Quotes About Stop-motion

I'm meant to be an animation director. That world, and the culture of stop-motion, is where I want to live. It's more my problem than Hollywood's. I'm not attuned to Hollywood.

My earliest memories are making little Super 8 films - or watching my brother make stop-motion space spectaculars.

When you look back over 100 years when stop-motion was really at the dawn of cinema, a lot of the ways it developed was you had stage magicians who were looking to bring their illusions to life, and one of the ways they did that, at the time, was through cinema and stop-motion. They developed these processes.

People have been declaring stop-motion dead for a generation. But living in the digital age, people appreciate the art of craft, or working with your hands.

I used to take my little Disney figurines and turn them into stop-motion animation.

Stop-motion has limitations, any form of filmmaking does, but stop-motion has a lot of limitations.

If you go too small, you can't get the performance you need out of the small little parts. And if you go too big, the puppet gets difficult to move, because it's too heavy, and there's too much material, and it becomes this exercise in just moving these massive parts around. So there is a natural scale that makes sense for stop-motion.

Walking in stop-motion animation is probably the most difficult thing you can do... The way that they have these puppets connect to the set is they actually drill a hole in the set, and they put a threaded rod up through that hole and screw it into the bottom of their foot, and that keeps them in place.

Historically, for a stop-motion film, you gathered the crew together, you made the movie, and then everyone ran screaming to the next project.

I feel I'm just meant to do stop-motion. Live-action is much more glamorous to some, but it's basically a whole army of people focused on one thing.

CG can do anything, but it can't do everything well. What it naturally can do is special effects. But using stop-motion comes from our desire to do handmade stuff. There are always going to be kids who get out whatever it might be - clay, bits of wire, Barbie dolls, Legos. They want to tell little stories.

This medium of stop-motion, it can be much more than it's been kind of defined as - it's not just a creaky and anachronistic way of making films, it actually is a very vital art form that can do wonderful things if put in the right hands.

Historically, stop-motion animation has had a jerky-jerky quality, which is a constant reminder to audiences that they're looking at artificial objects. It creates a barrier between the audience having an emotional experience and what they're looking at. We're working hard to get past that.

I made tons of stop motion films with my friends in my neighborhood.

We use technology in service of the art, as a storytelling tool - and if we want to do something that's never been done we have to invent the technology. 'ParaNorman' represents the realization of stop-motion's potential.

We're not purists about stop-motion. If there's a tool we can use that makes more sense to bring something to life in a better way, we'll use it, whether that's hand-drawn animation or CG or some newfangled technology we're developing.

Stop-motion is sort of twitchy; you can feel the life in it. If we were to remove that completely, there'd be no point in it.

What stop-motion does best is present real objects magically brought to life in a very imperfect situation; the hand of the artist is there, the electricity of someone touching, massaging and torturing themselves to get life out of an inanimate object.

Every kid has a toy that they believe is their best friend, that they believe communicates with them, and they imagine it being alive, their toy horse or car or whatever it is. Stop-motion is the only medium where we literally can make a toy come to life, an actual object.

What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark - not too dark - fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page that's really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm.

You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.

I had seen other stop-motion animated features, and they were either not engaging or they're just too bizarre. There was one I liked when I was a kid called Mad Monster Party. People thought Nightmare was the first stop-motion animated monster musical, but that was.

I think stop-motion has always been semi-obsolete. And stop-motion animators - people like myself - love it so much that we're always going to be looking for new ways to make our films.

I started to do stop-motion when I was a kid. You take a Super 8 and make some models, and move, click, move, click. All that. I love all forms of animation, but there is something unique and special to stop-motion: it's more real and the set is lit like a set. But I think it's also a kind of lonely and dark thing to want to do.