I’ve been watching stop motion animation films since I was a kid, and it dawned on me recently that there isn’t a single stop-mo film that I actually like.
The work that goes into stop motion is incredible. It’s admirable that someone would do it. But it always turns out, in one word… creepy. The choppy movements are something out of a nightmare. Is it a coincidence that so many ‘dark’ and ‘scary’ scripts, such as Coraline, Nightmare Before Christmas, Tool’s Sober video, and others use stop motion? If anything, stop motion should only be used for relatively ‘scary’ films.
Anyway, there are many people who LOVE stop motion and I won’t fault them for it, but I just had to vent that many people also HATE IT.
My article, “Stop Motion Animation Sucks,” was submitted to Digg. I rolled my eyes. I knew that if it somehow got popular, I’d get destroyed in the comments, and it would be buried off the front page. I was correct.
The funny thing to me was that most of the comments simply disagreed, along with calling me a bad name. No one offered any clear reason that it is ‘cool,’ or ‘awesome,’ and said that my calling it ‘creepy’ was just my opinion. No duh. Even better, some people linked to ‘artistic’ stop motion videos and said something along the lines of, “If you think stop motion sucks then obviously you haven’t seen this.” Then I watched some of the weirdest, creepiest animation I’ve ever seen in their linked video. Even other users replied and said “What the f@$# did I just watch?” And yes, other users agreed with me that it sucks, but it’s always the haters who are more vocal.
So there you have it. Some people love stop motion, and others think it is virtually unwatchable. I speak for the later. But I’ll keep watching it, as I always have, in hopes that one day, someone actually gets a good script and doesn’t make the characters look like a walking turd.