{"id":507696,"date":"2026-06-23T19:58:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T19:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/507696\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T19:58:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T19:58:08","slug":"a-surge-of-stop-motion-animation-tells-off-ai-one-frame-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/507696\/","title":{"rendered":"A surge of stop-motion animation tells off AI one frame at a time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, The Book Of Life director Jorge Gutierrez announced that he was taking his latest animated project to Amazon for its inaugural AI program. Within days, Gutierrez walked back the<\/a> announcement after widespread criticism, pointing to an increased distaste for the technology when it comes to entertainment. One of the most notable people expressing this distaste is The Book Of Life producer (and noted AI hater) Guillermo del Toro, who is going in the opposite direction: directly investing in the next generation of human animators, specifically stop-motion animators. Del Toro teamed up with Netflix and GOBELINS Paris to set up<\/a> a new stop-motion studio in France and mentored the Ambriz brothers, who just released I Am Frankelda<\/a>. While speed and cheapness are upheld as virtues<\/a> by number-crunching producers obsessed by generative AI\u2019s potential savings, there\u2019s no replacement for the art actually created by human hands, and stop-motion animation is the complete antithesis to AI\u2019s soulless thievery.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a technique that\u2019s costly and labor-intensive, and the challenge is always to look different and try new things. Stop-motion animation is a resolutely human production, a bastion against a wave of AI slop where imperfection is a feature, and new productions\u2014either completely stop-motion like I Am Frankelda or implementing the technique, like I Love Boosters\u2014show there\u2019s still boundaries to push around keeping the retro approach fresh.<\/p>\n

Although CGI decimated the output of 2D animation and took over stop-motion\u2019s spot for special effects, there\u2019s still a clear audience for handmade creativity. When the trailer for Laika Studio\u2019s Wildwood was released<\/a>, it spread far and wide on social media, racking up almost 90 million views in a month on YouTube alone. The studio, whose angular style produced such critically acclaimed films as Coraline and ParaNorman, has amassed a following for its approach to stop motion animation and their offbeat stories. Aardman Animations, the stalwart British studio behind Wallace And Gromit and Chicken Run, is as busy as ever, producing feature-length entries for each of their most famous series over the past few years. Later this fall, they will also release a new sequel for Shaun The Sheep, The Beast Of Mossy Bottom. The desire for stop-motion is even allowing the company to branch out into other IP; Aardman announced<\/a> it would soon be bringing its familiar style to a new collaboration called Pok\u00e9mon Tales: The Misadventures Of Sirfetch\u2019d & Pichu.<\/p>\n

Making Mexico\u2019s first-ever stop-motion feature, Cinema Fantasma did more than set a precedent with I Am Frankelda. The Netflix film is an imaginative riff on Gothic romance, childhood fairy tales, and a dreamland of nightmares and monsters, even incorporating 2D-animated oil painting and hand drawn effects into its DIY aesthetic. The handmade process allows the characters\u2019 hair, fur, feathers, and costumes to look charmingly old-school but organic, as these real objects are moved, photographed, moved, and photographed again for hundreds of hours to create the illusion of movement. Some background details, like pebbles or grass, move with the figures like they would in real life. It\u2019s the kind of movement AI-generated images specifically can\u2019t replicate without looking eerily unnatural. Both I Am Frankelda and the original series Frankelda\u2019s Book Of Spooks end with behind-the-scenes footage showing how animators brought the characters to life and created certain effects and settings, illustrating and centering the filmmakers\u2019 work as the credits roll, demystifying the process and reminding audiences of the human effort that it takes (and should take) to bring movie magic to the screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But even higher-profile filmmakers have been using stop-motion to tap into the nostalgia and power of the technique. The Mandalorian And Grogu featured the work<\/a> of Oscar-winning FX artist and Mad God filmmaker Phil Tippett for a tactile robotic fight scene. In I Love Boosters, director (and AI skeptic<\/a>) Boots Riley uses surreal stop-motion animation to bring to life otherworldly villains who use skinsuits to manipulate the media and an unwitting public. These briefer moments still access what the likes of Aardman, Laika, and Cinema Fantasma all find throughout their best films, pushing the boundaries of the old-school technique, dazzling audiences with technical feats and memorable characters. <\/p>\n

As companies attempt to push generative AI into films, especially into animation, artists must remember that the result is only an approximation of what the prompter asks for, not what they dream up for months, draft, and redevelop before finally setting up the first camera shot. While AI offers tempting creative shortcuts<\/a>, filmmakers like del Toro and Riley are clear-eyed about how AI has and can hurt the industry. It\u2019s probably no coincidence that they\u2019re investing in stop-motion. Filmmaking isn\u2019t supposed to be easy\u2014it\u2019s supposed to look impressive, and on that front, this recent surge of stop-motion animation rejects giving up the ghost of human artistry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, The Book Of Life director Jorge Gutierrez announced that he was taking his latest animated project…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":507697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-507696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}