By Christopher Walsh

You need a lot practical training to excel in stop motion. But if your ambition is to contribute to stop motion in a meaningful way, you’ll need more than hands-on skills.  It’s often said that you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. It’s true in life, and it’s true in stop motion (although why bother separating the two, right?) Historic knowledge about the medium helps you to find and secure your place in it, and it helps you to see yourself as an artist, within a context. 

Understanding the impact and significance of major works and artists can also be a great source of professional pride. As you create your own stop motion, you’re working “alongside” some of history’s most talented motion picture artists, through the medium that you share with them. As you deepen your understanding of the history, you’ll also find great sources of inspiration in the works themselves. Maybe your next stop motion idea will be inspired by something new (to you), that’s just waiting to be discovered, somewhere in the hallowed halls of stop motion history.

Although stop motion is a relatively young medium, it’s so rich and diverse that it can’t be summed up easily (which is a good thing, of course!) As a result, this chronology is far from complete. Also, I’ve highlighted some artists and studios by simply picking out a “gem” or two from an overall body of work. Ray Harryhausen, for example, deserves an entire book all to himself! But there’s a reason this section is called “A Brief History”.

If you let this overview lead you onward (and deeper), there’s much more to discover. And don’t just read about them here- search out the actual films, and watch them! The animated works themselves are what’s really important, and checking out all this work will be the most fun you’ll have in a history class, guaranteed.

As you might expect, the focus is on puppet animation, but I’ve tried to include highlights of “related approaches” as well. I also make little distinction between “pure” puppet films (films that use only miniature sets and puppets) and “special effects” films (films that blend stop motion with live action). If it was created in front of (or underneath) a camera in a straight-ahead, frame-by-frame process, I considered it for inclusion.

Check out the links on the left for a decade-by-decade breakdown of the medium.