Stop - Motion Animation

I have been a fan of animation for as long as I can remember. My parents were the first to notice my passion in it and suggest I look further into animating. This is when I took a drawing class where one of the projects was to create a charcoal animation; ie destructive animation where you erase and redrawn your frame every time. So far I haven't been able to devote a great deal of time to actual animating, but in my spare time all I do is watch and analyze animated films.

Animation has been around as long as film has been around. With early innovators like Méliès in 1896 already attempting stop - motion, the animation industry has evolved along with traditional narrative films.

While animation has gone through many phases, many pioneered by Walt Disney and his company, the type of animation that interests me the most is stop - motion animation. Many beloved films are produced through stop - motion including The Nightmare Before Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Coraline.

Stop - motion animation is the process where an animator will move the figure by a small amount, take a picture, and repeat. When all of the photos are put together the figure now has the appearance of fluid motion. One of the best examples of this is The Nightmare Before Christmas with dance numbers and multiple characters in each scene. Even though most of the scenes were shot at 12fps, there are two exceptions.

My favorite studio, and a studio that only does stop - motion productions, is studio Laika. Laika is responsible for the stop - motion films of Coraline, ParaNorman, and their upcoming project Kubo and the Two Strings, just to name a few. Studio Laika has 10 years of experience producing stop - motion films, with several Academy Award nominations. Laika has put out stop - motion films that never cease to amaze me. From color dynamics in Coraline to the incredibly accurate representation of bullying in ParaNorman, Laika has been using stop - motion animation to create incredible pieces of art for 10 years, and I can't wait to see what their next 10 hold.

Many of my friends claim that stop - motion animation is weird or disturbing for them but that's almost the reason why I like it. It's physical objects that are manipulated into giving the appearance of smooth motion, and I think that's fascinating. Hopefully with Kubo coming out in August and Anomalisa already out in theaters, people will be more open to stop - motion animation come to understand and respect the incredible amount of work that goes into these beautiful films.

The Boxtrolls

I really like it when trailers don't give away the entire plot of a film. It's something that's becoming less and less common; movie trailers now, on average, are around two and a half minutes in length and usually give away the funniest lines, coolest moments, and main plot points of a film. It's annoying. Which is why I find it so refreshing when I find a trailer that manages to pique my interest while simultaneously not really giving me anything to work with.

Case in point with one of the trailers going around for the new stop-motion animated movie The Boxtrolls. 75% of the trailer is basically a "making of" video; giant hands sculpt tiny details onto clay faces, animators walk through the small-scale cities that they've made, things like that. It's insightful, and a way to show audiences the faces of characters that they'll be seeing in the film without giving anything away. You see some of the finished product at the end of the trailer, but only the animation; nothing about the story is revealed.

I thought that this was a great marketing tactic. It succeeded, at least, in getting me to do a little research on the film to learn a bit more about it. The Boxtrolls is based off of the 2005 children's book Here Be Monsters!, which was written and illustrated by Alan Snow. The plot summary, in one sentence via IMDB, is this: a young orphaned boy, raised by underground cave-dwelling trash collectors, tries to save his friends from an evil exterminator. Ok, now you've really got my attention.

The company behind the film (Laika, which - fun fact - is based in Portland Oregon and run by Travis Knight, the son of the co-founder of Nike) is the same company behind Coraline and ParaNorman, two really great - and kind of creepy - stop motion films. One of the directors, Graham Annable, has worked as a story artist on ParaNorman and - curve ball - as a clean up artist for The Goofy Movie. The other director, Anthony Stacchi, also directed Open Season, and worked in the VFX department of Antz and James and the Giant Peach.

With a cast that includes Elle Fanning, Ben Kingsley, and Simon Pegg, I'm gonna go out of my way and say that this will be one of the best animated movies of 2014. You heard it here first.