Stop motion animation is almost as old as film-making itself. The first instance of the technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackman for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. In 1902, the film, "Fun in a Bakery Shop" used clay for a stop-motion "lightning sculpting" sequence. The Haunted Hotel (1907) is another stop motion film by James Stuart Blackton, and was a resounding success when released. Segundo de Chomons (1871-1929), from Spain, released Hotel Electrico later that same year, and used similar techniques as the Blackton film. In 1908, "A Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Nightmare" and "The Sculptors Nightmare" , a film by Billy Bitzer, were released. December of 1916 , brought the first of Willie Hopkin's 54 episodes of "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Also in December of 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She would release her first film in 1917, "Romeo and Juliet". Another one of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary (1912).
The great European stop motion pioneer was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1892-1965), who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910), The Ant and the Grasshopper (1911), Voyage to the Moon (1913), On the Warsaw Highway (1916), Frogland (1922), The Magic Clock (1926), The Mascot, (aka, The Devil's Ball) (1934), and In the Land of the Vampires (1935), to name but a few of his over fifty animated films.
Starevich was the first filmmaker to use stop-action animation and puppets to tell a story. He began by producing insect documentaries which, in turn, led to experiments with the stop-action animation of insects and beetles. Initially he wired the legs to the insects' bodies, but he improved this substantially in the ensuing years by creating leather and felt-covered puppets with technically advanced ball & socket armatures. One of his innovations was the use of motion blur which he achieved, most likely, by the use of hidden wires.
His techniques took hold among the avant-garde in Eastern Europe in the 1920s and '30s, growing out of a strong cultural tradition of puppetry. Notable artists include the Russian Alexander Ptushko, Hungarian George Pal and the influential Czech animator Jiří Trnka. The aesthetic tradion of the puppet film was continued by Bretislav Pojar, Kihachiro Kawamoto, Ivo Caprino, Jan Švankmajer, Jiri Barta, Stephen and Timothy Quay (Brothers Quay), and Galina Beda.
The great pioneer of American stop motion was Willis O'Brien (1886-1962). In 1914, O'Brien began animating a series of short subjects set in prehistoric times. He animated his early creations by covering wooden armatures with clay , a technique he further perfected by using ball & socket armatures covered with foam, foam latex, animal hair and fur. Birth of a Flivver (1915), Morpheus Mike (1915) , The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1916), R.F.D. 10,000 B.C.: A Mannikin Comedy (1917/18), The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919), The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), The Son of Kong (1933), and , with the assistance of a young Ray Harryhausen, Mighty Joe Young (1949), yet these were but a few of the many films he animated. O'Brien's Nippy's Nightmare (1916) may have been the first film to combine live actors with stop-motion characters.
Puppeteer Lou Bunin created one of the first stop motion puppets using wire armatures and his own rubber formula. The short, satiric film about WWII entitled Bury the Axis debuted in the 1939 New York World's Fair. in a Bunin went on to produce a feature-length film version of Alice in Wonderland with a live-action Alice and stop-motion puppets portraying all the rest of the characters. Bunin was blacklisted in the 1950s but still managed to create numerous TV commercials using stop motion techniques, as well as a number of children's short films.
Willis O'Brien's student Ray Harryhausen made many movies using the same techniques; most famously, the skeleton scene from Jason and the Argonauts (1964). But America and Britain were slower to embrace the puppet film, and the use of stop motion grew out of other sources. American children's television in the 1950s had often used string-puppets, and in Britain the glove-puppet had been part of popular culture from the days of Punch and Judy.
In November 1959 the first episode of Sandmännchen was shown on East German television, a children's show that had cold war propaganda as its primary function. New episodes are still being produced in Germany, making it one of the longest running animated series in the world. However, the show's purpose today has changed to pure entertainment.
In the 1960s, the French animator Serge Danot created the well-known The Magic Roundabout (from 1965) which played for many years on the BBC. Another French/Polish stop-motion animated series was Colargol (Barnaby the Bear in the UK, Jeremy in Canada), by Olga Pouchine and Tadeusz Wilkosz.
A British TV-series The Clangers (1969) became popular on television. The British artists Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall (Cosgrove Hall Films) produced a full-length film The Wind in the Willows (1983) based on Kenneth Grahame's children's classic.
Italian stop motion films include Quaq Quao (1978), by Francesco Misseri, which was stop-motion with origami, The Red and the Blue and the clay animation kitties Mio and Mao. A stop-motion animated series of Tove Jansson's "The Moomins" (from 1979), produced by Film Polski and Jupiter Films was also a european production, made in different countries like Poland and Austria. This stop-motion was rather primitive, sometimes the puppets "moved" by a series of stills instead of showing actual movements.
In North America, Jules Bass produced a series of popular Christmas specials such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (using 'Animagic' stop motion puppets) (1964). The specials were animated in Japan by Japanese stop-motion pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga. Meanwhile, Art Clokey created the television series Gumby (using clay animation) and Davey and Goliath (1960-1977).
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Clearly, the origins of stop motion was a piece of hardwork and it evolves from many failures that leads us to the creative space we indulged into these days. And its sad to see that not many have the intention to honor and understand these creators, especially Ladislaw Starewicz.Do watch his Fleur De Fougere, the puppet stop motion! - Zheng Joo
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