So there’s more freedom and there’s more opportunity to show work and more of a platform. I think interest has been revived.”Īdds Julie Lockhart, co-founder and president of production of Locksmith Animation: “ has encouraged experimentation and making more content and then it hasn’t been so dependent on that opening weekend. With streaming you have more competing places needing good product. It’s the patience and the time it takes to make them and sometimes executives are worried they’ll lose their jobs before the film is finished, which actually happens a lot. Ultimately, it’s how successful the stop-motion films are considered to be, but there’s always a risk. “I think it’s because of streaming that the opportunity to take chances became a little greater,” says Henry Selick, helmer of Netflix’s “Wendell & Wild.” “And it’s hard to know if the renaissance will continue or last. As audiences burned through content during lockdowns, they also searched for new shows and stylistic approaches to storytelling. This wasn’t necessarily so for animation or auteurs. While audiences adopted streaming, especially during the pandemic, some forms of entertainment were completely upended. The tools like Dragonframe are available to everyone.” You can get camera and an object to shoot and you can add on the degree of difficulty. You can do it very simply and quite quickly. It’s a technique that’s relatively straightforward.

I think there is a renaissance of stop motion and I hope there is. “I had a friend who used to say to me that all films were started as a conspiracy of optimism,” says Mark Gustafson, co-helmer of “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” for Netflix. Still, it’s the imperfections of the puppets and their movements created by hand that make it so thrilling for Add to that the need for, among others, hundreds of replacement faces for the various puppets, clothing made of fabric scaled down for the puppets and a production schedule that needs to be carefully monitored to track such things as where each puppet goes on any given day, and you can see what can make working in stop motion so perilous. The stop-motion films “ Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” “Wendell & Wild,” and “ Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” were all released in 2022, which is rare since the techniques used to make stop motion can be incredibly detailed and often require dozens of artists to be shooting scenes for the film if it’s ever to be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

It definitely hasn’t always been like this, but several stop-motion helmers hope the trend continues.

In a year in which the film industry was still in disruption because of the formidable powers of digital streaming, stop-motion animation - maybe the most analog of all styles of filmmaking - has had a peak year, with three features vying for awards and shorts introducing powerful new talents.

Stop motion animator