Claymation is a form of stop-motion animation where moveable characters (made from clay) are used to create the illusion of movement by being incrementally shifted frame by frame. Like any stop-motion film, these pieces of art can take years to produce because it’s an extremely meticulous process.
Claymation truly rose to popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s in the UK with projects such as Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit franchise (with popular films like Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit). However, later in the 2000s, claymation as a medium for filmmaking started to fade out.
The UK film Chicken Run from 2000 is regarded as the first feature-length clay-mation film, with other clay-mation projects like Wallace and Gromit, which came out prior, being short films. These films were beloved because of the charm and whimsical nature behind them. It’s also hard to ignore appreciation for a project that took one week to create one minute of film.
These types of clay-mation films are free-form style, which means the clay isn’t hardened or put into a model or skeletal figure for structure. The clay is completely molded and sculpted by hand. And in my opinion, one of the most charming aspects of these freeform clay-mation films is seeing the fingerprints in the clay characters from where the animators sculpted and moved them.
While many stop-motion films use clay at various parts of their process, it is not to the extent at all as the Wallace and Gromit series and a film like Chicken Run. Many popular and iconic stop motion films like Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas use clay to create models for the characters, but unlike the others projects I have discussed, they use these clay models to create molds with a sturdy malleable material that have a ball-and-joint metal skeleton inside for more structure.
Recently, I have started to see a comeback in these types of clay-mation films. In 2023, Netflix, working with Aardman Animations (the animation studio that originally produced Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run) released a sequel to Chicken Run called Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget that followed the same main characters with their children. Aardman Animations also recently released the trailer for their newest Wallace and Gromit film Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, which will be released this winter. I am particularly excited for this because this film marks the comeback of one of my favorite characters from the series: Feathers McGraw (an evil penguin who disguises himself as a chicken with a rubber glove). This character was last seen in the short Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers which received an Oscar for Best Short Film in 1994.
When I first heard of these projects, I was very excited because the originals are very nostalgic to me, and I’ve always loved the claymation medium. However, I was also nervous they were going to be made using CGI instead because of the technological advancements that have been made since the originals. To my surprise and delight, the films were still made using the same claymation method. I am excited to see if claymation will continue to make a comeback in feature-length films and hopefully see them regain the popularity they once had.