motion-picture camera; the animator moves the
objects slightly for each recorded frame. The
objects moved and photographed for stop-motion
animation can be full-scale or miniature models,
puppets made of cloth or clay, or cutouts of other
drawings or pictures. Underneath some figures are
armatures, or skeletons, with fine joints and pivots,
which hold the figures in place between the anima-
tors’ careful manipulations. Though more sophisti-
cated types of stop-motion animation are available,
many animators still use this method because it is
relatively inexpensive and quick to produce.
Among the first American stop-motion films
was The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric
Tragedy(1915), by Willis O’Brien, who went on to
animate stop-motion dinosaurs for Harry O. Hoyt’s
live-action adventure The Lost World(1925), then
added giant apes to his repertoire with Merian C.
Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong
(1933) and Schoedsack’s Mighty Joe Young(1949).
Inspired by O’Brien’s work on King Kong, Ray Har-
ryhausen set out at thirteen to become a stop-
motion animator and is now most famous for his
work on Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts
(1963), a Hollywood retelling of the ancient Greek
legend. (O’Brien’s and Harryhausen’s work estab-
lished a continuing tradition of using animation
to create special effects for incorporation into
live-action feature films.) Feature-length animated
narrative films that use this technique include
Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of
the Were-Rabbit(2005), Wes Anderson’s Fantastic
Mr. Fox(2009), and Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie
(2012).
Digital animation, which may begin with draw-
ings, storyboards, puppets, and all the traditional112 CHAPTER 3TYPES OF MOVIES
Alternative animationAnimation isn’t just for
narrative. Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s 2008 documentary
portraying soldiers’ recollections of the Lebanon war of 1982,
uses animation to visualize his interview subjects’ memories,
dreams, and hallucinations [1]. The artist Oskar Fischinger
began experimenting with abstract animation in 1926 [2].
The fifty avant-garde movies he animated, including Motion
Painting No. 1(1947), influenced generations of animators
and experimental filmmakers. Influential filmmakers like Jan
Svankmejer and his stylistic progeny Stephen and Timothy
Quay (better known as the Brothers Quay) employ stop-
motion animation to create dark, surreal experimental
movies like the Quays’ The Comb(1990) [3].132