Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion effects feature throughout many of the films we have viewed during the course, and here I will talk about two specific cases: King Kong and Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair. Stop motion is created by taking still shots of an object, and slowly moving the object between each shot, so that when the film is played back at normal speed, it gives the appearance of movement. The simplicity of the process helped its widespread use throughout film history; from it's earliest stages, such as in Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton's The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), right through to today, in T.V. shows like Robot Chicken.

The process of stop motion itself is interesting in terms of its place in modernism. Firstly, it combines still photography with film; a series of frozen moments play out rapidly, creating the illusion of movement. I'd like to suggest that this relationship is akin to the relationship of pre-modern art, and art since the end of the 19th century. The still images are like paintings, while their rapid succession is like film*. At one point during Charles and Ray Eames' Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair (1960) we are shown a selection of their Molded Plastic Side Chairs (Model DSSN). The chairs grow in numbers, various coloured chairs move along rows of the DSSN, and the chairs are shown as if stacking themselves. Here we have a prime example of a modernist take on a traditional piece of furniture, already in itself a comment on the connection between the old and new worlds, which is then made to look as if it has it's own lifeforce - the static chair is made mobile, a part of the modernist push towards animation (pun intended) and movement.

Another aspect of stop motion that is notable for us is the way in which it manipulates miniatures to look like giant behemoth's onscreen. In King Kong (1933), a monstrously over-sized ape is captured and brought back to New York, where it runs amok before being killed on the streets below the Empire State Building. Kong, who appears enormous in the film, was in fact a tiny clay-molded miniature. So, stop motion presents us with an effect that is simultaneously on a micro (personal, individual) level and a macro (global) scale, much like the modern world, in which we live not only individual lives, but also global lives - thanks to the possibilities of airplanes, telephones (and after King Kong), television, satellite communication and the internet.

Although stop motion has been all but replaced by CGI in filmmaking, its significance in the birth and rise of cinema parallels the inherent duality of the format. As cinema helped usher in the modern world, stop motion brought the past into the present, frame by frame.

*well, it quite literally is film, but never mind that for now