10 great stop-motion animated films

Objects set in a tiny tableau are carefully and barely perceptibly moved. The camera captures the scene, and then those objects – malleable character figurines (‘puppets’) and other miniature props – are moved and captured again. Played in sequence, those two shots now give the illusion of movement; they bring the inanimate to life. That entire deliberate process, however – of manipulating and shooting objects – must be repeated as many as 24 times in order to produce a single second of moving film.

The delicate, time-consuming nature of stop motion has unsurprisingly seen cinema move slowly in embracing it fully. The pioneering stop-motion filmmakers, including Władysław Starewicz and Jiří Trnka, more commonly made shorts rather than features, while Hollywood innovators Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen created stop-motion sequences for what were otherwise live-action pictures. Though stop motion has been around since cinema’s very beginning, it wasn’t until the 1990s, at the dawn of CG animation, that stop-motion animated features started even being made in earnest in Hollywood.

Painstaking though animating a film through stop motion may be, what comes out the other end has a quality that’s uniquely, fantastically its own. Most often, stop motion has been used to make children’s fare, the tactility of the handmade world giving a stop-motion film the feel of, as Guillermo del Toro puts it, “a toy world made alive”. But the form also lends itself to more mature visions. The jerky strangeness of the animation makes stop motion ideal for films of a spooky or surreal bent, while the odd realism of the three-dimensional form has seen stop motion used to tell offbeat dramatic stories such as Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa (2015).

As our Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen season begins, here are 10 films that showcase stop motion’s uncanny magic.

Directors: Władysław and Irene Starewicz

In its opening frames, The Tale of the Fox states proudly that it is a “revolution in the history of cinema”, and well it might: the film, which demanded from its makers 18 straight months of production and years more of post-production, was the first feature to be fully animated by stop-motion puppetry. That makes it notable, but it’s the sophistication and artistry of the work by stop-motion pioneer Władysław Starewicz that makes the film still compelling as cinema.

Based on medieval European stories of vulpine trickster Reynard the Fox, The Tale of the Fox sees wily Reynard steal food from and repeatedly dupe his fellow animals, all the while evading the ruling lion king. The adaptation, by Starewicz and his co-director/co-writer daughter Irene, shows none of the frustration of its making, the material executed with a rambunctious, irreverent humour. Undeniable, meanwhile, is the fairytale beauty of the handiwork by the Starewiczes, who lens their anthropomorphised menagerie and storybook landscapes lovingly in monochrome.

Director: Jiří Trnka

Influential Czech animator Jiří Trnka used one of his first short films to ridicule one totalitarian regime (his country’s former occupier, Nazi Germany, in 1946’s Springman and the SS), and he used his very last to criticise another. Having found backing from Czechoslovakia’s ruling Communists for earlier films, including his kaleidoscopic A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959), Trnka in the end bit the party that fed him with his unsparing authoritarian lampoon The Hand.

Content to make pottery for his own amusement, a sculptor is one day confronted inside his home by a giant gloved hand, which demands the sculptor create a bust in its image. Not persuaded by the promise of money or by threats, the sculptor is ultimately imprisoned and forced to create pieces that glorify his captor. Rendered in minimal, muted colour, The Hand, in just 18 minutes, conveys all of Trnka’s despair, in a late stage of his career, at having had to work under a regime that permitted only officially sanctioned creativity. The film was eventually banned by Czech authorities, underlining Trnka’s point, but it survives today as a small monument to free artistic expression, as well as to Trnka’s streamlined mastery of animated storytelling.

Directors: Brothers Quay

In their 45 years working across film, commercials and music videos, UK-based American twin animators the Brothers Quay have produced dozens of shorts, often in an atmospheric surrealist style reminiscent of Cold War-era eastern European animation. Theirs are worlds of old parts and discarded everyday items – nails, lightbulbs, meat – that in their abandonment have taken on a life of their own.

In Street of Crocodiles, perhaps the brothers’ finest work, our world is a tired old peep box, in which a severe-looking puppet and assorted knick-knack creatures interact with their miniature realm, itself crawling with life. Backed by an assaultive string score, the film is less about making logical sense than it is about sensation, and the brothers’ very pleasure in the practice of animation. Rusty screws dance around dried mud; an ice cube melts on a dusty mirrored surface; dispersed seeds regroup to form a fluffy dandelion head. These are images so tactile you can feel them just by looking.

Director: Jan Švankmajer

Alice will seem familiar enough to Lewis Carroll aficionados: a young Victorian-era girl, bored at home, follows a timepiece-sporting rabbit into a land of bizarre characters and illogic. But the director, Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, is a macabre fabulist with a penchant for the antique and the grotesque; and so his Alice tumbles into a stop-motion Wonderland that resembles the inside of a moth-bitten curiosity cabinet, where the Caterpillar is a beaten-up old sock with false teeth, the White Rabbit a shoddily taxidermied bunny whose ruptured body bleeds sawdust.

These are Švankmajer’s preferred playthings – figures with texture and an eerie life – and they are, too, for his Alice, presumably, with our heroine voicing the Wonderland characters throughout the film, as though its events were perhaps not of a dream but an active product of the girl’s playtime imagination. It’s not strictly a kids’ film – it’s not even strictly Carroll, as acknowledged by the film’s Czech title, Něco z Alenky, which translates to ‘Something from Alice’ – but Švankmajer’s interpretation of Carroll’s Alice stories evokes the simultaneous menace, wonder and novel strangeness of the world as it can appear to a child.

Director: Nick Park

Before Bristol-based animation house Aardman graduated to feature filmmaking with cinema’s finest animal-based prison breakout movie in 2000’s Chicken Run, the studio enjoyed its greatest success with its Oscar-winning Wallace and Gromit shorts. 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, considered the best of the series – in a BFI poll in 2000 it was voted the 18th best work of British television – is typically droll stuff: inventor Wallace and his silently savvy canine companion Gromit take in a lodger who turns out, naturally, to be a penguin criminal mastermind named Feathers McGraw.

Playfully blending elements of sci-fi, noir and big-budget action cinema, The Wrong Trousers is a film with one eye on Hollywood, its laser-tripped diamond heist, blockbuster train chase finale and opening B-movie-style title design all nodding to popular genre cinema from across the pond. Still, the whole affair inescapably has to it a feeling of humble Britishness, from the wry humour through to the very animation technique, with Aardman’s ‘claymation’ approach seeing the animators’ thumbprints left visibly imprinted on the characters.

Director: Henry Selick

Previously the preserve chiefly of international and arthouse cinemas (and television), stop-motion animation got a Hollywood upgrade with the 1993 fantasy musical The Nightmare Before Christmas. Bankrolled by Disney, the film would prove a fruitful union of two eager artists: producer Tim Burton, realising at last a project he first conceived of years prior as a young animator, and director Henry Selick, a stop-motion shorts director in his feature debut given the freedom and studio resources to prove his command of the medium.

In a world where the holidays are arranged by characters from assorted fantastical realms, Jack Skellington, the MC of Halloween, discovers a doorway to the festive Christmas Town, and subsequently begins to dream of a Christmas masterminded by himself and his fellow Halloween Town ghouls. Sharing an outsider sensibility as well as the enthusiasm of young talent suddenly given the keys to the (magic) kingdom, Selick and Burton together forge a gothic paean to individual expression with a fluidity not seen before in stop motion.

Director: Wes Anderson

Stop-motion feature filmmaking had a banner 2009, with tragicomic Australian buddy movie Mary and Max, anarchic Belgian comedy A Town Called Panic and Henry Selick’s dark modern fairytale Coraline – the first film from LAIKA Studios – all premiering that year. Also released in that vintage year was Fantastic Mr. Fox, a Roald Dahl adaptation which proved a perfect fit of both form and content for a director who had previously only dabbled in stop motion.

Having incorporated stop-motion elements into 2004’s The Life Aquatic, Wes Anderson in Fantastic Mr. Fox swaps his usual stylised live-action dioramas entirely for actual dioramas – all the better to control every inch of his film, from backdrops of perpetually umber sky to the (often bewildered) expressions on the characters’ faces. And in interpreting Dahl’s novel, about a slippery gentleman fox who must outwit three farmers as they relentlessly hunt him and his family, Anderson finds the dry whimsy and occasional sourness of the author comfortably matches his own.

Director: Travis Knight

Since their first feature, American animation outfit LAIKA have brought a blockbuster polish and scale to their films by hybridising CGI and stop motion. Kubo and the Two Strings is a particularly lavish example of this blending of animation styles. That openness to different forms, however, is exhibited further still in the film’s design, which incorporates characters who nod to the masked figures of Noh theatre; creatures and crafts styled like origami; and sets inspired by vivid Japanese ukiyo-e art.

The film’s setting is a fairytale feudal Japan, where a one-eyed boy named Kubo, who has the ability to magically animate objects by playing the shamisen, embarks on a quest to vanquish his evil grandfather after he’s left orphaned. It’s an almost boilerplate hero’s journey narrative, with a foolish comedy sidekick and a wise mentor thrown in, in the form of, respectively, a samurai-shaped beetle and a talking monkey. But gradually these archetypal characters morph into something else, more poignant, and director Travis Knight finds space in that classic narrative to wrestle with both what it means to die and what it is to be left behind.

Director: Phil Tippett

Responsible for nifty stop-motion sequences in other directors’ films going back to the first Star Wars (1977), visual effects guru Phil Tippett finally arrived at his own stop-motion feature in 2021. The film, Mad God, took Tippett more than 30 years to complete, and it shows: a wordless journey through junkyard landscapes littered with appalling Boschian creatures, the film is mind-boggling in its imagination and visual detail.

Opening on a gas-mask-wearing figure dropping from the sky in a diving bell, Mad God is a slow descent into an inexplicable industrial hell; here, shambling humanoid drones are burned and splattered for sport, a rotten mouth pictured on a TV screen babbles in baby talk, and giant masked abominations are shocked endlessly by electric chair. Without a clear narrative and reflecting no contemporary trends, Mad God is cinematic outsider art, patiently crafted over many years for one purpose: pure, individual expression of the artist.

Directors: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

Working in stop motion for the first time, fantasy and horror maestro Guillermo del Toro finds an ideal outlet for his enduring twin interest in the physically and morally monstrous. Co-directing with the late Mark Gustafson, del Toro presents a gallery of grotesques – janky wooden puppets, milky-eyed chimps, decomposing undead rabbits – in an adaptation of The Adventures of Pinocchio that transposes the action to Fascist Italy.

Created by woodcarver Geppetto following the death of his son, the titular incurably curious wooden ‘boy’ is exploited first by circus showrunner Count Volpe and then the Podestà, a local Fascist official who believes Pinocchio’s near-immortality could make him valuable to the Mussolini regime. Typically for del Toro, in this world horror and beauty co-exist, in fantastical creatures such as the neon-blue, Chimera-like Death, and in a story that accommodates both a (frequently mocking) examination of fascist ideology and a touchingly sincere message about love enduring after loss.

Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen, supported by headline partner LAIKA, takes place at BFI Southbank from 1 August to 9 October.

The free exhibition LAIKA: Frame x Frame runs from 12 August to 1 October.