The joy of stop-motion films lies in noticing the little details, those intricate features crafted in miniature and tucked into the background of a scene, adding a richness of texture to the (usually) fantasy world onscreen. It is these little details that are celebrated by the British Film Institute’s new exhibition LAIKA: Frame x Frame, opening on August 12th and running until October 1st at the BFI Southbank, as part of their Stop-Motion season. With over 700 artefacts on display, walking through the exhibit evokes the very best stop-motion viewing experience, each glance revealing another miniscule, yet exquisitely modelled feature.
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Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024), the stop-motion story of Grace (or Gracie) a young mollusc-obsessed girl growing up in 1970s Australia, is not a fantasy film. Unless, of course, it is entirely a fantasy. As Grace thinks back over her life, and how she found herself in the ‘present day,’ she offers her pet snail Sylvia (and by extension the audience) a tale as bizarre, incongruous, and carefully curated as the vast array of snail-related memorabilia she has collected over the years.
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Had Disney’s Strange World (2022) made more of an impact the internet might well be flooded with articles comparing Don Hall’s latest work with James Cameron’s behemoth sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). Both explore magnificent simulated environments, examine the complicated dynamics arising from father-son relationships, and tackle the destructive land-grabbing hunger associated with colonial sentiment.
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For a long time, the work of Pixar Animation Studios was routinely presented as something of a gold standard for animation. A critical darling and box office juggernaut, Pixar’s run of early films from Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) to Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019) were mostly unquestioned hits delivering nuanced meditations on everything from emotion to connection to self-actualisation.
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