The history
130 years of moving things a little and taking a photo: from wooden circus toys and beetles to 3D-printed faces and wool.
Stop-motion began as a camera trick: stop cranking, move something, start again. Pioneers used it for toys, insects, matchsticks and dinosaurs. Clay studios made it warm and funny, and LAIKA added 3D printing, but the core is still the same: one photo, one tiny move, again and again.
c. 1897–98
Stop-motion film (claimed, date disputed)
Blackton and Smith, The Humpty Dumpty Circus, USA
1915
Indian stop-motion film
Dadasaheb Phalke, Agkadyanchi Mouj
1926
Oldest surviving animated feature (cut-out)
Lotte Reiniger, Germany
1930 (released 1937)
Puppet feature film (often cited)
Ladislas and Irène Starewicz, France
2006
Stop-motion winner of the animated feature Oscar
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Aardman, UK
2009
Stop-motion feature shot in stereoscopic 3D
Coraline, LAIKA, USA
1897 – 1932
Film-makers find that a stopped camera can make objects move by themselves. Toys, dead beetles, matchsticks, paper silhouettes and model dinosaurs come to life.
1898
c. 1897–98 (claimed)
Albert E. Smith later wrote that he and Blackton animated his daughter's jointed wooden circus toys, moving them a little between exposures. The film is lost. Smith dated it to about 1897 or 1898, but a film of that name was reviewed in 1908, so historians are not sure when it was made.
Why it mattered. It is often named as the first stop-motion film, though the date is uncertain.
1910
Starewicz, a museum director and insect collector, wired the legs of dead stag beetles and moved them frame by frame to film them fighting. The short is called Lucanus Cervus.
Why it mattered. It is one of the earliest surviving puppet animations, made with real insects as puppets.
1912
In this 12-minute comedy, insect puppets act out a story of jealousy, complete with a cinema inside the film. The puppets had jointed bodies so they could hold poses.
Why it mattered. It showed that puppets could act and tell a story, not just move.
1915
Phalke, who made India's first feature film in 1913, made a short object-animation film of matchsticks, Agkadyanchi Mouj. He had earlier filmed a pea plant growing at one frame a day.
Why it mattered. It is counted as India's first stop-motion film.
1925
The feature film of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel mixed stop-motion dinosaurs with live actors. The models had metal armatures under rubber skins.
Why it mattered. Audiences saw believable animated creatures in a big feature for the first time.
1926
Reiniger animated black paper silhouettes with hinged joints, frame by frame on a lit table, for The Adventures of Prince Achmed. It took about three years.
Why it mattered. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film, and it made cut-out animation an art.
1933 – 1971
King Kong shows what stop-motion can do in a feature. Harryhausen mixes puppets with live actors, Czech and Soviet artists make puppet films, and clay and pixilation arrive.
1933
Kong was a small puppet with a metal armature and rabbit fur, animated a frame at a time and combined with live actors using rear projection and other tricks.
Why it mattered. It is widely regarded as a milestone of stop-motion, and it inspired a generation of animators.
1947
Trnka's feature The Czech Year used carved wooden puppets with fixed faces. Their feelings came from lighting, camera angles and body poses.
Why it mattered. Prague became a world centre of puppet film, and it later trained animators from other countries, India among them.
1952
McLaren animated two real actors frame by frame, so they glide and float as they fight over a flower. The film won an Academy Award in 1953.
Why it mattered. It made pixilation, stop-motion with people, famous.
1953
For The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Harryhausen animated his creature in front of projected live-action footage, then added a foreground layer on top. The method was later sold as Dynamation, a name used from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958).
Why it mattered. It let puppets and actors share the same shot cheaply, long before computer effects.
1963
The skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts lasts a few minutes on screen but took over four months to animate, matching every sword blow to the actors.
Why it mattered. It became one of the most famous stop-motion scenes ever made.
1968
1960s
Pati studied puppet animation under Jiří Trnka in Prague and became head of animation at Films Division. His experimental short films of the late 1960s, such as Explorer (1968), mixed live action with techniques like pixilation.
Why it mattered. He brought European puppet and stop-motion ideas into Indian government film-making.
1969
As a student, Leaf pushed beach sand around on a lit sheet of glass to make Sand, or Peter and the Wolf, photographing each change from above.
Why it mattered. It showed that stop-motion could be as fluid as painting.
1972 – 2004
Aardman in Bristol turns plasticine into comedy and wins Oscars. Hollywood backs stop-motion features like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Chicken Run.
1972
Two school friends started making animation for children's television, and their plasticine characters grew into a studio.
Why it mattered. Aardman became the world's best-known clay animation studio.
1989
Park finished A Grand Day Out, the first Wallace & Gromit film, which he had started as a student. His Creature Comforts, with clay animals voiced by real people, won the Academy Award for animated short in 1991.
Why it mattered. Clay animation became a comedy style loved around the world.
1993
A full stop-motion musical feature released by a Disney label. The hero's face was changed with replacement heads, reported as about 400 of them.
Why it mattered. It proved that a stop-motion feature could be a Hollywood hit.
2000
Aardman's first feature film told of chickens escaping a farm, all in plasticine over armatures.
Why it mattered. It became the highest-grossing stop-motion film.
2005 – today
Digital stills cameras and frame-grab software replace film. LAIKA 3D-prints tens of thousands of faces, and Indian studios win awards with new materials like wool.
2006
March 2006
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) won the Academy Award for best animated feature.
Why it mattered. It was the first stop-motion film to win that award.
2009
LAIKA's first feature was the first stop-motion feature shot in stereoscopic 3D. Its faces were designed on computers and 3D-printed, about 20,000 of them. 29 animators together made about 90 to 100 seconds of film a week.
Why it mattered. 3D printing made replacement faces precise and very varied.
2016
For Kubo and the Two Strings, LAIKA built a giant skeleton puppet about 16 feet (almost 5 m) tall, moved by motion-control rigs. The studio printed about 64,000 faces for the film.
Why it mattered. LAIKA calls it the largest stop-motion puppet ever made.
2019
LAIKA printed about 102,000 faces for Missing Link, enough to change a face every frame. The film won the Golden Globe for best animated feature.
Why it mattered. Printing had grown from thousands to over a hundred thousand faces in ten years.
2022
A dark, hand-made retelling of Pinocchio with puppets built partly in Mexico. It won the Academy Award for best animated feature in 2023.
Why it mattered. It kept stop-motion features at the top of the craft.
2024
On Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, up to 30 animators each made about 4.2 seconds of animation a week, shooting on digital stills cameras with Dragonframe frame-grab software, mostly on twos.
Why it mattered. The tools changed, but the pace of hand-made animation did not.
2025
June 2025
Desi Oon, a stop-motion film made from wool about India's native sheep wool, won a jury award in the commissioned films section at the Annecy animation festival. Over 50 artists worked on it for six months of filming.
Why it mattered. It showed Indian studios inventing new stop-motion materials.
By the numbers
The number of replacement faces LAIKA printed for each film grew fivefold in ten years (TCT Magazine).
Did you know?
A 90-minute film at 24 frames a second has 129,600 frames. Even on twos, that is 64,800 separate poses.
An Aardman animator on Vengeance Most Fowl averaged about 4.2 seconds of finished film a week.
Starewicz's first puppets were real stag beetles, their legs replaced with wire.
Kubo's giant skeleton puppet was about 16 feet tall and weighed about 400 pounds (180 kg).
By mixing face halves, Kubo's face could make an estimated 48 million expressions.
The people
1882 – 1965 · Puppet animator · Russian Empire and France
Turned insects and toys into actors, and made one of the first puppet features.
1870 – 1944 · Film-maker · India
Father of Indian cinema, who also made India's first stop-motion film, of matchsticks.
1886 – 1962 · Special-effects animator · USA
Animated the dinosaurs of The Lost World and the ape of King Kong.
1899 – 1981 · Silhouette animator · Germany
Cut her characters from black paper and made the oldest surviving animated feature.
1920 – 2013 · Creature animator · USA and UK
Mixed puppets with live actors in films like Jason and the Argonauts.
1914 – 1987 · Experimental animator · Scotland and Canada
Made pixilation famous with Neighbours.
1932 – 1975 · Animator and director · India
Trained with Jiří Trnka and led animation at Films Division.
born 1946 · Animator · USA and Canada
Animated with sand and with paint on glass.
born 1958 · Clay animator and director · UK
Created Wallace & Gromit at Aardman.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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