Except one girl, Lisa, whose bright voice pierces through the miasma. He’s numb, and to him, everyone looks and sounds the same (all characters, save two, are voiced by Tom Noonan). A lonely customer service expert arrives at a Cincinnati hotel for a convention. That’s been obvious from his first screenplay (“Being John Malkovich”) through his latest, a stop-motion-animated existential meditation on depression, loneliness, despair and the need for, and frailty of, human connection. 'Anomalisa' (2015)Ĭharlie Kaufman is a genius. And in a way, it's the most Andersony of Anderson's films, and all the whimsical tics and accouterments (foxes go tree shopping, beagles love blueberries) integrate smoothly with a child's logic. Adapting a children's novel by Roald Dahl about an anthropomorphic, squab-stealing fox into a stop-motion-animated feature allowed Anderson to exercise the greatest amount of control that had ever gone into one of his worlds. Fox' (2009)Īll of director Wes Anderson's cinematic worlds are fantastical and thick with artifice - cartoonish, almost. charming), child-friendly homage to horror films about a quiet town whose giant-vegetable competition is threatened by a mutant rabbit. He took his claymation charm to the big time with this feature-length film from Aardman Animations, and it's every bit as clever as those shorts, an incredibly British (i.e. Stop-motion animator Nick Park had been delighting with his "Wallace & Gromit" short-film series since the '80s with absurdist adventures featuring absent-minded (and cheese-loving) inventor Wallace and his smart but silent (and awesome) dog, Gromit. The animated chronicle of the decades-spanning friendship that develops is beautiful and heartbreaking, the way the best art often is. They're an unlikely pair, but they become the best of friends when Mary picks Max out of a phone book and enlists him to be her new pen pal. Philip Seymour Hoffman voices Max, a morbidly obese 44-year-old man with mental problems living in New York City. Toni Collette voices Mary, a poor, lonely 8-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne. Stop-motion vet Henry Selick adapted the writer's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella into a winning film about an adventurous 11-year-old girl who finds a portal in her new house to the Other World. Writer Neil Gaiman's brand of dark fantasy is such a perfect fit for the weird wonders of stop-motion animations, it makes one wonder why more of his work hasn't been adapted in the medium. He shares the fruit domicile with a host of anthropomorphic bugs - Grasshopper, Centipede, Earthworm, Miss Spider, Ladybug and Glowworm - and together they set off across the ocean for New York. Stop-motion master Henry Selick directs this story about an orphaned British boy who escapes his life with his terrible aunts in, well, a giant peach. It's an unlikely Roald Dahl story to adapt into a film, so it required an unlikely art form to bring it to life. It's "The Great Escape," but on a chicken farm - what's not to love about that? Mel Gibson voices Rocky, a rooster keen to liberate a World War II POW camp-style chicken farm once the farmers bring in an ominous machine for making chicken potpies. 'Chicken Run' (2000)Īardman Animations and directors Peter Lord and Nick Park - the folks behind the Wallace & Gromit stop-motion-animated shorts - first tackled the big screen with this fowl bit of fantasy. Johnny Depp voices Victor, a shy Victorian man who, while practicing his wedding vows in a forest, accidentally weds the corpse of a murdered woman (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter), who springs to life following the unintended nuptials. It's no "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (nothing ever will be), but director Tim Burton still delivered a charming gothic fantasy when he went back to the spooky stop-motion well. Here are 10 of the best of those labors of love. It has gotten a bit easier with the rise of digital film technology and computer-generated effects, but stop-motion-animated films are still a labor of love for filmmakers. Stop-motion animation is an arduous art form that requires the painstaking manipulation of objects in small increments to give them the illusion of movement.
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