Stop motion
[8] While actual recordings of the passage of Venus have not been located, some practice discs survived and the images of one were turned into a short animated film decades after the development of cinematography.
[15] De Chomón's Sculpteur moderne was released on 31 January 1908[16] and features heaps of clay molding itself into detailed sculptures that are capable of minor movements.
The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1908, considered lost) by Blackton and his British-American Vitagraph partner Albert E. Smith showed an animated performance of figures from a popular wooden toy set.
Other notable stop-motion films by Cohl include Les allumettes animées (Animated Matches) (1908),[32] and Mobilier fidèle (1910, in collaboration with Romeo Bosetti).
[33] Mobilier fidèle is often confused with Bosetti's object animation tour de force Le garde-meubles automatique (The Automatic Moving Company) (1912).
The extant black-and-white film shows a matchstick figure writing an appeal to donate a Guinea for which Bryant & May would supply soldiers with sufficient matches.
As a means to plan his performances, ballet dancer and choreographer Alexander Shiryaev started making approximately 20- to 25-centimeter-tall puppets out of papier-mâché on poseable wire frames.
He garnered much attention and international acclaim with these short films, including the 10-minute The Beautiful Leukanida (Прекрасная Люканида, или Война усачей с рогачами) (March 1912), the two-minute Happy Scenes from Animal Life (Веселые сценки из жизни животных), the 12-minute The Cameraman's Revenge (Прекрасная Люканида, или Война усачей с рогачами, October 1912) and the 5-minute The Grasshopper and the Ant (Стрекоза и муравей, 1913).
Apart from the titular dinosaur and "missing link" ape, it featured several cavemen and an ostrich-like "desert quail", all relatively lifelike models made with clay.
Dans les Griffes de L'araignée (finished 1920, released 1924) featured detailed hand-made insect puppets that could convey facial expressions with moving lips and eyelids.
[citation needed] Starewicz finished the first feature stop motion film Le Roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox) in 1930, but problems with its soundtrack delayed its release.
Hungarian-American filmmaker George Pal developed his own stop motion technique of replacing wooden dolls (or parts of them) with similar figures displaying changed poses and/or expressions.
Trnka would make several more award-winning stop motion features including The Emperor's Nightingale (1949), Prince Bayaya (1950), Old Czech Legends (1953), or A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959).
They made three theatrical feature films Willy McBean and His Magic Machine (1965), The Daydreamer (1966, stop motion / live-action) and Mad Monster Party?
Polish studio Se-ma-for produced popular TV series with animated puppets in adaptations of Colargol (Barnaby the Bear in the UK, Jeremy in Canada) (1967-1974) and The Moomins (1977-1982).
Will Vinton followed with several other successful short film experiments including The Great Cognito, The Creation, and Rip Van Winkle which were each nominated for Academy Awards.
Czech filmmakers Lubomír Beneš and Vladimír Jiránek debuted their animated puppet characters Pat & Mat, two inventive but clumsy neighbors, in the 7-minute short Kuťáci in 1976.
Jittlov again produced some impressive multi-technique stop-motion animation a year later for a 1979 Disney special promoting their release of the feature film The Black Hole.
A further series in 1986, called Lip Sync, premiered the work of Richard Goleszowski (Ident), Barry Purves (Next), and Nick Park (Creature Comforts), as well as further films by Sproxton and Lord.
[50] Stop motion was also used for some shots of the final sequence of the first Terminator movie, also for the scenes of the small alien ships in Spielberg's Batteries Not Included in 1987, animated by David W. Allen.
In 1985, Will Vinton and his team released an ambitious feature film in stop motion called "The Adventures Of Mark Twain" based on the life and works of the famous American author.
Other notable stop-motion feature films released since 2000 include Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), $9.99 (2009), Anomalisa (2015), Henry Selick's Wendell and Wild (2022) and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022).
Since 2009, Laika, the stop-motion successor to Will Vinton Studios, has released five feature films, which have collectively grossed over $400 million: Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014), Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) and Missing Link (2019).
The third and latest stop motion short in stereo 3D was The Incredible Invasion of the 20,000 Giant Robots from Outer Space in 2000 by Elmer Kaan[55] and Alexander Lentjes.
Tippett also used the process extensively in his 1984 short film Prehistoric Beast, a 10 minutes long sequence depicting a herbivorous dinosaur (Monoclonius), being chased by a carnivorous one (Tyrannosaurus).
A low-tech, manual version of this blurring technique was originally pioneered by Władysław Starewicz in the silent era, and was used in his feature film The Tale of the Fox (1931).
The reasons for using stop motion instead of the more advanced computer-generated imagery (CGI) include the low entry price and the appeal of its distinct look.
[63] Guillermo del Toro aimed to praise the benefits of stop motion in his movie Pinocchio, saying that he wanted "the expressiveness and the material nature of a handmade piece of animation — an artisanal, beautiful exercise in carving, painting, sculpting".
[64] Many young people begin their experiments in movie making with stop motion, thanks to the ease of modern stop-motion software and online video publishing.
The Virgin Interactive Entertainment Mythos game Magic and Mayhem (1998) featured creatures built by stop-motion specialist Alan Friswell, who made the miniature figures from modelling clay and latex rubber, over armatures of wire and ball-and-socket joints.
