THE DEARTH OF STOP-MOTION ANIMATION

That’s not a spelling mistake in the heading of the article. Stop motion is not dead – it lives on strongly in the world of Aardman in particular. But there are general concerns from me that the sheer workload and costs incurred with such a heavy schedule in producing this stuff is making studios turn on their computers instead. When Aardman signed a 7-movie deal with Dreamworks even they succumbed to this.

And it’s not to discount this type of work. We all love Pixar. That’s a FACT. But what’s concerning is that even children’s television classics such as Fireman Sam are now computer generated programmes rather than stop-motion. These did not quite have the thumb-print in the work like Aardman studios does, but certainly the sight of a green felt hill is much more comforting than a #C453G5 (bright green) generated colour of Greendale (see Postman Pat’s adventure on the big screen).

Maybe it’s because it generates memories of the my first classroom and the toys on offer in there. It wasn’t quite a fully functioning 3D village with post office / fire station / farm / cafe / etc. but simply a sponge playmat big roads all laid out. But that model village feeling transcends in me and translates to my tastes in animation styles.

Or maybe it’s because of a fear I have with this, a bigger viewpoint whereby I discovered the reason for this lazy production approach was because we all ended up as fat people like in WALL-E. Life was too easy, and we were all lazy pigs with over-the-top voice activation systems in between sitting watching TV all day… actually that sounds like fun.

It’s swings and roundabouts.