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title: Feats of Clay: 10 Great Stop-Motion Animation Movies
description: Looking back, 20 years later, at 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' and its esteemed place in a venerable animation tradition
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og:title: Feats of Clay: 10 Great Stop-Motion Animation Movies
og:description: Looking back, 20 years later, at 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' and its esteemed place in a venerable animation tradition
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twitter:title: Feats of Clay: 10 Great Stop-Motion Animation Movies
twitter:description: Looking back, 20 years later, at 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' and its esteemed place in a venerable animation tradition
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* [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/)
# Feats of Clay: 10 Great Stop-Motion Animation Movies
by
[TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/)
Oct 15, 2013 9:45 AM UTC
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, 1993\. ©Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, 1993\. ©Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection©Buena Vista Pictures/courtesy—Copyright © ©Buena Vista Pictures/courtesy Everet / Everett Collection
by
[TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/)
Oct 15, 2013 9:45 AM UTC
Looking back, 20 years later, at ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ and its esteemed place in a venerable animation tradition
## Stop, Look, and Listen
When Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (pictured) opened, in limited release, on October15, 1993, it launched a renaissance in stop-motion animation. Sure, many moviegoers were already familiar with the technique, moving objects and figurines increment by increment so that they appeared to be in motion. We'd seen it in small doses, in special effects sequences in movies like King Kong or Jason and the Argonauts, or in crude but delightful form on TV programs like Gumby and the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and many others). But this was the first time a Hollywood studio had taken a gamble on a full-length stop-motion animated feature, and the gamble paid off with a smash hit and future dual-holiday classic.
Since then, there have been a number of great stop-motion features, many of them just as macabre or strange as Nightmare. Connoisseurs of the art form began to recognize such names as Henry Selick, Laika, Aardman, and Nick Park, among others. For the rest of us, we got to marvel at the occasional stop-motion achievement, something so idiosyncratic, tactile and hand-made in an era of impersonal CGI. Here are 10 such movies that knocked our socks off, frame by painstaking frame.
gsusman
## Fantastic Planet
This French sci-fi epic uses cutout stop-motion, creating something that looks like traditional 2D cartoons but using paper cutout figures, as Terry Gilliam did for Monty Python and Trey Parker and Matt Stone did for the pilot episode of South Park. Adapting Stefan Wul's novel Oms en serie, director Rene Laloux uses the cutout medium to create a surreal world that looks like something out of Dali or Bosch.
Here, humans are a minor species on a planet ruled by Traags, humanoids a hundred times our size, who regard us somewhere between pets to be cherished and pests to be eradicated. War breaks out between the two species and threatens to destroy them both. In the meantime, statues dance, rockets get stomped on, and silly hats get worn.
The combination of futuristic sci-fi and retro animation technique is fascinating; it makes the story feel more classic than it is. The movie's visual imagination — tall, blue-skinned aliens, tentacled predators, and gnarled jungles — seems to anticipate the world of James Cameron's Avatar. gsusman
## Alice
Czech animator Jan Svankmajer is one of the most original artists – and one of the most surreal and unsettling – working in stop-motion. Working in both claymation and pixilation (animation of found objects), he creates worlds where bizarre metamorphoses become commonplace and ordinary objects take on ominous life even when they're still. In his first feature-length film, he brings this sensibility to his adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice stories.
Alice is played by a real girl, but her stuffed rabbit comes to life and leads her to a weird world full of stop-motion and pixilated creatures. (And when Alice shrinks, she becomes a doll.) The scissor-wielding rabbit also turns out to be the Queen's executioner.
It's worth remembering that Svankmajer's homeland was still part of Communist Eastern Europe when the film was made (indeed, some of his earlier shorts were disturbing and idiosyncratically personal enough that they briefly got him banned from filmmaking). It's hard not to read Alice as both a child's nightmare and as a political allegory, about a land where authority is arbitrary and cruel, and where reason fails. Never has the link between Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka seemed more apparent. gsusman
## Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas
It's hard to calculate the impact of Nightmare, except to note that most of the other films on this list would never have been made if it had failed. What was unique wasn't so much the characters (clearly macabre creations from the mind of the Beetlejuice director) or the plot (which owes a clear debt to those old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials) but the physicality of this strange new world, created in Henry Selick's San Francisco studio. We'd seen creatures like these before in Ray Harryhausen effects sequences — essentially, posable action figures built over wire-frame skeletons, but never comprising a whole movie, or capable of displaying so many different moving muscles or facial expressions.
Their movements weren't seamless, but that stiff, strobing effect only served to make them seem more old-school spooky, a la Edward Gorey drawings. The story of Jack Skellington, the bored mayor of Halloweentown who misguidedly takes over Christmas, is a typical Burton fable about a misunderstood artist, but it's clear that he and Selick were both hitting early creative peaks here. gsusman
## Chicken Run
Most of the characters in this film are hens, but they have that familiar Aardman Studios look, complete with bug eyes and toothy grins. Directed by Nick Park and Peter Lord, Chicken Run plays like a feathered parody of The Great Escape. At a Yorkshire chicken ranch that looks like a German POW camp, recidivist escapee Ginger (Julia Sawalha of Absolutely Fabulous) keeps getting put in solitary (a coal bin), where she bounces a Brussels sprout off the walls like Steve McQueen with his ball in Great Escape. A brassy Yank rooster (Mel Gibson) appears and offers to teach the chickens to fly to freedom, even though the only flying he's ever done is out of a circus cannon.
Nonetheless, the fowl need to flee, and soon, before rancher Mrs. Tweedy (who's just bought an industrial cooking contraption worthy of Aardman's Wallace and Gromit) turns them all into pot pies. The slapstick premise reaps endless rewards, from the humor (there's little as funny as a panicky chicken trying to fly), to the voice acting (this is Mel Gibson's finest performance of the last 15 years) to the sheer ingenuity on display in every frame. gsusman
## Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
After several impeccable short films featuring eccentric inventor Wallace and his even smarter dog, Gromit, Aardman finally gave us a feature-length adventure for the duo. Marking Curse of the Were-Rabbit from beginning to end is the series' trademark cleverness (Wallace's goofy gadgets being an extension of the animators' own inventiveness in bringing the claymation pair to life), throwaway puns, and celebration of English quaintness.
Here, the cheese-loving inventor and the silent canine are running a pest-control business, protecting the townsfolk's prized vegetable gardens from ravenous rabbits. But Wallace's attempt to use technology to brainwash veggie-despoiling urges out of the bunnies results in the inadvertent creation of the title monster.
The resulting chills (with a tip of the hat to the classic Universal monster movies of the 1930s and '40s) are suitable for wee viewers, while there's plenty for adults that will go over kids' heads. Not just jokes, but an appreciation for the craftsmanship of Nick Park, Steve Box, and the Aardman team, from the wondrous Gromit himself (who somehow manages to be even more expressive without a mouth) to the entire universe built to house Aardman's claymation creations. gsusman
## Coraline
Nightmare Before Christmas fan Neil Gaiman met Henry Selick just as he was about to publish Coraline, a meeting that inspired the elaborate, spooky screen version of the Sandman author's novel for kids. It took seven years for Selick to complete the movie, which was the first for the Laika stop-motion animation studio and one of the first stop-motion movies to be shot in 3D.
Facially, the characters are an improvement over the already intricate creatures of "Nightmare," each with a set of interchangeable mouths and other features that offer a combined potential of more than 200,000 facial expressions. (Some of the characters were manufactured through the use of black-and-white 3D printers, a first.) The movie also called for the building of 150 different sets at the Laika studio.
The result is a mesmerizing and truly creepy tale of a girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who, disenchanted with her parents, discovers an alternate world, complete with a new mom and dad who will spoil her. But Other Mother turns out to be a soul-stealing witch, and Coraline must rely on her wits not only to escape but to free the other trapped souls. The stop-motion figures turn out to be apt for a story whose central recurring image is that of a girl or woman with stitched black buttons where her eyes should be, like a doll. Of course, Selick's stars really are dolls, yet they're as unique, lively, and soulful as real people. gsusman
## Fantastic Mr. Fox
After years of making movies that placed people like playthings in precious, dollhouse-like settings (the townhouse in The Royal Tenenbaums, the ship of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the train cars of The Darjeeling Limited), it seemed natural that Wes Anderson would go all the way and make a stop-motion movie. His miniaturist's eye is perfectly suited to the children's storybook world of Roald Dahl, an author who treated kids like little sophisticates, capable of appreciating satires on human foibles that alternate between whimsy and terror.
In this case, it's a story about a fox (voiced with characteristic suaveness by George Clooney) whose love of larceny finally gets him in trouble with three very dangerous chicken ranchers. Even as a drama of family jealousy typical of Anderson or co-screenwriter Noah Baumach (The Squid and the Whale) unfolds under his earthen roof, Mr. Fox must pull together all the woodland critters to take on the ranchers. The animals were initially designed by Henry Selick (who had also worked with Anderson on the otherworldly sea creatures in Life Aquatic), and every whisker seems to vibrate with life. gsusman
## The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Sometimes, in Aardman movies, the occasional thumbprint is visible on the plasticine figures; consider it a sign of authenticity and individuality. Directed by Peter Lord, Pirates is Aardman's first claymation movie in 3D, and it's based on a children's book, not an original story — but the tale's absurdity and creativity are pure Aardman.
Hugh Grant is his usual dry, witty self as the Pirate Captain, seeking some credibility for himself and his hapless crew by entering the Pirate of the Year contest. Somehow, Queen Victoria (herself a swashbuckling avenger) and Charles Darwin get involved. (Indeed, in England, the movie was released under the title The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Here, however, marketers decided that scientists aren't cool, and that the movie's preoccupation with evolution might alienate a large swath of the American public that doesn't believe in that bedrock principle of contemporary science.) The movie was overshadowed by 2012's two other great stop-motion films, but like Grant's captain, it won't settle for being elbowed aside for long. gsusman
## ParaNorman
Laika's second feature, its first without Henry Selick, and its first using 3D color printers to manufacture characters, ParaNorman is the Burton-esque story of a boy cursed with the ability to talk to ghosts. (Told by his mom that he needs to let go of his memories of Grandma because she's "in a better place," Norman replies, "No, she's not," since he knows she's still sitting on the living room sofa, and is still complaining.)
This skill makes Norman something of a haunted outcast, a la Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. But it also makes him the only one who realizes that the town is about to be invaded by zombies, and that only he can save the day. Given the nature of the story, the visuals are unusually creepy and ghoulish, especially for a kids' movie.
There's also an openly gay character (a first for a children's animated movie), though his orientation isn't revealed until the final moments (reinforcing the movie's message about withholding judgment of other people). All of this makes ParaNorman unusually sophisticated, though kids who are into monsters and zombies may eat it up without noticing some of the material flying over their heads. gsusman
## Frankenweenie
Tim Burton brings his career full circle with this feature-length adaptation of the animated short that was his first release. Shot in glorious black-and-white (in homage to James Whale's 1930s Frankenstein movies), the movie centers on Victor Frankenstein, here a suburban kid who harnesses lightning to reanimate his beloved dead dachshund, Sparky.
Victor is a smart and talented kid — in an apt touch, the movie begins with Victor's own 3D stop-motion animated home movie, a monster mini-epic featuring Sparky as its Godzilla-like hero — but those qualities also make him an outcast with no friends, like many a Burton protagonist. The film is full of witty visual and aural references to past Burton features (notably, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Sleepy Hollow), as well as allusions to the classic monster movies Burton watched as a child.
Once Sparky gets loose, of course, all the other kids want reanimated pets, and soon the town is overrun with monstrous misfit creatures. But Frankenweenie is actually a sweet story despite its often ghoulish trappings, like many Burton movies — in this case, a story of just how far a lonely and misunderstood kid will go to preserve a friendship. According to Disney, Frankenweenie was the first black-and-white movie and the first stop-motion animated movie to be presented in the giant-screen IMAX format. gsusman
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