Introduction

I have always been interested in all areas of animation, including flipbooks, 2D, 3D, stop motion etc. When I was younger I experimented with stop motion using plasticine and even though I haven’t used the medium in such a long time in favour of 3D animation, I was reminded by it upon watching the Wes Anderson film “Fantastic Mr Fox” recently. I enjoy his films in general anyway, but the way he utilises a very underused style of animation and still manages to keep his very particular aesthetic in his films I found especially impressive. If his previous films are unique, “Fantastic Mr Fox” and “Isle of Dogs” further push his work into becoming even more different from most other large budget films being released. I thought that a lot of the stop-motion films I have watched often feel incredibly disparate and are not easy to compare to other stop-motion films – I feel like “Coraline”, “Anomalisa”, and “Kubo and the Two Strings” all are difficult to find films that feel like they fit in the same box as them, whereas for a lot of live-action films I might be able to group similar films more easily. Why I feel this way is I think that there is perhaps a correlation – the kind of director who will take the risk of using such a rare medium is likely the kind of director who will also take risks with how they use the properties of stop-motion to tell their story, such as in “Fantastic Mr Fox” when stop motion is used to create inhuman, beast-like movements at times for the animal characters who for a lot of the film act and move similarly to humans.

History

Historically similar to other forms of animation, stop-motion mostly has roots as a medium primarily seen as “for children”, though it has been able to transcend this reputation in more recent times, similarly to how other forms of animation are now being used to entertain an adult audience. “Wallace and Gromit”, “Pingu” and “Postman Pat” were very popular for their time in the ’80s and ’90s and maintained popularity as in my household we even watched them growing up in the mid to late ’90s and early 2000s. Although some creepy stop motion animations were being made around this time, it was not until around 1993 with Tim Burton’s “The Corpse Bridge” that somewhat creepy-looking stop-motion would hit the mainstream audience. A director named Henry Selick would direct this film, as well as other well-known stop-motion films later such as “James and the Giant Peach” and “Coraline”.

Thematic usage

I think that the choice to use this style of animation always feels like it is further contributing to a strong theme that the filmmaker is trying to go for. The stop-motion often seems to either push a more creepy, horror-like theme (as an example in the majority of Coraline, or videos such as this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NT2ZiPIukw), or a more charming, comfortable theme (such as in Pingu, or Wallace in Gromit). However, even in this, I find that a lot of stop-motion media toes the line of what is creepy or charming and even if the majority of it is either obviously going for one or the other, some elements or moments can easily switch the general feeling of the animation over to the other side. This contrast can be effective at allowing the director to play with how the audience feels and quickly switch the general feeling of the media quite easily, in a way that might be very difficult to achieve using other methods. The usage of this in small elements in non stop-motion films I believe is a very good way to quickly achieve an effect where you want to change how the audience is feeling, whether you want to make them comfortable with a fairly charming looking stop motion animation, or if you want to make them feel uncomfortable with a creepy, unnatural looking stop motion animation. I think that this is a heavily under-utilised technique, though I think that it can be very effective as seen in many of Wes Anderson’s films that feature small scenes with stop-motion animation and help make his films stand out.