Understanding Animation: The Aesthetic of Stop-Motion and Puppetry

Scene from "Dimensions of Dialogue"

During last week's session of Animation: Process and Production we went through a presentation on the linear history of animation from its very roots. Starting from the chronicles of animated entertainment, we were introduced to the technological and mechanized marvels of the Pre-Film era such as the phenakistoscope, the praxinoscope, the zoetrope, etc. While all of these revolutionary and innovative gadgets initiated and drove the progression of animation as we know it, it had been up until circa 1899 when film had started growing its roots. With further development of techniques of animation, we were able to identify the dispersing progression of all kinds of animation. I, personally, was intrigued by the very incipient upswing of stop-motion, and being motivated by the presentation went on researching about how the technique had progressed to this day. Initially, what caught my interest in the presentation was the animation "Matches an Appeal" by Arthur Melbourne - Cooper, which is frequently identified as being the first film (plus stop-motion) in existence. What intrigued me about it were the puppets used - solely made from matchsticks, like doodle stickmen. Furthermore, as the presentation progressed, we were introduced to Wladyslaw Starewicz's animations which used beetles as armatured puppets, shedding light to the progression of puppet-making in animation. More elaborate than the matchstick-men, the beetles introduced a level of eeriness and grotesque atmosphere in the world of stop-motion animation, as the characters mimicked life more profusely with the characters being something existent in real life. More so, the beetles were the among the first armatured characters in stop-motion, as when Starewicz noticed that they moved when he did not want them to he reassembled their limbs with wax as to become more flexible and stationary during animating. Having said this, one animator that had been significantly inspired by Starewicz is Jan Svankmajer (one of my favorite stop-motion artists), which also incorporated a macabre feature in his animations. However, unlike Starewicz, Svankmajer elaborated upon his characters and made them in a surreal manner - crafting characters out of a variety of materials. One such example would be his film "Dimensions of Dialogue" which presented vivacity in characters (as they appeared human-like, done with clay). Personally, I believe Svankmajer to be the initiator of puppetry due to his use of various elements to craft his characters, where from that point on many stop-motion armatured characters had been created with the same materials. Interconnecting this with my trip to the Manchester Animation Festival, the figures used for the making of "Shaun the Sheep" had been extremely intricate with inner iron armatures for optimum stability, which goes to show how with time people have mastered the art of puppetry and stop-motion.