A Timeline of Stop-Motion Animation History, From ‘A Trip to the Moon’ to ‘Missing Link’ (Photos)

This week, the pioneering studio Laika returns with “Missing Link,” the stop-motion animated family film starring Hugh Jackman and Zach Galifianakis. With “Missing Link” landing in theaters on Friday, TheWrap looks back at the history of stop-motion animation, going all the way back to the dawn of cinema.

“The Humpty Dumpty Circus” (1898)

The first ever stop-motion animated film was made by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith between 1897 and 1898, “The Humpty Dumpty Circus.” Though the film is lost to history, the directors used their daughter’s dolls to imagine acrobats and animals in motion.

“The Enchanted Drawing” (1900) and “The Trip to the Moon” (1902)

Early cinema experimented with editing techniques to create illusions and special effects on screen in what would become traditional stop motion. Shorts like “The Enchanted Drawing” (1900) or “Fun in a Bakery Shop” (1902) found actors on screen manipulating drawings or piles of dough as if by magic. Most famously, magician turned filmmaker George Melies used the “stop trick” to dazzling effect in his films and for his sci-fi short “A Trip to the Moon.”

“The Lost World” (1925)

Willis O’Brien made several dozen model dinosaurs for the film “The Lost World,” based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s fantasy story, even experimenting with getting the models and the human actors into the same frame at once. “The Lost World” was the first stop motion feature to be produced in the U.S., and O’Brien’s techniques would later serve as a precursor to his work on “King Kong” in 1933.

“The Tale of the Fox” (1930)

Polish photographer Wladislaw Starewicz took the stop motion style to new heights with this fully animated fable “The Tale of the Fox.” The film’s expressive puppet figurines of foxes, rats, cats and insects made with wax and wire served as a direct inspiration on filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson for his “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

George Pal’s Puppetoons

Animator George Pal is credited with developing the technique “replacement animation.” Instead of requiring puppets to have a malleable head, Pal created numerous wooden heads each with slightly different facial expressions that could be replaced and used to convey any emotion or anything the puppet needed to say. In 1940, he started making short films for Paramount, and in 1944, Pal won an honorary Oscar for his technique.

Jiří Trnka

Known as the “Walt Disney of Eastern Europe,” Czech animator Jiří Trnka once said, “A puppet is not a miniature human. He has his own world.” Trnka’s films starting in 1947 were made primarily for adults, and the studio’s puppets had highly sophisticated designs and movements that made them more suitable for stop motion animation.

Gumby (1955) and “Davey and Goliath” (1961)

Art Clokey was a pioneer in clay animation, or claymation, creating the iconic character Gumby that debuted on “The Howdy Doody Show” in 1955 and later the show sponsored by the Lutheran Church “Davey and Goliath.” Being able to produce these shows quickly and cheaply greatly advanced stop motion animation as a genre and in the minds of the popular culture.

“Jason and the Argonauts” (1963)

One of the most influential animators who ever lived, Ray Harryhausen was a protege of Willis O’Brien and worked with him until finally getting the chance to lead a project in 1953 with the film “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” Harryhausen developed the “Dynamation” technique that helped integrate the live-action with the models. Harryhausen made his masterwork with 1963’s “Jason and the Argonauts,” with the scope of the film’s skeleton battle and hydra creation being ambitious leap above his previous films.

“Sledgehammer” (1986)

In 1986, rocker Peter Gabriel would work with Nick Park and Aardman Animation, the studio that would eventually be behind “Wallace and Gromit” and “Chicken Run,” to make a music video for his song “Sledgehammer.” Gabriel sat under a sheet of glass for 16 hours as every frame was individually, painstakingly photographed. Before long, Michael Jackson and the MTV logo would incorporate stop motion into their music videos, and the “Sledgehammer” music video would go on to be the most awarded video from the VMAs ever.

“The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993)

By far the most ambitious stop motion animated film to that point, Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” has 109,440 frames crafted by a team of 120 workers across 20 sound stages. It was made for $18 million and grossed $76.2 million, spawning a small wave of other stop motion films like “James and the Giant Peach” and “Gumby: The Movie” just as digital animation from Pixar was about to take off.

“Chicken Run” (2000)

Aardman Animation’s first feature film was the first of a massive, $250 million, four film partnership between Aardman and Dreamworks. While Aardman had already won a trio of Oscars for some of their short films, including the Wallace and Gromit shorts “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave,” “Chicken Run” was a blockbuster to the tune of $224 million worldwide. In 2005 however, Aardman suffered a serious fire in which all of their sets and memorabilia was lost.

“Coraline” (2009)

You can likely count on one hand the number of films that made RealD 3-D look like the next big thing in film, and “Coraline” was one of them. But Henry Selick’s much anticipated follow-up to “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and the first for animation company LAIKA still looks great today because computers were used only to enhance the traditional animation process.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009)

Prior to 2009, Wes Anderson looked like a stop motion animator who always shot in live action. He was destined to make “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel. “I’ve always loved stop motion animation and I particularly wanted to do stop motion with puppets that have fur, for whatever reason that is. I’ve always liked that,” he said.

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