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Stop Motion
A family of penwipers lives near the shore. Penwipers, as everyone knows, was a sort of large, landbound bird with a beak like a curlew that lived in caveman times. It lived on fish, cried copiously, and its range seems to have been confined to this short stop-motion film by Joseph Sunn.
Animation fans like me are fascinated by some of the more obscure branches, like Lotte Reiniger's silhouette work, or stop-motion, in large part because they are uncommon. There are ten thousand or more hand-drawn cartoons, more than a hundred features, but at times it seems there is only one exponent of claymation in the field at any moment. It's as if Willis H. O'Brien invented it, Ray Harryhausen was briefly his assistant, worked through the 1970s, then Will Vinton did some work. True, there was Gumby in the 1960s, and 'Mr. Mike' shorts during the early years of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but those also seem like outliers.
In truth, animation of any kind has always been enormously expensive, and it is only the amazing advances in industrializing hand-drawn cartoons in the 1910s that made them marginally viable for a few decades. Claymation never had that breakthrough -- unless you conclude, as I do, that CGI is essentially the same process, moved into a computer.
Animation fans like me are fascinated by some of the more obscure branches, like Lotte Reiniger's silhouette work, or stop-motion, in large part because they are uncommon. There are ten thousand or more hand-drawn cartoons, more than a hundred features, but at times it seems there is only one exponent of claymation in the field at any moment. It's as if Willis H. O'Brien invented it, Ray Harryhausen was briefly his assistant, worked through the 1970s, then Will Vinton did some work. True, there was Gumby in the 1960s, and 'Mr. Mike' shorts during the early years of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but those also seem like outliers.
In truth, animation of any kind has always been enormously expensive, and it is only the amazing advances in industrializing hand-drawn cartoons in the 1910s that made them marginally viable for a few decades. Claymation never had that breakthrough -- unless you conclude, as I do, that CGI is essentially the same process, moved into a computer.
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- boblipton
- May 22, 2019
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- $5,000 (estimated)
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