![]() ![]() ![]() He finally retired after completing work on 1981’s Clash of the Titans. Starting with Mighty Joe Young in 1949, Harryhausen worked on many popular science fiction films, creating aliens, prehistoric creatures, and mythic beasts in numerous films. Kanopy offers a documentary that summarizes his career. One of these new animators was Ray Harryhausen, a stop motion animator who had a decades-long career and worked on some of the most notable stop motion science fiction films. This film set the template of every giant monster movie to follow, but its wonderful stop motion Kong was the thing that stayed in the public imagination, inspiring many young talents to go into the field of stop motion animation. The dinosaurs made such an impression on audiences that their creator, Willis O’Brien, survived the transition to sound films and worked on another landmark movie, 1933’s King Kong. An adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle adventure story about explorers finding a dinosaur-filled plateau in South America, The Lost World was notable for the fact that it made extensive use of stop animated models to create the most lifelike dinosaurs seen on film at the time. The first feature-length film to make extensive use of stop motion animation was 1925’s The Lost World. Although stop motion shorts such as these were popular throughout the 1910s, it would take until the early 1920s for what would today be considered feature-length stop motion pictures to be produced. One influential early stop motion artist was Wladyslaw Starewicz, whose early stop motion works, such as Battle of the Stag Beetles and The Ant and the Grasshopper, featured dead insects with wireframe skeletons acting out dramatic plots. One of the earliest surviving films to use stop motion is 1902’s Fun in a Bakery Shop, which uses a “lightning sketch” version of claymation to animate a face made out of dough. Sadly, this is a lost film, and no verified stills or parts of the film have been recovered. ![]() The very first stop motion film produced was 1898’s The Humpty Dumpty Circus, a short film made using dolls with jointed limbs to simulate the movements of circus acrobats. The history of stop motion animation is almost as long as that of film itself. You may find it useful to create a Kanopy account through the library's website, as many of the films mentioned in this article are available only there. Before you start on your own stop motion film, read about the history of the art form and the milestones in the development of this style of animation. Did you also know that stop motion animation, or the art of animating objects by moving them in small increments between individual photographic frames, is actually the oldest style of animation on film? It has a long history, featuring many different types of objects and figurines. ![]()
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