I'm in Love...With Stop-Motion!

This post is taking a completely different direction than I expected.I had fully intended to write about the evolution of character styles in animation, as in the differences between characters throughout the decades like Felix the Cat, or Robin Hood – Zootopia, or human characters in Shrek VS Frozen.

While I still think this is a fun idea, I either wasn’t using the right key words when researching or no one else thinks it’s as important or interesting as I do. So I decided to save you all the trauma of me prattling on endlessly with possibly unfounded opinions and just share a couple of videos instead.

These are a couple of dark, quirky short films made by Zealous Creative on YouTube. I adore them and want to bring attention to them.  Plus also they’re stop-motion.

Stop-motion is hard, painstaking work, of posing and positioning for hours on end for only 30 seconds of footage. Personally, it’s my favorite kind of animation. The people who do it, do it well, and because they’re passionate about it, and it shows. I love being immersed in something and you just know that the people who made it really care about what they’re doing.

My love for stop-motion goes back to my early childhood, watching Rankin-Bass Christmas specials. I still watch them every year because, dammit, the Nostalgia Fairy bites hard. It’s also just plain fun regardless of the animation quality being nowhere near Laika level. (I mean Laika the animation company who have made movies like Coraline, and most recently Missing Link, not Laika the Russian space dog.)

These two videos most definitely are Laika level quality. Enjoy!

Zero

The Maker

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish." J. R. R. Tolkien