Wikipedia Deep Dive

Stop motion

12 min read

A Russian entomologist once wanted to film beetles mating. The beetles, uncooperative subjects that they were, kept dying under his studio lights. So Ladislas Starevich did what any reasonable person would do: he removed the beetles' limbs, replaced them with wire, and animated their corpses frame by frame. The resulting film looked so lifelike that audiences assumed he had somehow trained the insects to perform.

This is the strange magic of stop motion animation—a technique so simple in concept that a child could understand it, yet so labor-intensive that it borders on madness. Take a photograph. Move something a tiny bit. Take another photograph. Repeat this thousands of times. When you play the photographs back quickly, the object appears to move on its own.

That's it. That's the whole trick.

Before Film Even Existed

The story of stop motion begins before movies themselves, in an era when people were still figuring out how to create the illusion of movement from still images. In the mid-1800s, inventors were obsessed with devices that spun illustrations in circles to trick the eye into seeing motion—contraptions with names like the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope.

In 1849, a Belgian physicist named Joseph Plateau had an idea that wouldn't be properly realized for over a century. What if you combined his spinning-disc animation device with Charles Wheatstone's stereoscope, which created the illusion of three-dimensional depth? The result would be three-dimensional moving images—essentially what we now call 3D movies.

Wheatstone suggested using photographs of a solid object, perhaps a small statue, taken from slightly different angles. Plateau figured you could make sixteen plaster models showing sixteen stages of movement, photograph each pair in stereo, and create animated three-dimensional motion.

He never built it. By this point in his life, Plateau was nearly completely blind—ironically, damaged by his own experiments staring at the sun to study visual perception. The first person to fully understand how to create animated film couldn't see.

The Accidental Discovery

The stop trick—stop motion's simpler cousin—was discovered essentially by accident. The story goes that Georges Méliès, the French stage magician turned filmmaker, was cranking his camera on a Paris street when the mechanism jammed. He fixed it and kept filming. When he developed the footage, he discovered something magical: a bus had transformed into a hearse. People had vanished. The world had changed in an instant.

What had actually happened was mundane. While he fiddled with his camera, time passed. Vehicles and pedestrians moved. But on film, the pause was invisible—only the sudden change remained.

Méliès immediately understood the potential. In 1895, the Edison Manufacturing Company had already used a version of this technique for something rather gruesome: a film called "The Execution of Mary Stuart," in which an actress was apparently beheaded. The trick was simple—stop the camera, swap the actress for a dummy, resume filming, drop the axe. The edit was invisible.

The difference between the stop trick and stop motion is one of degree. The stop trick uses a single interruption to create one dramatic change. Stop motion uses hundreds or thousands of tiny interruptions to create the illusion of continuous movement. It's the difference between a magic trick and a sustained hallucination.

The Haunted Hotel That Changed Everything

For years, filmmakers experimented with animated objects in small doses. Edwin Porter showed letters assembling themselves in title cards. Georges Méliès reportedly animated letterforms. Émile Cohl made matches dance. But these were novelties, brief sequences amid longer films.

Then, in February 1907, J. Stuart Blackton released "The Haunted Hotel."

The film itself was a simple haunted house story with live actors. But it contained one sequence that left audiences genuinely baffled: a close-up of a table setting itself. A knife floated through the air and began cutting bread. Cups poured their own tea. Food arranged itself on plates.

There were no visible wires. No obvious trap doors. No one could figure out how it was done.

The film was an international sensation, and it created a problem for the people who made it. Blackton's partner Albert E. Smith would later claim he wanted to patent the stop motion technique, but Blackton dismissed the idea as unimportant. This may have been wisdom or folly—the technique was both too simple to protect and too fundamental to monopolize.

When "The Haunted Hotel" reached Paris, the Gaumont film company bought a copy specifically to study it. They played it frame by frame, trying to reverse-engineer the illusion. The person who finally cracked it was a newcomer named Émile Cohl, who would go on to become one of the founding figures of animation itself.

The Animator as Obsessive

What kind of person becomes a stop motion animator? The work requires a particular form of patience that borders on compulsion. A single second of animation might require twenty-four separate photographs. A five-minute film means over seven thousand frames, each requiring the animator to make tiny adjustments to puppets, sets, and lighting.

Consider Alexander Shiryaev, a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer who started making stop motion films around 1906. As a dancer, he understood movement in his bones—the weight shift that precedes a leap, the follow-through of an extended arm, the way a turn begins from the core. He built puppets about eight to ten inches tall, with wire armatures that could hold any pose, and animated them performing choreography that real dancers would struggle to execute.

According to animator Peter Lord—who would later co-create Wallace and Gromit—Shiryaev's work was decades ahead of its time. Yet it remained almost entirely unknown until 2003, when a documentary finally brought his films to light. He had been animating in near isolation, not for an audience, but because the work itself compelled him.

Then there was Ladislas Starevich and his dead beetles. After his breakthrough with insect corpses, Starevich moved to Moscow and began creating elaborate puppet films with remarkable emotional depth. His 1912 film "The Cameraman's Revenge" told the story of infidelity and blackmail among beetles—a melodrama complete with jealous spouses, illicit affairs, and a devastating moment of public humiliation when one beetle screens footage of another's indiscretion.

The film is twelve minutes long. It contains more genuine pathos than many feature films. And every movement was achieved by manipulating dried insect bodies, frame by frame, for what must have been months of work.

Clay Dreams and Lightning Sculptures

Not all early stop motion involved puppets or objects. Some of the most striking experiments used clay—a material that could be continuously reshaped between frames, allowing transformations impossible with rigid figures.

In 1902, Edwin Porter filmed "Fun in a Bakery Shop," showing a baker rapidly molding faces from dough. This wasn't quite stop motion—the baker's hands were visible, working at normal speed—but it planted a seed. What if the clay could reshape itself?

Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón answered that question in 1908 with "Sculpteur moderne." The film shows heaps of clay that appear to spontaneously organize themselves into detailed sculptures. The clay rises, forms features, creates an old woman who then stands and walks around before being squashed back down and reformed into a different pose.

The technique required the animator to work backwards, starting with the finished sculpture and gradually dismantling it between frames. When the film was reversed, destruction became creation. The clay seemed possessed of its own artistic will.

A few weeks later, an American film called "A Sculptor's Welsh Rabbit Dream" attempted something similar—clay molding itself into three complete busts. Unfortunately, no copy survives. This is a recurring tragedy in the history of early cinema: an estimated eighty to ninety percent of all silent films are lost, their nitrate prints having decomposed, burned, or simply been discarded when no one thought they were worth preserving.

The Mystery of the Matchstick Man

There's a puzzle in animation history that has never been satisfactorily resolved. A British filmmaker named Arthur Melbourne-Cooper made a film called "Matches: An Appeal" showing a matchstick figure writing a message asking viewers to donate money so soldiers could have matches. The question is: when?

Melbourne-Cooper and his daughter claimed the film was made in 1899, during the Second Boer War, which would make it the first stop motion animation ever created. But no archival records confirm this date. Other historians place it at 1914, during the First World War, when another appeal for soldier supplies would have made sense.

The fifteen-year discrepancy matters because it determines who gets credit for inventing an art form. If Melbourne-Cooper really did animate matchsticks in 1899, he predates everyone—Méliès, Blackton, Cohl, all of them. If the film is from 1914, he was just one of many practitioners of an established technique.

Complicating matters further, Émile Cohl released his own "Animated Matches" film in 1908. Did Cohl inspire Melbourne-Cooper? Did Melbourne-Cooper inspire Cohl? Did they independently arrive at the same obvious idea—that matches, with their stick-figure shapes, made natural animation subjects? We may never know.

Moving Furniture and Automatic Hotels

One recurring subject in early stop motion was furniture that moved by itself. This makes intuitive sense—furniture is heavy, solid, obviously incapable of autonomous movement. When a table walks across a room or a chair pulls itself out for a guest, the impossibility is immediately apparent.

Segundo de Chomón's "La maison ensorcelée" from 1907 showed haunted furniture alongside other supernatural effects. The following year, his "Hôtel électrique" depicted an automated hotel where luggage unpacked itself and brushes polished shoes without human intervention—a vision of domestic automation that wouldn't become reality for another century.

Émile Cohl and Romeo Bosetti made "Mobilier fidèle" in 1910, featuring faithful furniture that followed its owner. This is often confused with Bosetti's 1912 film "Le garde-meubles automatique" (The Automatic Moving Company), in which furniture relocates itself during a household move. Both films recognized that there's something inherently comic about dignified furniture behaving like eager pets.

The Grammar of Movement

What makes stop motion different from other forms of animation? After all, hand-drawn animation, computer animation, and stop motion all create the illusion of movement from a series of still images. The mathematics are identical—around twenty-four frames per second creates smooth motion for the human eye.

The difference is physical. A stop motion puppet exists in three-dimensional space, subject to real gravity and real light. When a clay figure moves, it catches light differently with each adjustment. When a puppet walks, its feet actually press against the ground. This physicality gives stop motion a particular quality—a sense of weight and presence that drawn or computer-generated animation must work hard to simulate.

There's also something slightly uncanny about stop motion. The movement, no matter how skilled the animator, never quite matches the continuous flow of real life. There's a subtle stutter, a quality of discontinuity that the eye registers even when the brain can't articulate what's wrong. This isn't a flaw—it's a feature. Stop motion exists in an aesthetic space between reality and abstraction, neither fully believable nor clearly artificial.

Early animators developed conventions that exploited this strangeness. Objects transforming into other objects. Figures appearing and disappearing. The impossible presented as matter-of-fact. Stop motion made visible what live-action film had to hide—the constructed nature of cinematic reality.

Why It Endured

You might expect stop motion to have died out once computers could generate photorealistic animation. The technique is slow, expensive, and physically demanding. A single mistake can ruin hours of work. Weather changes, lights burn out, puppets deteriorate.

Yet stop motion not only survived the digital revolution—it thrived. Studios like Laika and Aardman continue producing stop motion features to critical and commercial success. Directors who could use any technique still choose to push real objects around real sets, one frame at a time.

Part of the reason is that quality the early practitioners stumbled upon: stop motion feels handmade because it is handmade. In an era of frictionless digital perfection, there's something appealing about visible craft. You can sense the fingerprints in the clay, the slight wobble of a puppet held in position by nothing more than friction and hope.

But there's also something about the relationship between the animator and the animated. A stop motion animator spends days or weeks bringing a single scene to life, adjusting a figure's expression by fractions of millimeters, developing an almost parental intimacy with their creation. Willis O'Brien animated the original King Kong. Ray Harryhausen spent his career giving life to mythological creatures. Nick Park created Wallace and Gromit from plasticine and patience.

These aren't just filmmakers—they're closer to puppeteers, or perhaps sculptors working in time. Each frame represents a choice, a physical intervention, a small act of creation. The animator literally touches every moment of the film.

The Beetles Have the Last Word

Ladislas Starevich, the man who started by animating dead beetles, fled Russia during the Revolution and eventually settled in France. There, he spent decades working on increasingly ambitious projects, including a feature-length film called "The Tale of the Fox" that took over a decade to complete.

He continued animating until his death in 1965, by which point he had been working in stop motion for over half a century. The industry had transformed around him—sound had come, then color, then television. But the basic technique remained exactly what it had been when he first wired those beetle corpses back in 1910: move something, photograph it, move it again.

Some technologies evolve beyond recognition. Others achieve a kind of perfection that resists improvement. Stop motion is the latter—an art form that reached its essential form over a century ago and has changed only in refinement, not in kind.

The beetles would recognize it. If, that is, they were still alive to see.