Winsor McCay debuts Gertie the Dinosaur as an interactive vaudeville performance in Chicago, an early landmark in character animation and a precursor to later stop-motion creature effects.
The film The Lost World premieres in New York, featuring Willis O'Brien’s stop-motion dinosaur effects—an influential early milestone for stop-motion techniques in feature filmmaking.
King Kong premieres in New York City, showcasing Willis O’Brien’s groundbreaking stop-motion work integrating animated creatures with live action—an enduring reference point for film effects and stop-motion craft.
Art Clokey’s clay stop-motion character Gumby becomes a television series on NBC, helping popularize stop-motion for recurring broadcast programming.
Jason and the Argonauts premieres, featuring Ray Harryhausen’s celebrated stop-motion creature animation—especially influential for fantasy and mythological effects work in cinema.
Rankin/Bass’s stop-motion (“Animagic”) TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer premieres on NBC, becoming a long-running annual broadcast tradition and a major showcase for stop-motion on television.
Peter Lord and David Sproxton register the name Aardman Animations, laying the groundwork for a studio that would become central to modern clay/stop-motion filmmaking for TV and features.
Will Vinton’s feature-length Claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain receives a limited theatrical release, representing an important U.S. stop-motion (clay) feature effort of the 1980s.
Henry Selick’s stop-motion feature The Nightmare Before Christmas premieres at the New York Film Festival, marking a major modern studio-backed stop-motion production and a lasting influence on feature animation aesthetics.
Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit short The Wrong Trousers debuts on BBC Two, helping establish character-driven clay stop-motion as mainstream prime-time television entertainment.
Wallace & Gromit short A Close Shave premieres on BBC Two, continuing Aardman’s refinement of expressive character animation and comedic staging in stop-motion for television.
Aardman’s feature Chicken Run is released in the U.S., demonstrating the commercial viability of stop-motion as a wide-release feature format and becoming a high-water mark for the medium’s box-office reach.
LAIKA’s Coraline opens in U.S. theaters, advancing contemporary stop-motion production with large-scale pipeline practices and stereoscopic exhibition, helping drive a stop-motion resurgence in mainstream cinema.
LAIKA’s ParaNorman releases, noted for pioneering full-color 3D printing for replacement animation faces—an important technical step in modern stop-motion character performance and production efficiency.
LAIKA releases Kubo and the Two Strings, exemplifying a mature hybrid workflow combining handcrafted stop-motion with advanced fabrication (including extensive 3D-printed facial systems) and digital augmentation.
After select-theater release, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio begins streaming on Netflix, signaling major contemporary investment in feature stop-motion and bringing the medium to a global streaming audience at scale.
Stop-motion animation in film and television (1920–present)
