As the years' progress, film takes leaps and bounds in new directions as new technology develops. From puppeteering to advanced CGI and animation, film truly outdoes itself with every coming year. However, one section of film continues to be overlooked: stop motion.
Stop motion includes a wide range of mediums, from clay to paper. The director takes pictures of each frame, in a slow and steady process. Compared to traditionally animated films, stop motion films take much longer to create because of how these films need to be produced and the work that needs to go into them. A character simply smiling can take hundreds of photos, each with a small section of character movement that needs to happen to make the full shot possible. If one single picture doesn’t line up with the rest, the whole scene needs to be reshot, and in many cases, more than one character appears in each scene. According to AthenaStudios, when scenes call for a reshoot, it can get a bit pricey. Sometimes editors don’t find mistakes in scenes until much later, when the set has already been deconstructed. This means directors will have to put the set up all over again, taking more time and energy, not to mention making sure that the set matches perfectly with the original.
With the slow pace of a stop motion film's creation, a heavy amount of thought and detail goes into each scene, as the artists on the team make most of the set pieces by hand, including the faces of the characters. The items in the set of each scene contain a heavy amount of details in most films, such as Fantastic Mr. Fox by Wes Anderson. In his film, Anderson fills each scene with a number of props and different clues—one scene in a trailer had an entire wall filled with mini post-it notes, all with notes written on them.
The website, Rotten Tomatoes, rated movies, and films based on the appeal of their reviewers, but also on how the audience perceived it. If the film has a 60% or more rating it will be deemed “fresh”, less than 60%, and the movie becomes deemed “rotten”, or one that someone shouldn’t partake in. Rotten Tomatoes rated Fantastic Mr. Fox 93% “fresh”, Corpse Bride 84%, and Nightmare Before Christmas 95%. While these movies remain more well known, other smaller stop motion films don’t receive as much press before the film’s release. Only a few commercials played for these movies: Missing Link, Early Man, The Little Prince, The BoxTrolls, and Isle of Dogs. All of these films received a fresh rating by Rotten Tomatoes. Most of these movies also had big A-lister celebrities lending these films their voices, yet most of them went unseen by the public. Whether the art style appeared too strange, or people simply didn’t know about the films, these movies did not gross as much at the box office.
Because of these letdowns, many believe stop motion to be a dying genre, cast into the corner of movie-making until it slowly fades from existence. However, many new artists step into the field every day, adding their own touches to the world of stop motion animation—whether that be by working on larger projects or simply making their own short films. One such artist, Jim Mackenzie, works heavily in claymation as a creator of commercials and his own short films about his private art pieces. One of his latest pieces, “The Scarecrow,” even received coverage by the Huffington Post. He has even worked on some well-known commercials, such as the infamous Sprite Cranberry commercial from 2018 and 2019. The commercial became a popular meme amongst students at AFHS for a short period.
Only 11% of AFHS students surveyed believed stop motion to be better than regular motion pictures. However, many students reported that they did have a favorite stop motion film, most choosing The Nightmare Before Christmas. What most of this proves: stop motion remains an odd, yet enjoyable, field of film that continues to be heavily overlooked, despite no two movies being quite the same in execution.
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