and planning. Excellent stop motion is the result of an incomprehensible density and depth of talent. And out of all the great stop motion studios out there, Laika might be the best. This…
If you are a dog lover, you need to stop what you’re doing right now and watch this squeal-inducing short by Chloé Alliez. It’s called Oh My Dog! and it features the most adorable furry little stop-motion puppy puppets, not to mention a heartwarming (and realistic) tribute to Crazy Canine People.
Animating anything by hand using stop-motion techniques, one frame at a time, is a time-consuming and mind-numbing process. But in order to create the surreal organic images for his WoodSwimmer video, Brett Foxwell had to slowly slice away at a log, sliver by sliver, while photographing the entire process.
“Wildlife” is a very big jigsaw puzzle. Clocking in 33,600 pieces, it ranks among the largest manufactured jigsaw puzzles in the world and will set you back almost 400 bucks. But if you think it’s hard enough to do on its own, imagine turning it into a stop motion movie of classic video games while you assemble it.
Headlines like that are why we do what we do.
Last year was filled with lots of fantastic animated films, but when the Oscar nominations come out, we’ll be very surprised if My Life as a Zucchini isn’t among them. Not many people outside of its native Switzerland have heard of it yet, but the stop-motion animated film will open in the U.S. next month, and you can…
“The Lighthouse” is a short with no dialogue and a masterful use of light and shading that tells the story of a solitary lighthouse keeper who discovers the ability to manipulate matter that ends up transporting him somewhere brand new.
I’ve always thought that one of the appeals of stop-motion claymation was the imperfections in the animation, how things never quite moved as fluidly as real life. After watching this short from Guldies, I now realize that it’s because no one is a master of stop-motion claymation like he is. The animation is really…
There’s no real explanation as to why these toy Gundam robots want to steal the classic 1960s Batmobile, but by the end of this short film, by the talented stop-motion artists at YouTube’s Counter656, you won’t care. Besides, since when do you need a good reason to watch robots fight?
