No one was immune 2D cel animation quickly disappeared, bringing about dark times for traditional animators. The 90's were considered a strange time since the hand animated films like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicken Run, and James and the Giant Peach were hits and fan favorites but because of PIXAR's success with their first feature film Toy Story, the whole industry from music commercials, television shows, to feature films quickly abandoned the once-loved handmade art forms. With the growth of desktop computers and the advancement of technology, handmade animation was quickly disappearing as the preferred medium of choice for commercials, visual effects, and movies. Films such as, Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back, Dragon Slayer, and Robo Cop would be filled with stop motion visual effects to the point that the lines between reality and the imagined were so well blurred, many people thought it just couldn't get any clearer.īy the early 90's things started to fall apart in the stop motion animation industry. The Noid and The California Raisins would be two huge clay animated commercial characters that would later become bigger than the brands they were trying to promote. Will Vinton, who won an Academy Award for Closed Mondays, opened up an animation studio in Portland Oregon that would produce some of the most iconic characters to this day. Soon it looked like clay and puppet animation was everywhere. Cable television networks like MTV would hire artists to make their station ID's completely out of stop motion, and music videos for artists (like Peter Gabriel) would have their music videos completely produced in stop motion. The amount of animation produced during this time can be viewed as mind boggling. The 80's were truly a golden age of stop motion world wide. By the 1980's stop motion had hit its peak with feature films, animated television series, highly profiled commercials for major brands, and the newest of mediums: the music video. His work on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957), Mysterious Island (1961), First Men in the Moon (1964), The Valley of Gwangi (1969), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), and Clash of the Titans (1981) are considered some of the best stop motion animated work in the world to this day, and in most cases Harryhausen animated the entirety of the visual effects by himself.īy the 1970's, stop motion had hit a fever pitch by being one of the most utilized visual effects techniques, as well as a medium for commercials. He would go on to produce visual effects for many films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), along with a ton of others. When Willis O'Brien invited Ray Harryhausen to join him in animating on the 1949 version of Mighty Joe Young, this allowed the young Harryhausen to develop his skill and range as an animator. His stop motion animation work appears in numerous films, the most famous of which, 1953's The War of the Worlds, won an Academy Award for best visual effects. Harryhausen made a string of major films that advanced the art of stop-motion animation, including The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Clash of the Titans (1981).Īnother notable Hollywood stop-motion pioneer was George Pal. O'Brien's greatest protege was Ray Harryhausen. The film Mighty Joe Young (1949), on which O'Brien supervised the stop-motion animation special effects, was awarded an Oscar for best visual effects in 1950. Smooth motion, realistic expressions, and improved integration with live actors made the stop-motion Kong the film's star, and earned O'Brien his place as the father of modern stop-motion animation. The Lost World (1925), in which O'Brien mixed stop-motion dinosaurs with live actors, was a major hit, but it was his work on King Kong (1933) that took stop-motion animation to new heights.įor King Kong, O'Brien perfected many of the techniques he had developed for The Lost World. Stop-motion animation made its first serious entry into the mainstream film industry through the work of animator Willis O'Brien.
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