Stop-Motion Animation: 13 Examples to Learn From

Thirteen stop-motion pieces are worth studying before you brief one, and I have embedded and broken all of them down below. If you only have time for four, start with PES’s “Fresh Guacamole”, Aardman’s “Creature Comforts”, Laika’s “Kubo and the Two Strings”, and Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs”. Each earns its place for a different reason, and the rest run from a 1963 landmark to a 2022 Oscar winner.

I co-founded Moonb, a creative studio, and stop-motion is the format clients ask me about most and commission least. The moment I walk someone through what it actually takes, the romance runs into the calendar. A physical object, puppet, or model gets photographed one frame at a time and nudged a hair between shots, so a run of still photographs reads as motion. At 24 frames a second, usually shot on twos (12 unique poses per second), you are looking at roughly 1,440 photographs for a single minute of finished footage. You feel that labour on screen, and in a feed drowning in CG and AI-generated clips, that handmade texture is the thing that stops the thumb.

The word covers a handful of named styles, and I always make sure a client knows which one they actually mean before anyone quotes it, because the build and the schedule change completely between them.

Style	How it is made	A well-known example	Best for
Claymation	Malleable clay puppets remodelled between frames	Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit	Character, humour, warmth
Object animation / pixilation	Everyday objects or real people shot frame by frame	PES’s Fresh Guacamole	Product transformation, visual wit
Cutout	Flat paper or fabric shapes moved on a plane	South Park’s early construction-paper episodes	Fast, graphic, illustrative work
Puppet / replacement	Armatured puppets with swappable faces	Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings	Feature-scale narrative, high polish

The four pieces below span that whole range. Before them, the brand example I quote most on scoping calls: Chipotle’s “Back to the Start” won both the Film and the Branded Content Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, and years on I still point to it as the clearest proof that stop-motion can carry a purpose-driven campaign by itself.

PES, “Fresh Guacamole”: object animation at its wittiest

I pull this one up whenever a client swears their product is too dull to animate. PES turns a hand grenade into an avocado and poker chips into tortilla chips, one visual pun at a time, and at 1 minute 40 seconds it is the shortest film ever nominated for an Academy Award. What I take from it: object animation makes the ordinary strange. If your product, or the things it is made from, can transform into something unexpected frame by frame, you have a hook nobody scrolls past.

Aardman, “Creature Comforts”: the claymation blueprint

Nick Park set the recorded voices of real people to clay animals and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short, and Aardman then built a 40-year commercial business off exactly that warmth, the same studio that gave us Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. What I take from it, and what I tell any client nervous about looking too polished: personality is what carries claymation. The craft reads as friendly and a little imperfect, which is precisely why it disarms an audience that would tune out a glossy ad.

Laika, “Kubo and the Two Strings”: stop-motion at feature scale

Every Laika feature has earned a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, and on Kubo the studio pioneered 3D-printed replacement faces that gave a single puppet up to 48 million possible expressions. The figure I use to reset a client’s expectations is the pace: Kubo’s animators averaged about 3.3 seconds of usable footage per week across a shoot that ran roughly 94 weeks. What I take from it: stop-motion scales to breathtaking heights, and the cost climbs right alongside the craft. This is the top of the medium and the top of the invoice.

Wes Anderson, “Isle of Dogs”: stop-motion as art direction

Anderson reaches for stop-motion because of its deliberate, handmade precision, which turns it into an auteur’s medium rather than a children’s one. What I take from it: the technique is itself a statement of taste. Choosing it tells your audience something about your patience and your standards before a single word is spoken.

Guillermo del Toro, “Pinocchio”: stop-motion at its most serious

This 2022 feature won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and it is a somber, adult film set in Fascist-era Italy, nothing like the cute puppet reel people picture when they hear stop-motion. What I take from it: the medium is not a whimsy-only ghetto. If your message is serious, the craft can carry it with the same weight a live-action drama would, and win the top prize doing it.

Peter Gabriel, “Sledgehammer”: the craft that outlived the song

Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for sixteen hours while Aardman and the Brothers Quay shot him one frame at a time, and the result won nine MTV Video Music Awards and became the most-played video in the channel’s history. What I take from it: one labour-intensive technique choice can make a single piece the most memorable thing a brand ever ships. The song is good; the craft is why anyone still remembers it.

Will Vinton, “The California Raisins”: a commodity turned into a character

A board that sells dried fruit hired Will Vinton, the animator who coined the word Claymation, to make raisins dance to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and the characters outgrew the ad into four albums, TV specials, and a merchandise line. What I take from it: a well-designed character can turn a commodity into an asset you own. The spot was the beginning, not the whole thing.

Aardman, “Chicken Run”: stop-motion at box-office scale

Aardman’s first feature grossed around 227 million dollars worldwide and is still the highest-grossing stop-motion film ever made. What I take from it: the technique is not stuck in the arthouse. It can carry a mainstream, wide-release film and play to the largest audience there is, so the handmade look is not a niche you get boxed into.

Ray Harryhausen, “Jason and the Argonauts”: one sequence people never forget

The 1963 film is remembered for one thing: Ray Harryhausen’s sword fight between three live actors and seven animated skeletons, which took him about four and a half months to shoot, some days yielding only a dozen usable frames. What I take from it: pour the budget into one signature sequence. Decades later nobody recalls the rest of the film, but that fight is still studied. One unforgettable set-piece outlives everything around it.

Tim Burton and Henry Selick, “The Nightmare Before Christmas”: a world you own for decades

Henry Selick directed it from a Tim Burton story, a crew of more than a hundred spent about three years on seventy-six minutes of film, and the thing has never stopped earning: it turned into a perennial franchise and a merchandise engine that has run for thirty years. What I take from it: a distinctive, ownable world is a long-tail asset. Build a world with its own look and it keeps paying out long after the launch.

Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, “Anomalisa”: stop-motion for adults

Kaufman and Duke Johnson used more than a thousand 3D-printed faces to give their puppets subtle, grown-up performances, and the film became the first R-rated one nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. What I take from it: let the technology serve the story and then disappear. The printing was not the point; the quiet adult emotion was, and the craft is there to deliver it, not to show it off.

Adam Elliot, “Mary and Max”: imperfection as the point

Adam Elliot built every puppet and set by hand, in camera, no CGI anywhere, for a heavy and tender story about two pen pals, and it won the top prize at Annecy. What I take from it: the visible imperfection is the point, not a flaw to sand off. The fingerprints and the wobble read as human warmth, the exact opposite of the frictionless polish coming out of a generator, and that is what makes people feel something.

Robot Chicken: stop-motion that runs like a factory

Seth Green and Matthew Senreich have run this stop-motion sketch show on Adult Swim since 2005, animating toys and action figures at the pace of a comedy series, and it has won six Emmys doing it. What I take from it: build a repeatable pipeline, not a single showpiece. If you want ongoing stop-motion for a series or a social feed, the win is a process that produces volume at a steady cadence, which is a very different thing from one hero film.

What these examples teach a brand

The same lessons run through all four. First, the craft is the message: stop-motion signals human effort and patience, both of which get scarcer and more valuable the more a feed fills up with synthetic video. Second, the constraint breeds better ideas, because the sheer labour pushes you toward one simple, single-minded concept, and simple concepts are the ones that travel. It also stops thumbs almost by default, for the plain reason that it looks like nothing else scrolling past.

What stop-motion costs and how long it takes

Expect to pay a premium per second and to measure the timeline in weeks, not days. In my experience a polished 15-to-30-second brand spot commonly lands in five figures and takes several weeks of build, shoot, and post, because a person is physically making and moving every element on screen. Laika’s 3.3-seconds-a-week is the extreme feature-scale version, but even a short commercial lives in the same slow gear.

Two variables move the number more than anything else. The build comes first, since puppets, sets, and rigs are fabricated by hand before a single frame is exposed, and a distinctive character can eat weeks on its own. The shoot is the other, because a skilled animator produces only a few seconds of usable footage in a day, so the second count on your storyboard maps almost directly to shoot days. Edit, sound, and grade sit on top the way they do on any job. When a client tells me the reference film they love, I can usually tell within a minute whether their timeline is realistic, and it often is not.

Is stop-motion right for your project?

Choose it when the handmade feel is the point, and skip it when you need volume or speed. It is the right call when the tactile quality itself reinforces what your brand stands for, or when you want one hero piece to stand out hard against slick digital work. It is the wrong call when you need many assets on a quick turnaround at a low cost per clip.

It is the format I most often talk clients into and, just as often, back out of. If you are hiring for it, look for a director or studio with a physical stop-motion reel rather than a motion-graphics team promising to work it out, and ask to see puppets and rigs from real past jobs. At Moonb we produce animation across techniques, stop-motion included, with a senior Creative Director matching the craft to the idea instead of defaulting to it. If you want the technique chosen for the message, see how Moonb works.