Stop motion
animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own
Stop motion (also known as stop frame animation or object animation) is an animated filmmaking and special effects technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints (puppet animation) or clay figures (claymation) are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation. Stop motion with live actors is often referred to as pixilation. Stop motion of flat materials such as paper, fabrics or photographs is usually called cutout animation.
Terminology
The term "stop motion", relating to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen as "stop-motion"—either standalone or as a compound modifier. Both orthographic variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has a second meaning that is unrelated to animation or cinema: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong".
History
The use of animated objects in film has been present since the early days of cinema.
1849 to 1895: Before film
Before the advent of chronophotography in 1878, a small number of photograph series depicted subjects in successive positions. These can now be regarded as a form of stop motion or pixilation, although very few results were meant to be animated.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Stop motion” is animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Stop, motion and animation, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q308876. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1849, 1895 and 1878.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stop motion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.