Stop-motion animation is one of the oldest art forms in film history. Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion,” an early photographic study of movement, demonstrates the basic technology behind stop-motion animation. Composed of photographs of a moving subject — a jockey on a galloping horse — arranged in sequence, the pioneering approach illustrates how stop-motion works. Photographing objects, moving them, taking new images, and so on gives static figures the illusion of motion through Hollywood magic.
While the materials and techniques involved in stop-motion animation have evolved, the essentials of the process have remained the same for more than a century. The art form has just as storied a history at the Academy Awards, a brilliant lineage that Travis Knight and the Laika team undoubtedly hope to contribute to with their latest marvel, Wildwood. Laika is known for carrying forward the stop-motion art of replacement animation, in which animators create characters’ facial expressions by swapping out heads or faces for ones with different expressions; the studio says it used a record 142,000 replacement faces for Wildwood.
READ: How Laika’s Wildwood became “The Lord of the Rings of stop-motion animation”
It’s appropriate that stop-motion’s Oscar journey began with a little-known pioneer of replacement animation, George Pal, whose “Puppetoons” involved movable, hand-carved wooden puppets whose expressions changed when Pal switched out their wooden faces. He began experimenting with his technique in European advertisements in the early 1930s before moving to the U.S. in the 1940s to make shorts for Paramount, eventually earning seven Academy Award nominations in the Short Subject, Cartoons category. Pal received a Special Award at the 16th Academy Awards for “the development of novel methods and techniques” for his Puppetoons.
Another pioneer was the great Willis H. O’Brien, who considerably evolved the use of stop-motion as a special effect, and the technology of armatures (the posable metal skeletons inside most stop-motion puppets) in The Lost World (1925) before evolving them further in 1933’s King Kong. Despite its influence, King Kong didn’t receive an Oscar nomination, though its director and producer, Merian C. Cooper, would be given an Honorary Award in 1953 for “his many innovations and contributions to the art of motion pictures.”
O’Brien received his kudos three years earlier in 1950 for work on Mighty Joe Young (1949), on which he brought on and first mentored a young Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen would go on to evolve O’Brien’s techniques for combining stop-motion with live action in a technique he called Dynamation in such films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and Clash of the Titans. Essentially keeping stop-motion alive as a special effect in feature films, Harryhausen received the Gordon E. Sawyer Award in 1992 for “technological contributions which have brought credit to the industry.”
The 1970s marked a high-profile chapter for claymation, with California Raisins creator Will Vinton’s short “Closed Mondays” (co-directed with Bob Gardiner) winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1975. The use of stop-motion as a special effect hit new heights with George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy. The chess set in A New Hope (1977), the tauntaun and AT-AT walker in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and the rancor and AT-ST in Return of the Jedi (1983) all utilized the technique, contributing to the effects tapestry that won the franchise Oscars for Best Visual Effects for A New Hope and two Special Achievement Awards for the visual effects of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
The end of the 1980s was marked by two exceptional claymation shorts, both from Nick Park and Aardman Animations. Park’s “Creature Comforts” (1989) and the Wallace & Gromit-introducing “A Grand Day Out” (1989) were both nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 1990 Academy Awards, with “Creature Comforts” winning. Subsequent Wallace & Gromit shorts “The Wrong Trousers” (1993) and “A Close Shave” (1995) went on to win the prize for their respective years. Aardman’s short “Wat’s Pig” was nominated for Best Short Film (Animated) at the 69th Academy Awards, but lost to another stop-motion short, “Quest,” by Tyron Montgomery and Thomas Stellmach.
Aardman’s feature Chicken Run (2000) was wildly popular and critically acclaimed, but arrived the year before the Academy created the Best Animated Feature category. The studio would finally take home Best Animated Feature for 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, becoming the first stop-motion feature to do so. The studio received subsequent Best Animated Feature nominations for Peter Lord’s The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists! (2012), Mark Burton and Richard Starzak’s Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), Richard Phelan and Will Becher’s A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2019), and Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2025).
Hopping back to 1993, Tim Burton collaborated with Henry Selick on the path-breaking The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the 66th Academy Awards for its stop-motion technical achievements. Burton and Selick went off on their own stop-motion trajectories. Tim Burton returned to the medium as director for 2005’s Corpse Bride and 2012’s Frankenweenie, both nominated for Best Animated Feature (providing Burton his only two Oscar nominations, oddly enough). Selick’s 1996 Nightmare follow-up, James and the Giant Peach, received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score.
In 2009, Selick directed Coraline, the first stop-motion feature for Travis Knight’s new studio, Laika, which also earned the studio its first nomination for Best Animated Feature. Laika went on to receive Best Animated Feature nominations for Chris Butler and Sam Fell’s ParaNorman (2012), Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi’s The Boxtrolls (2014), Travis Knight’s subsequent Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) (also getting nominated for Best Visual Effects), and Chris Butler’s 2019 follow-up Missing Link (2019). The studio’s only Oscar so far was the Academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award at the 88th Scientific & Technical Awards for “pioneering the use of rapid prototyping for character animation in stop-motion film production.”
Two other world-class live-action directors have joined the stop-motion train, advancing the art form. Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) gained numerous fans for its charm, unique look, and stellar vocal performances, competing for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. Anderson returned to the medium for 2018’s Isle of Dogs, which received the same pair of nominations at the 91st Academy Awards in 2019. Guillermo del Toro took to the medium in 2022 for Pinocchio, a stellar reinterpretation of the tale that won Best Animated Feature at the 95th Academy Awards. It was the second time a stop-motion feature won the coveted award, and the first streaming-service win for an animated feature [verify: scope of the “first” claim].
This is only a small sample of the Oscar-nominated classics that Laika and the Wildwood team likely hope to join. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa (2015), Claude Barras’ My Life as a Courgette (2016), Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (2022), and Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail have also received Best Animated Feature nominations, in addition to a host of brilliant shorts over the years. What does that mean for Wildwood? The Laika team is the proud inheritor of a stunning lineage, and the studio has received a Best Animated Feature nomination for each of its stop-motion features to date [verify: confirm the complete feature list and nomination record]. With Wildwood being their biggest and boldest yet, perhaps now is finally the time to take home that Oscar gold.
