There are two stop-motion animation films coming out soon. New Movies Bring the Inanimate to Life looks at the technique’s history:
Stop-motion animation dates back at least to 1907, when J. Stuart Blackton used the technique to show a dinner being prepared by invisible hands in his short film ‘The Haunted Hotel.’The technique has a venerable history in live-action films, used to create dinosaurs in the silent classic ‘The Lost World,’ the giant ape in the original ‘King Kong,’ the beasts in films by special-effects master Ray Harryhausen and the giant robots in ‘RoboCop.’
Stop-motion has had a varied life on television with such shows as ‘Gumby,’ ‘Davey and Goliath,’ Rankin-Bass productions like ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and the California Raisins commercials.
Aardman gave stop-motion a modern makeover in the mid-1980s with its ultra-cool animation for Peter Gabriel’s music video ‘Sledgehammer.’
Advances in realistic computer effects in the last decade have largely choked off stop-motion animation in live-action films. And despite the timing of ‘Corpse Bride’ and ‘Wallace & Gromit’ along with Aardman’s ‘Creature Comforts’ TV series, stop-motion’s future looks spotty.
‘I think we’re either going to die on the vine, become a buggy-whip factory, or we’re going to be discovered as a folk-art craft,’ said ‘Corpse Bride’ cinematographer Pete Kozachik, who worked on ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ and ‘James and the Giant Peach.’