Text and Context – 2: The endless fascination for the genre of stop-motion

The modern-day animation industry, despite benefitting from looking back, is yet to accept some undeniably vital arguments as to why incorporating stop-motion techniques is relevant

(Originally published in The Hindu on November 18, 2022)

When special effects artist Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams was digitally creating a T-Rex for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, stop-motion filmmaking was still evolving. Spielberg’s film, as shown in one of the episodes of Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us, branched a new norm of filmmaking in which animatronics, miniatures, and stop-motion techniques were used only to supplement digital creations. Stop-motion, having been reduced to just a subgenre of filmmaking, found a niche and a home with the help of production houses such as Aardman Animations (who made it to mainstream cinema with the help of Spielberg’s DreamWorks banner) and Will Vinton Productions (which later became Laika, a major player in animation). Thanks to these production houses and filmmakers like Henry Selick, stop-motion continues to scale the graph, with creators having attained the absolute heights of realistic designs and movements through CGI, but with an eye on the past.

There’s a spectacular irony here. For decades until the late nineties, animation moved with a quest for realism. Filmmakers strived to introduce motion blur to their stop-motion creations to make them look real. The transitions and cuts had to be realistic as well, and experiments with claymation (stop-motion with the use of plasticine clay) like in Will Vinton’s earlier short films, were the closest that they could get to transitions. And now, due to reasons like the consumer-driven interest in authenticity and craftsmanship, filmmakers want their CGI-driven projects to have the ‘stop-motion effect’. The Lego Movie, for instance, had the makers bring together real Lego sets and digitally-constructed sets to give that jerky effect. The fascination for finding fingerprints and the reason for the frame rate not going above 30 FPS — apart from the enormous effort higher frame rate demands in stop-motion — is a result of the same. Interestingly, stop-motion also seems to be the immediate resort for filmmakers like Spielberg who are wary of the ‘uncanny valley’ phenomenon, which refers to the unsettling feeling that arises when a computer-generated figure is too humanlike.

The modern-day animation industry, despite benefitting from looking back, is yet to accept some undeniably vital arguments as to why incorporating stop-motion techniques is relevant. In the earlier days of stop-motion, the medium influenced the form. Filmmakers had to work around the inherent limitations of stop-motion. For instance, to solve the issue of motion blur and to avoid continuity errors between frames, figurines had to be designed in a specific way. In Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit series, Wallace has no hair. Gromit the dog, and Shaun the sheep have smoothened fur. So was the case in Henry Selick’s James and the Giant Peach. The minimal facial features weren’t just to appeal to children. Music had to overemphasise drama to make up for the alleged artificiality. Such quick fixes eased things up in an already strenuous filmmaking process.

The nature of the medium, at times, even affected the narrative. For instance, in Will Vinton’s Oscar-winning short film Closed Mondays (1974)…..

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