Of the five animated features nominated for Golden Globe awards this sea-
son, two—Coraline and e Fantastic Mr. Fox—used stop motion, one of the old-
est animation techniques. Even so, for Mr. Fox, as with most animated fi lms these
days, computer graphics played a role. CG artists working on the fi lm, though,
found few similarities to hand-drawn or CG fi lms.
"Stop motion is quite strange," says Tim Ledbury, visual eff ects supervisor for
Twentieth Century Fox's e Fantastic Mr. Fox. "It's more like making a live-action
fi lm than a CG fi lm. As far as I was concerned, the foxes could have been actors.
But, it was like live action in slow motion." Animators creating a stop-
motion fi lm work one or two frames at a time, moving tiny models into
various positions and then fi lming them.
January 2010 28
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Animation