Stop motion shorts: seven of the best on BFI Player

Britain’s rich history of stop motion filmmaking stretches back to the earliest years of cinema. There is no clear origin point, but between roughly 1906 and 1908 a range of enterprising pioneers around the world began to adapt the internal workings of movie cameras to capture frames individually rather than in rapid-fire sequence. So instead of fixing moving bodies on static celluloid images at around 16 frames per second, with stop motion inanimate objects could be manipulated and moved between each planned opening of the camera’s shutter. In “live action”, previously captured movements are reanimated in the projector. Stop motion can bring to life characters, events and stories that are unharnessed by the real world. 

Stop motion filming was also the route to drawn animation, filming sequential drawings on paper or layers of clear cels. But the term “stop motion” has become principally used to categorise works created by animating 3D objects. Many early filmmakers raided their children’s bedrooms for articulated toys to use as a readymade cast of characters for their films, but they were soon replaced by purpose-built puppets of increasing sophistication. Others experimented with malleable clay and putty to create what became later known as “Claymation”, arguably perfected by Aardman in later years. 

There is something about the mix of real and artificial movement that often lends stop motion a quietly uncanny feel: think of Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963). But its clockwork control of time and space can equally be turned to thrilling yet comic effect, for example Wallace and Gromit’s toy train chase in The Wrong Trousers (1993). While Ma vie de Courgette (2016) demonstrated that simple, open-faced puppets could carry heavy, emotional depths. It’s an art that offers a wealth of avenues, and one that remains vital, even in the digital age.

Coinciding with the BFI’s Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen season, this selection of films from the free Stop Motion collection on BFI Player offers some highlights from the medium’s history in Britain. 

Childrens’ intense relationship with their favourite toys has always existed on the cusp of fantasy and reality. Narrative tales of dolls coming to life precede the cinema, but the development of stop motion brought them alive as never before. Arthur Melbourne-Cooper was a true pioneer of the form, filming increasingly elaborate tales of toyland and even staging a biblical flood, floating Noah’s ark in his bathroom. Dreams of Toyland (also released under the title In The Land Of Nod) uses live-action bookend sequences to frame the boy’s dream, which soon turns into a nightmare as his new toy bus ends up a smoking wreck. The final shot of the boy tumbling from his bed in tears is reminiscent of the final panel of Winsor McCay’s contemporary comic strip, Little Nemo In Slumberland. 

George Pal will always be best known for his groundbreaking specials effects sci-fi films, like The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960). But his origins in animation in his birth country of Hungary, then Berlin and Eindhoven, saw him develop his patented “Pal-doll” or “Puppetoon” technique of stop motion replacement animation. Rather than puppets with articulated limbs that were moved between frames, Pal used replaceable parts and figures in different poses that could be swapped in and out to create sequences of movement. It meant his characters could change shape as they moved, bringing the “squash and stretch” principle that had added increasing dynamism to cel animation into stop motion. Of the five Horlicks cinema commercials he made with the British advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, Love On The Range (1939) is the last and best entry. A “Silly Billy Romance”, Western and Musical all rolled into six minutes of Technicolor delight. 

Though this Solidox toothpaste advert is not as polished as the productions of George Pal or Signal Films (see below), its slight scuzziness is part of its appeal. From a trundling zoom into a model’s teeth – “like pearls in a sea of tantalising loveliness” – we transition to the supposed reverse-angle, with piles of foul-looking crud nestling behind the smile.  The germs that get to work on those gums are smartly dressed but distinctly British workmen – revelling in the mire. It was filmed using a knock-off colour system, British Tricolour, with Edwin Shorter’s “Puppetonia” animation looking a long way from Pal’s “Dollywood”. But the quiet ambition and subdued colours of this sponsored reminder of low-key, everyday worries like plaque, are all signs towards readjustment to peacetime living in the British post-war landscape. 

When George Pal left for the US in November 1939 he left behind a wealth of skills and experience with his former staff. After some notable adventures in WWII, Gerald Holdsworth drew on his experience working on Horlicks ads at J. Walter Thompson’s Film Department in the 1930s and set up a stop motion studio, Signal Films. He sought out many of Pal’s animators and technicians and persuaded them to come to the UK, where they made a series of cinema commercials and sponsored shorts of exceptional quality. The washing powder advert Mousewife’s Choice is incredibly charming, demonstrating a mix of Pal’s replacement animation with the character’s faces, while using articulated armatures for their limbs. Sadly the studio’s ambition to create a feature-length adaption of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince didn’t come to fruition.

Why bother with puppets when you can just use people instead? Pixilation is a stop motion technique in which actors are posed and filmed frame by frame, dating back as least as far as Segundo de Chomón’s Hôtel électrique (1908). The Grasshopper Group was a British organisation of amateur animators that produced and showcased a range of member productions. Requiring only a camera capable of shooting single frames, a little imagination, and a lot of patience, pixilation was the perfect lo-fi medium for their early experiments. With Bride and Groom they used a £120 grant from the BFI Experimental Film Fund to further their ambition, filming in colour and in a makeshift studio. One of the real-life actors in this hybrid cartoon world is a young Bob Godfrey, at the start of his own career in animation that would result in cult TV favourites Roobarb (1974) and Henry’s Cat (1983-1993). 

Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Smallfilms company had already had success with the 2D cut-out animation series Ivor the Engine (1959-63) and Noggin the Nog (1959-65), before they tried their hand at stop motion with knitted 3D puppets for Pingwings (1961-65). The alien Clangers, who debuted in 1969, were similarly crafted but with pink wool to take advantage of the still novel colour television – not to mention the moon landings. Vote For Froglet was a special release episode to coincide with the October 1974 UK General Election and offers an extraordinary skewering of party politics. Postgate’s political past and heritage offer insight into his purpose, but to have such an intervention on BBC1 in the middle of polling day is somewhat staggering today.

Animation of all forms is filled with anthropomorphic animals, generally revealing more about humanity than natural history. Carla MacKinnon and Hannah Peel’s half-human, half-animal characters in their 2018 short O, Hunter Heart are a key part of her narrative extrapolation from real-life human testimony. The film is rooted in documentary but filled with drama. Truths about the heady poison of a toxic relationship are surfaced through the unrelating gaze of an owl atop a human body, or a gesture from joined hands replaced with the graze of sharp talon on fur. The film was one of thirteen short animations commissioned by the BBC and BFI as part of an Animation 2018 initiative. The variety of ways that stop motion is used even within that small sample is further evidence of its continued capacity to entertain, provoke, thrill and elucidate.