Mary Robinette Kowal - Stop Motion's Pioneers Make Fantasy History One Frame at a Time
In many ways, you could say that stop motion animation was invented to create fantasy flicks. Certainly, it's been linked to fantasy for most of its history because for decades, if you wanted a monster or supernatural creature, it was the only recourse. With the advent of CGI, stop motion's role is changing, but it retains a strong connection to the genre. Let's take a look at some of the pioneers of stop motion.
Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton
The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898) is the earliest recorded instance of stop motion. Although there is no surviving footage, the movie features a toy circus complete with acrobats and animals as they come to life. (That's right: Toy Story is as old as the 1800s.) Varying sources disagree on the details, but it's clear that one of the two men manipulated his daughter's toy circus while advancing the film one frame at a time. And thus, an art form was born.
Wladyslaw Starewicz
In 1910, the director of the Museum of Natural History in Kaunus, Lithuania had a serious problem: He needed to film stag beetles fighting, but the nocturnal bugs went to sleep whenever the studio lights came on. So he took the exoskeletons and put them over armature wire, creating the first stop motion puppets. His short movie Lucanus Cervus (1910) was so successful, he went on to create a fairy tale performed entirely with bugs, The Beautiful Lukanida, regarded as the first stop motion movie performed with puppets. So CGI flicks like A Bug's Life owe their ancestry to this turn-of-the-century insect voyeur.
Willis O'Brien
O'Brien started his stop motion career with clay figures like in Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915) -- a short about the romantic tribulations of a caveman -- which led directly to him being hired to create the creatures for The Lost World (1925). By this point, O'Brien had pioneered the technique of using rubber skins over metal armature. He continued refining his technique and created one of the most famous of all stop motion creatures, King Kong, in 1933. Here the beast's fur is constantly in motion from the animators touching him -- a hurdle that kept stop motion from tackling hairy beasts for years to come.
Ray Harryhausen
One of O'Brien's assistants was Ray Harryhausen, who took the concept of stop motion and ran with it, focusing on making the animation a seamless part of the entire movie. To that end he provided special effects in fantasy flicks ranging from 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (his first color feature flick) to Clash of the Titans (1981). His fight scene in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) between seven animated skeletons and three live actors is credited with inspiring a whole generation of filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton and James Cameron.
Will Vinton
Did you know that the word "claymation" is a registered trademark? Yep, Will Vinton, best known for the California Raisins, refined clay animation into a distinct enough form that he registered the term as a way to distinguish what he was doing from other clay animators. At its heart though, this is still clay over armature. One of the most striking uses of his sculpted clay work occurs in Return to Oz (1985), in which the Nome King is represented by an uncanny mix of claymation and live action.
Aardman Studios
Started in 1975 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, Aardman is part of a growing movement to use the limitations of stop motion as a stylistic choice. Their feature length movie Chicken Run (2000) really brought clay animation back to the table as a vibrant filmmaking technique, which can be seen more recently in movies like Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). Their movies all have a distinctive look centering around the replaceable features on their puppets' faces.
Henry Selick
Also celebrating the visual aesthetic of stop motion, Henry Selick has directed visual classics like The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the first full-length, stop motion feature from a major American studio, James and the Giant Peach, and Coraline. With Coraline, he teamed with LAIKA to bring us the first 3D stop motion animated flick. While CGI movies like Avatar might mean the end of stop motion as a special effect, others like Fantastic Mr. Fox show us that stop motion as an artistic choice is still a vibrant form.
Who is your favorite master of stop motion animation?
Mary Robinette Kowal is the winner of the 2008 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a professional puppeteer. Her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, is being published by Tor in 2010.
Not exactly my favorite, but Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby and Davey and Goliath, was a major figure in the field and he unfortunately just passed away a couple of weeks ago on the 8th.
As for my fave ... Hmmm. I think I'll go with David W. Allen since he did so much enjoyable (if not for the right reasons) lowbrow stuff like Laserblast, Freaked, Flesh Gordon and the Puppet Master series. He also did the Pillsbury Doughboy all through the 70s and 80s.
Okay, so this is weird. I just took a break from writing an essay about Willis O'Brien and David Allen, and checked my email to find a link to this cool post (thanks, Chris!).
Starewicz's films are incredible -- eerie, joyful, creepy, unlike anything else in cinema (check him out on Youtube).
Also, I would include Jan Švankmajer. Again eerie, joyful, creepy. Like Starewicz, his work has the atmosphere of a nightmare. And let's not forget the other Czechs, Jiri Barta and Jiri Trnka and the great Karel Zeman.
But it's Willis O'Brien who forged the art in the States, and yes -- I'd concur with Sarcastro -- it's David Allen who followed in his footsteps, right down to the sad fact that his grandest creation never saw the light of day. With O'Brien, it was War Eagles (Vikings atop giant eagles in the 1940's, battling over New York City). With Allen, it was The Primevals (also with Vikings, at least in the earliest version).
Full disclosure: My novel October Dark is coming out next month. (starred review in Library Journal!) It tells a secret history of the fantastic film, centered on O'Brien, and his encounter with an undying Phantasmagoria magician in 1931. The aftermath of that encounter echoes down the decades to 1977, where a suburban kid named Will Travers stumbles onto secrets beneath the Dimension 150 Movie Palace where Star Wars is playing.
Will is a rabid 8mm stop-motion animator, as was I, and born on Halloween (me too), and he worships O'Brien, Harryhausen, Jim Danforth, and most of all David Allen, whose epic The Primevals he eagerly awaits.
End of plug.
Allen worked on the film from the late sixties (when it was called Raiders of the Stone Ring, with Vikings) up to his death in 1999 at the age of 54.
Back in 1978, Cinefantastique did a cover story on the unmade film, currently in preproduction, a tale of adventurers and Yeti and lizard aliens, reportedly welded to a rigorously intellectual premise (undisclosed). Allen's ambitions for the film increased over the years, and I think it's safe to say his intention for The Primevals was the fulfillment of the art form, and his life's work.
Oh, Jim Danforth also needs to be on the list, too, perhaps in caps.
thanks,
David
david_herter@hotmail.com
I must admit that I haven't seen many of these films, but that is simply due to a lack of opportunity. I really must sign up for Netflix.
My favorite on the list is still Ray Harryhausen. Clash of the Titans is one of the movies I remember watching as often as possible on TV while growing up. I’m looking forward to the remake. I am really excited by what I’ve seen in the trailers.
I would like to throw out a hypothesis that the computer animation of today is a continuation of stop motion animation. Computer animators work with digital models instead of clay or rabbit fur models, but I believe that the principles are the same. The digital models are manipulated one frame at a time. The computers come in to fill in the textures of the digital models after the animation is complete. Of course my expertise is limited to DVD bonus features. I invite anyone with more experience to weigh in.