Stop motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving as if by magic. The first instance of the stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. In 1902, the film Fun in a Bakery Shop used clay for a stop motion "lightning sculpting" sequence. French trick film maestro Georges Méliès used it to produce moving title-card letters for one of his short films, but never exploited the process for any of his other films[dubious – discuss]. The Haunted Hotel (1907) is another stop motion film by J. Stuart Blackton, and was a resounding success when released. Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929), from Spain, released El Hotel Eléctrico later that same year, and used similar techniques as the Blackton film. In 1908, A Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Nightmare was released, as was The Sculptor's Nightmare, a film by Billy Bitzer. French animator Emile Cohl impressed audiences with his object animation tour-de-force, The Automatic Moving Company in 1910. The great European stop motion pioneer was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1892-1965), who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910), The Ant and the Grasshopper (1911).
One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which dazzled audiences in 1912. December 1916 brought the first of Willie Hopkins' 54 episodes of "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Also in December 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She would release her first film in 1917, Romeo and Juliet.
In the turn of the century, there was another well known animator known as Willis O' Brien (known by others as O'bie). His work on The Lost World from 1925 is known, but he is most admired for his work on King Kong, a milestone of his films, made possible by stop motion animation.
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1960s and 1970s
In the '60s and '70s, independent clay animator Eliot Noyes Jr. refined the technique of "free-form" clay animation with his Oscar-nominated 1965 film Clay or the Origin of Species and He Man and She Ra (1972). Noyes also used stop motion to animate sand laying on glass for his musical animated film Sandman (1975).
Sand-coated puppet animation was used in the Oscar-winning 1977 film The Sand Castle, produced by Dutch-Canadian animator Co Hoedeman. Hoedeman was one of dozens of animators sheltered by the National Film Board of Canada, a Canadian government film arts agency that had supported animators for decades. A pioneer of refined multiple stop motion films under the NFB banner was Norman McLaren who brought in many other animators to create their own creatively controlled films. Notable among these are the pinscreen animation films of Jacques Drouin, Alexeiff Parker, and Gaston Sarault such as Mindscape (1976).
Italian stop motion films include Quaq Quao (1978), by Francesco Misseri, which was stop motion with origami, The Red and the Blue and the clay animation kitties Mio and Mao.
A stop motion animated series of Tove Jansson's "The Moomins" (from 1979), often referred to as "The Fuzzy Felt Moomins", produced by Film Polski and Jupiter Films was also a European production, made in different countries like Poland and Austria.
Marc Paul Chinoy directed a puppet animation feature length film based on the famous "Pogo" comic strip in 1980. Titled I go Pogo, it was aired a few times on American cable channels but, has yet to be commercially released.[citation needed]
One of the main British Animation teams, John Hardwick and Bob Bura, were the main animators in many early British TV shows, and are famous for their work on the Trumptonshire trilogy.
Disney experimented with several stop motion techniques by hiring independent animator-director Mike Jittlov to do the first stop motion animation of Mickey Mouse toys ever produced for a short sequence called Mouse Mania, part of a TV special commemorating Mickey Mouse's 50th Anniversary called Mickey's 50th in 1978. Jittlov again produced some impressive multi-technique stop motion animation a year later for a 1979 Disney special promoting their release of the feature film The Black Hole. Titled Major Effects, Jittlov's work stood out as the best part of the special. Jittlov released his footage the following year to 16mm film collectors as a short film titled The Wizard of Speed and Time, along with four of his other short multi-technique animated films, most of which eventually evolved into his own feature-length film of the same title. Effectively demonstrating almost all animation techniques, as well as how he produced them, the film was released to theaters in 1987 and to video in 1989.
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1980s to present
In the 1970s and '80s, Industrial Light & Magic often used stop motion model animation for films such as the original Star Wars trilogy: the chess sequence in Star Wars, the Tauntauns and AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, and various Imperial machines in Return of the Jedi are all stop motion animation, some of it using the Go films - the ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark and many of the shots of the runaway, the first two "Robocop" feature films use Phil Tippett's Go Motion version of stop motion. Stop motion was also used for some shots of the final sequence of the first "Terminator" movie, as they were for the scenes of the small alien ships in Spielberg's Batteries Not Included in 1987, animated by David W. Allen.
Allen's stop motion work can also be seen in such feature films as The Crater Lake Monster (1977), Q - The Winged Serpent (1982), The Gate (1986) and Freaked (1993). Allen's King-Kong Volkswagen commercial from the 1970s is now legendary among model animation enthusiasts.
Of note are the films of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, which mix stop motion and live actors. These include Alice, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Faust, a rendition of the legend of the German scholar. The Czech school is also well illustrated by the series Pat & Mat (1979 -- 2004), featuring two hilariously clumsy characters. It was created by Lubomír Beneš and Vladimír Jiránek, and it was wildly popular in a number of countries.
Since the general animation renaissance headlined by the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, there have been an increasing number of stop motion feature films, despite advancements with computer animation. The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton was the first of the widely released stop motion features. Henry Selick also went on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, and Tim Burton went on to direct Corpse Bride.
Another individual who found fame in clay animation is Nick Park, who created the characters Wallace and Gromit. In addition to a series of award-winning shorts and featurettes, he won the Best Animated Feature Oscar for the feature-length outing Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Chicken Run, his first feature-length production, grossed over $100 million at the North American box-office, and garnered critical praise. Other notable stop motion feature films released since 1990 include Fantastic Mr. Fox and $9.99, both released in 2009, and The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993).
