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16 Overlooked Stop-Motion Features You Probably Haven’t Seen

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Since two of the five Academy Award nominees for best animated feature this year – Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham’s Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail — are stop-motion productions, we thought it’d be a fun idea to take a look at some fascinating stop-motion animated features throughout history that might’ve flown under your radar.

The field of stop-motion movies is rich and there’s a lot more to discover besides the movie from Aardman and Laika (and filmmakers like Henry Selick and Wes Anderson). This survey of such films hopefully provides a good starting point for your viewing adventures.

Let’s begin with the pioneering French feature The Tale of the Fox, directed by Ladislas Starevich, which was one of the first animated features of any kind. It was animated over an 18-month period in 1929 and 1930, but there were problems adding a soundtrack and it took until 1937 for it to premiere anywhere. The swashbuckling story about a tricky fox who runs afoul of the king is lots of fun, and the stop-motion animation is nothing short of extraordinary. It’s like a black & white Fantastic Mr. Fox made nearly eight decades before Wes Anderson’s film.

Another marvelous early animated feature that cartoons fans should be aware of is Aleksandr Ptushko’s The New Gulliver (1935), a Soviet adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels that mixes live-action footage with stop-motion puppets. The making of this movie was an insane undertaking, involving 3,000 different puppets, and the replacement animation techniques are extensive, with some puppets having over 300 interchangeable heads for changing facial expressions. The story is propagandistic (which was the norm for Soviet films of this era), but the incredible stop motion and funny interactions between the Lilliputians are the main takeaway.

Jiří Trnka was one of the true greats of Czech stop-motion animation, and his final feature might be his best: his Shakespeare adaptation A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959) is so beautiful to look at and lyrical in style that it calls to mind a stop-motion variation of Disney’s Fantasia. That coat made entirely of little fairies must’ve been a beast to animate (I believe Vlasta Pospíšilová did the honors).

One absolute masterpiece of animation that depressingly few people have seen is the unsung Soviet feature The Bath (1962), directed by Anatoliy Karanovich and Sergei Yutkevich. The film was produced during the Khrushchev Thaw, the period following Stalin’s death when censorship in the arts was relaxed. Soviet animators of the 1940s and ’50s had been required to draw realistically, but this film tosses all of that realism aside in a bold explosion of mixed-media madness, incorporating stylized stop-motion puppets, graphically flat drawings, paper cut-outs, live-action clips, candy wrappers, etc. The characters even repeatedly interrupt the movie to berate the director. I’m sure I missed a lot of the satire here, but the film is so fearlessly determined to cram visual creativity in your face that it’s impossible to lose interest. Thanks to the good people at Animation Obsessive for translating this gem.

One delightful animated movie I don’t see mentioned much is Dougal and the Blue Cat (1970), a French feature based on Serge Danot’s tv series The Magic Roundabout, all about a hairy dog who goes on mystical adventures. The movie takes the already whimsical show and pushes it into even kookier territory. I love the toylike characters designs by Ivor Wood and the colorfully sparse, almost Dr. Seussian backdrops. There are no subtitles on the clip below, but for context, Buxton the evil blue cat is commanding his army to turn the world blue by imprisoning anyone who isn’t blue like him.

I think it’s safe to call the Chinese feature Saving Mother (1984) obscure, given the lack of information about it available online, but I like it quite a bit. The film, directed by Xi Jin and Liu Huiyi, tells the story of a boy born of a fairy and a mortal who must defeat his evil uncle to save his mom. The story is nice, and the puppets are constructed out of appealingly simple, rounded shapes. It most resembles an animated version of the fantastical live-action wuxia movies that were coming out of Hong Kong at this time.

There’s a long tradition of combining stop-motion puppets with human actors, from the old monster movies by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen to the arthouse films of Karel Zeman and Jan Švankmajer. In the gleefully creepy British feature The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993), director Dave Borthwick shot the actors frame-by-frame using a pixilation technique alongside the puppets, giving the whole project an erratic look that perfectly matches the disturbing subject matter about inhuman scientific experiments.

While many of the best stop-motion films appeal to all ages, the medium certainly has the capacity to handle mature subject matter, as proven by the critical acclaim received by films like Mary and Max (2009), Anomalisa (2015), and My Life as a Zucchini (2016). Christiane Cegavske has described her wonderfully weird movie Blood Tea and Red String (2006) as a “fairy tale for adults,” and it certainly taps into the energy of a strange old fable that hasn’t been sanitized for children. Cegavske animated the film entirely by herself over a period of thirteen years, and the twitchy movements and creatively simplified effects (like the paper fire and plastic wrap water) are all nicely personal. Cegavske is currently working on a second movie, Seed in the Sand.

I will never stop singing the praises of the French/Belgian film A Town Called Panic (2009), directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, which must be one of the best things humanity has produced. The nonsensical narrative involves a birthday party for a horse, which takes the characters to the center of the earth and even to a parallel universe, but the real fun is seeing these kitschy little figurines jerked around to enact increasingly surreal sight gags. This is a classic.

Czech animator Jiří Barta is one of the true geniuses of stop motion, having made two sensational animated features: The Pied Piper and Toys in the Attic. Seeing Toys in the Attic in 2009 was a revelation for me; I couldn’t believe it was still possible to make a movie so quirky and hand-crafted in the 21st century (it looks like something that might’ve been made in 1971, and I mean that in the best possible way). The film, sort of an oddball twist on Toy Story, features characters assembled from the sort of junk you find in your attic. The jerky animation and tangible textures get straight to the heart of what makes stop-motion so unique as an art form. This clip comes from the English dub:

Jan Balej, another talented animator from the Czech Republic, has made several stop-motion features, and I always enjoy the grungy, bug-eyed character designs in them. His twist on The Little Mermaid story, Little from the Fish Shop (2015), is a particularly good example of his particular style. According to Balej, he chose to adapt this story using stop motion because “it is the typical ‘jerkiness’ or ‘grain’ of the animation technique paired with the feel of authenticity of the scenery that together help evoke the inclement atmosphere of a harbor-district.”

The dystopian Japanese film Junk Head (2017) tells the story of a cyborg who journeys through an underground labyrinth to save humanity. The film is eerie, disarmingly playful, and full of weird creatures who spout different forms of gibberish. Takahide Hori, who had no prior film experience, made the movie almost entirely by himself over a period of seven years. Hori explained, “Everything started from my misunderstanding. I’m not really great at computers or graphics, and you have to learn about software, you have to learn about computers. I thought my brain doesn’t have that kind of capacity. But whereas the stop-motion animation, all you have to do is that you create it all, you move it, take a shot, easy. How wrong was I?”

One of the most visually-inventive animated features I’ve ever seen is the Chilean horror film The Wolf House (2018) by Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña, about an escaped cultist who loses her mind in an abandoned house. The film features a totally new approach to stop-motion in which rooms are constantly transformed and reconstructed into something like an animated art installation. It’s rare to see a movie that you really can’t compare to anything else, but The Wolf House qualifies.

One recent stop-motion movie that is just begging to be a cult classic is the bizarro Estonian comedy The Old Man Movie (2019) by Mikk Mägi and Oskar Lehemaa. The plot: a farmer and his grandchildren must track down an escaped cow before its udder explodes into a milk mushroom cloud. The film delivers one absurd, lowbrow joke after another, and there is no attempt to animate lip syncs, so the characters all speak under their breath like an old Popeye cartoon.

Stop-motion movies tend to be underdogs in the increasingly digital movie industry, but through pure love of the medium, animators have soldiered on and kept the tradition alive. There have been a surplus of well-received, high-quality stop-motion films produced in the last few years, including Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), Henry Selick’s Wendell & Wild (2022), and the Netflix anthology film The House (2022), not to mention the many interesting combinations of stop motion and live action we’ve seen lately, like the quirky mockumentary Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022), the old-school creature feature em>The Primevals (2023), and the psychological horror flick Stopmotion (2023).

One of the most exciting stop-motion projects of late that deserves more attention is Mad God (2021), a post-apocalyptic nightmare 30 years in the making. The film was the pet project of legendary effects animator Phil Tippett, known for his iconic work on Star Wars, RoboCop, Jurassic Park, and most of your other childhood favorites. Tippett began the film in 1990, but shelved it when Jurassic Park led him to believe that his days as a stop-motion animator were numbered. A successful Kickstarter campaign in 2010 allowed him to finish what he started. You can see how Tippett designed the puppets for his tormented fever dream here:

Those are just a few great stop-motion features we think deserve a look, but how about you? Which stop-motion films do you feel deserve more attention? Let us know in the comments below. We’ll close things out with the amusingly head-scratching ending to the 1967 Rankin-Bass feature Mad Monster Party? (Spoiler alert).

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