Stop Motion Animation Movie Draft (w/ Chase Ables)

I guess we can go ahead and move into our movie draft. I'm kind of excited. Yeah, me too. We did, we've done Fantastic Mr. Fox stop motion, we've done Isle of Dogs stop motion now so let's do a stop motion animation draft. Yeah. We're going to draft five each.

Eli Price (02:26:32.342)
I really like, I have enough to draft more on my list, but also like the ones at the bottom I don't really love a whole lot, or like they're just okay to me, so I don't really want to draft them. So we're going to stick to five so that we can get a really good, you know, two lists of five, ten total for you guys to maybe check out some if you haven't. But um.

Yeah, you're a first time guest, so I concede the first pick to you, that being the case. So yeah, if you want to go ahead and jump right in with your first pick. Sure. So, my first pick, and I guess the way I ordered my list, I don't know that I'm necessarily trying to win. But I don't know. I kind of went...

part way for like, oh, these are like good movies that I wish more people would see. Right, right. And also like just a little bit of like, I think these could win me some points. Yeah. So for my first one, I'm gonna go with Kubo and the Two Strings. Okay. Which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I love this movie. It's absolutely gorgeous. And it also kind of like sticks on the theme of I Love Dogs of like this,

you know American animators, you know trying to pay tribute to Japan that's true guys. Mm-hmm Yeah, I've seen it once. I think I actually watched it with you. I think that sounds right. Yeah, watch it kind of as a family And I remember enjoying it I didn't I didn't like

I love it, but I did really enjoy it. Really well made and impressive animation for sure. Oh, it's a gorgeous movie to look at. Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's a good pick. I think, and I didn't mention it at the beginning, but I try to not draft the movie that we talked about. So obviously like...

Eli Price (02:28:39.066)
I love dogs would probably be high up on both of our lists, but yeah, we'll set it aside. I was going to say, I even did that, I left Fantastic Mr. Fox off my list, kind of for the same reason. I feel like it's a Wes Anderson episode, you just talked about Fantastic Mr. Fox a few weeks ago. I feel like people know Fantastic Mr. Fox is fantastic. It's fantastic. We don't need to draft it. Yeah.

off drafting this fantastic Mr. Fox, but I do feel the same way. Let's get some other stuff in here. So I'm going to just start off right off the bat just drafting probably the stop motion animation movie that I've seen the most and just love watching. I watch it every year and that's Nightmare Before Christmas. I love that movie. The music is great.

Eli Price (02:29:39.701)
the way that cellic just captures like...

I don't know, just like the horror of things and things that are kind of gross with his stop motion. I just love it. And so Jack Skellington is like just an A plus character, like top notch. So yeah, that's one that I've just loved for a long time. You know, whenever I watch it, I'll have like the song stuck in my head for weeks. Yeah, that's going to be my number one.

one choice, Nightmare Before Christmas. So yeah. It's a great choice. Yeah, where are you gonna go with your second pick? My second pick is going to be GDT's Pinocchio. Oh man, okay.

I'm really upset now because that's the one I really wanted to get. I figured it would be somewhere on your list so I went ahead and put it kind of high up so that I would have a better chance of getting it. But yeah, it's like...

I don't know, just watching it, it's really amazing. It's just an amazing movie to watch. Like all the different...

Eli Price (02:31:01.218)
all the different ways of doing the puppetry and just the attention and the backgrounds and I don't know. It's a fantastic movie. If you haven't seen it, it's only a few years old, so if you haven't seen it, I think it's on Netflix. Yeah, I think it actually came out last year, didn't it? That's right. Yeah, it was last year. And this isn't like the bad Disney movie with Tom Hanks Pinocchio that came out last year. No, no, no.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, which I think he had to name it that because there was that other one coming out the same year. Right. Disney's kind of been doing this thing where with their, you know, live action remakes of their movies, there have been a couple of them, Jungle Book being the other one, where there were kind of these, you know, art or filmmakers coming out with like their versions of these classic stories. And Disney going.

Oh crap, we want to make that money. Yeah. So they kind of rushed out their live action version, right. Uh, because they already had, you know, that in their repertoire from back in the day. Right. Yeah. So yeah, that's definitely something that. I don't know. We, we've talked about it before on the podcast, but, um, but yeah, I loved, um, Del Toro's Pinocchio. It's, it's very, very like.

emotionally, what's the word I'm looking for, like just like the depth of emotion in that one and like yeah it's just an incredible movie and then you know the animation like I think of that shot like going through the circus like the camera like you have like

really interesting camera movements happening alongside like the, you know, obviously like the puppets moving for the animation. But yeah, that incredible, really incredible scene. And movie. Yeah, so that really like throws me for a loop. Sorry. I was really hoping to get that one. But yeah, that's part of the game. So

Eli Price (02:33:19.43)
I'm gonna go ahead and draft.

Eli Price (02:33:26.477)
Oh man.

Eli Price (02:33:31.986)
I guess I will draft, I guess I'll stick with Henry Selig and go ahead and draft Coraline. Oh, good choice. Yeah, Coraline is, for one, like Neil Gaiman, he's a great author. He does, you know, he has a lot of novels. Coraline is actually a children's book that he wrote.

And he does some comic stuff too with the Sandman and stuff like that, which I think there's a Netflix series based off of those comics now too. Gotcha. I didn't realize. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, Coraline is, Coraline is, I read the book years ago. It's a great little book. And the way that Selick captures that...

like the creepiness of it, like I was saying with Nightmare Before Christmas, it's just like really great. The buttons, which is part of the book too, like the kind of inverse world, there's the parents have like, the people have button eyes, and the way like that, that's just perfect for stop motion. It's like if you were to write a book with hopes that stop motion was going to be made

stop-motion movie is going to be made of it. That's like a detail that you would definitely put in there. It works so well. But yeah, Coraline is a great one. So yeah, I guess I've got this Henry Selig draft going here. Fair enough. So I guess for my number three I'll go with Chicken Run. Okay.

Chicken Run. Yeah. It's a classic. It is. And it's so much fun. It is. And also has a little bit of a Wes Anderson through line with George Clooney, Mr. Fox himself playing the rooster. Yeah, yeah. I didn't think about that. It's been a while since I've seen Chicken Run. It was on my list because it's a great movie, but it has been a long while since I've seen it. So, you know, it's not like totally fresh on my mind. That's fair. It's been a couple years since I've seen it too.

Eli Price (02:35:49.27)
But yeah, just a charming, good time of a movie. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, my third choice, I'm gonna go with, yeah, another movie. So like, Pinocchio was one of my favorite movies last year, but this one I liked even more. And I don't know if a ton of people saw it, but I'm gonna go with Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

I need to catch up on this. This is one that's on my list. I would have honestly taken it first overall. It's probably my favorite movie on my list of stop motion movies. That's good to know. It was such a breath of fresh air of a movie. It's very gentle and quiet and sweet.

I don't know how they took these viral YouTube videos that came out over a decade ago and made this very sweet, precious movie that somehow made me cry at a talking show. But yeah, they pulled it off. It's fantastic. Yeah, I highly, highly recommend.

watching Marcel Deschel with shoes on. And it's funny too, it's very funny. It has to be with a name like that. Yeah. But yeah, okay, your fourth pick. Where are you gonna go? Okay, my fourth pick, I will go with...

Eli Price (02:37:37.062)
Okay, I'm gonna go with a movie called The Tale of Renard. Okay. Or The Tale of the Fox. It's a French movie from 32. It's the second stop like...

Not the second stop-motion animation movie, because there was like a bunch of like shadow puppetry stop-motion movies before this. But it was this and a movie from the USSR that came out at the same time. This one's a French movie. It's based on these old French, you know, folk tales, fairy tales, kind of a-shot fable-like stories of this kind of, you know, trickster-like fox named Renard.

Eli Price (02:38:24.178)
And it's a really fun watch. It really is. You can find it for free on YouTube. It's like an hour long. And it's a really good time. And kind of behind the scenes. So.

this past week's episode of your podcast was Fantastic Mr. Fox. So this was actually kind of a double feature for me because I knew that the show was, this recording was coming up and we were gonna be doing this draft. So I was just kind of like going through, looking at stop motion animated movies to like see, you know, what else was out there. And I saw that this was like, you know, a really early on really like kind of important movie for the craft. And I was like, oh, well it's another Fox movie. I should watch and it's short. I should watch this.

it on at lunch at work the other day and it kind of ended up being a double feature of watching that and Mr. Fox back to back. And it was a really good time. There's a lot of Mr. Fox in at least their version of Renard, I feel like. Okay, yeah, that's really cool. It's funny that like you have two great Fox related stop motion movies. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'll have to check that out. I like going back and like...

Definitely like I like doing these drafts to like get stuff like that you can go back and watch for sure But yeah, I guess like for okay for my fourth pick I'm gonna go with one that it kind of also is Kind of a it's um, I can my mind is blank on the word I'm looking for

It's a movie with three actually different like short, shorter like stories within it. Like a, like vignettes? Yeah, well not so much vignettes but like they're like full, full like short complete stories. But yeah, it's a movie that came out, I want to say like either, it might have been last year too. Which

Eli Price (02:40:29.066)
man last year some great stuff from movies last year. It came out on Netflix, went just straight to Netflix called The House. Okay, I don't think I've heard of this. Yeah, so.

I'm going to pull it up so I get the details right on the film. But yeah, it's called The House. It has three stories told by three different directors. Actually, there's four directors listed. I'm not sure if a couple worked on one or something like that. But yeah, it's these three stories all centered around like...

Not the same house like they're all like different settings and all that but they all like have a house in some way as like an important part of the story and like so the first one is like this like poor family that like the dad sort of like

you get the sense that he kind of sells his soul in a way and they end up in this really nice house and the house starts like, I don't know, the parents start becoming part of the house sort of thing. It's like, and it's super creepy. The way it's shot is very eerie. I'm almost, I'm picturing like, in this, like.

second to like the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies where Davy Jones is like crew becomes part of the ship Yeah, yeah Yeah, it definitely has a different like visual look Okay, just because I guess of the nature of like the stop-motion animation that it uses. It's very like there's a lot of like Especially like the people are like felt

Eli Price (02:42:28.782)
filthy kind of looking, at least for that first story. But then you have a couple that are animals, like the last two stories have animals as the main characters. You have one where there's this house with roaches taking over and the third story is

The first two feel more like cautionary tales and the third one feels like a little bit more hopeful. But yeah, I loved this one. It was a really fun time and you also get a little bit of eerie, creepy feel in there, which is becoming a trend I guess in my, other than Marcel the Shell, is like a trend with my picks is like the eerie creepiness that I guess stop motion is just like really great for. It can be, definitely.

But yeah, that's my fourth pick. This is your last pick. Yeah, you're gonna go so for my last pick I'm actually I'm gonna cheat just a little bit. Okay, so this movie is It's probably it's probably only one third of it is probably in stop-motion animation But it's a it's actually another French movie. It's a version of The Little Prince that came out in 2016 Okay and

So it's got like a framing narrative. I say framing narrative. It's honestly, it's the story of like most of the movie. Is this framing narrative of like this little girl and her neighbor who's an old man who was the pilot in the Little Prince story. And then a third of the probably about a third of the movie is him telling the story of the Little Prince. And all of that is done in stop motion animation. It's some of the most gorgeous stuff.

motion animation I've ever seen. Just the way like the models work and like the way they light them and the way they do space and everything. It's so good and it was actually my introduction to that book and like I like the framing narrative is it's good it's charming the animations done well but I just I fell in love with the story of the book as being told in the stop motion and I went

Eli Price (02:44:50.756)
Yeah, and just fell in love with it and I guess I'm almost more recommending the Little Prince As a thing, you know just in general. Yeah, but also watch the movie because it's gorgeous. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I agree. I didn't love this one because of like the

the extra stuff they put in to frame the narrative. I don't know, it felt added on, I guess. It does, yeah. And so- It feels unnecessary. But yeah, the actual Little Prince story part is very good in that one. And the book, The Little Prince, which is a little, it's like a French kid's book, is very, very good. Actually like...

picked it up at Barnes and Noble years ago and read it and went sitting in the store. Were you just crying in front of strangers by the end? Yes. It's a very, very good book. It is. But yeah. So yeah, go watch the movie, but even more so read the book for sure. Okay, well since you did a little bit of a cheat with a movie that's only partly stopped

and stop motion animation. I'll do the same with my last pick and I'll go with the original King Kong.

Obviously, a lot of this movie is not stop motion animated. Sure. But the main character is, though. King Kong himself is animated, and he's stop motion animated. And it's an iconic use of that art form. And a lot of techniques that they developed for that, a lot of his internal skeletal structure, that's the same techniques they're using to this day for stop motion.

Eli Price (02:46:48.144)
And so it's pivotal just for the way it looks, but also, like you said, just for the art form and how they do it in general. And this movie came out in 1933. So it's one of those things where painting, there's only so many like.

ways you can change the art form, but like it's still beautiful. Like it's not like you have to innovate and do something like totally new with like painting techniques to make like a beautiful painting and it feel fresh and new and it feels like similar with this sort of art.

Eli Price (00:02.794)
Yeah, so your last pick, your fifth pick, where are you going to go with that? Okay, so for my number five, I think I'm going to cheat just a little bit, and I'm going to go with the 2016 version of The Little Prince. So actually another like French stop motion animated movie. Which so The Little Prince is like a

French children's novel from back in the 40s or 50s. And it's a fantastic book. Highly recommend, highly, highly recommend the book. And this movie is actually what introduced me to it. So it's cheating because it's probably only a third stop motion animation. Only the book itself is done in stop motion animation.

And then the rest of it is like a framing narrative with like one of the characters from the book, the pilot, like kind of grown up as an old man. And it's like him interacting with this young girl that has moved in next door to him. And as part of that, he tells her the story of, you know, him meeting the little prince. And the stop motion work for like him telling the story is just gorgeously done. Like the...

the models and like the way the light interacts with everything and the way they do space and stuff. It's so pretty. It's so nice to look at. And they really, they even like do a really good job just like communicating the story and communicating the emotion and the themes of the story and it really resonated with me and like made me go out and read the book like immediately afterwards. I don't know, I just really fell in love with that story and even though like the framing narrative part of the

the movie isn't as great. It's still good and it's still charming and well animated and stuff. But yeah, I just can't recommend that story enough of The Little Prince. I love this movie because it introduced me to it. Yeah, yeah. And I remember seeing that movie when it came out. The stop motion part where they're actually telling the Little Prince story is really great.

Eli Price (02:26.846)
And I feel like they do it pretty well. I wasn't a huge fan of the framing narrative that you were talking about that isn't part of the book at all. But not because like, not really because I didn't like it because it wasn't in the book. I don't really think about movie adaptations in that way. I just didn't think it was that great. But yeah, it's still fine.

and good enough and maybe there is something to doing the two different animation styles where the older part of the story is stop motion and the newer part, like a more updated CGI kind of animation if I'm not mistaken, or was it? It wasn't hand drawn, right? No, yeah, it was CG animation, you're right. Yeah, so, but yeah, that's a good pick. The book...

I actually read the book a few years ago, I think, or more, in a Barnes and Noble. I just sat down with it and read the whole thing in the Barnes and Noble. Were you just sobbing in front of a bunch of strangers trying to buy books? Probably so. Yeah, it's definitely a very touching story. So yeah, definitely recommend the book. But the movie I enjoyed too, I think it's a good pick. It's definitely worth seeing. Oh yeah.

Yeah, so for my last pick, I am going to go, since you cheated a little bit and picked one that's not fully stop motion animated, I'll do the same. And I'm going to go with King Kong. You know, obviously a ton of this movie is not animated at all. It's, you know, live action. But King Kong, the titular character, is very much stop motion animated.

And it's really impressive, like the character work they pull off with this puppet, you know, going up against the live-action actors. Right. And you know, it's 1933, this movie came out, and so it really set, I guess, a historical precedent for what you can do with animation in general, but also with stop motion animation for sure, too. For sure.

Eli Price (04:49.23)
So yeah, I think it's an important film in that way for stop motion animation and it's just a good movie. I watched it not that long ago. I probably watched it a couple years ago and it has its flaws just narratively and the way it handles certain things I think. But man, just like what they were able to pull off with that movie and that character of King Kong.

It's just super impressive. Yeah, and I mean a lot of those techniques that they used on Kong, like those are still like the same techniques that are being used in stop motion right to this day. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, you know, it makes me think of like, the art forms like might not necessarily change in their techniques, but can still like do, you know, breathe fresh air into the art form like, you know, painting like how many like...

new painting techniques at this point are people coming up with but there's still beautiful paintings being made and you know stop motion animation like there's not a whole lot of like new techniques. I mean every once in a while you get something but there's not a whole lot of new techniques coming out as far as like how to capture stop motion animation but you still get beautiful works of art with it. And this movie was definitely with that.

giant ape, a big part of the art form for sure. So yeah, I'm glad we both decided to cheat a little bit with our last pick. Yes. Because yeah, I didn't, there's some other ones that I like, but don't love. There's probably one more that I really love, more for nostalgia than anything else, which is Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, the Rankin and Bass. Yeah.

See, I didn't grow up with this, so I don't really have the nostalgia for it. And so while I can appreciate the claymation of it, I don't know, the story itself doesn't really work that great for me. But I mean, I can understand growing up on something like that. Right. So my list wasn't super long. I have a lot that I wanna catch up with. I did see...

Eli Price (07:12.718)
I think it was last year, Selick put out Wendell and Wild, which I saw and wasn't a huge fan of, honestly. You know, I think the animation was still great.

but just the story-wise, not my favorite. Sure. That reminds me of like, Leica Studios who did Kubo and Coraline and Corpse Bride and stuff like that. Their most recent movie is called Missing Link. Yeah. And like, it's gorgeous to look at. Like it's like, it's probably their best looking movie. Okay. But the story's just kind of nothing. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. But there's, I mean, it's,

Wendell and Wilde is interesting. It's Yeah, it's an interesting story, but I just don't think it's like pulled off super well like good idea really interesting But yeah, no Jordan Peele is actually part of that one. Okay, thank you Thank you Helped with the writing it and stuff. Gotcha. Yeah, and he's I want to say key and peel like

actually voice a couple of the two main demon characters. That's fun. But yeah, there are some other ones that I wanted to point out that I have not seen that probably deserved to be on.

a list like this. One is Fantastic Planet, which is a French film. I've seen Fantastic Planet. I don't guess it clicked in my head that that's Stop Motion. Yeah, so I didn't think it was either, but it kept coming up on list when I was looking at it because I haven't seen it, but I've seen clips of it. It looks like it's hand-drawn animation, but they're actually moving hand-drawn pieces in stop motion.

Eli Price (09:11.272)
is like 2D, it's like 2D stop motion animation. That makes sense. Which is really cool. Another one, Anomalisa is one that I haven't seen. It's Charlie Kaufman, which I've...

I've seen enough Charlie Kaufman to know that I don't know if I want to see what he does with stop motion animation. Really bring out the surrealism of the art form. The surrealism and depression maybe. So I haven't seen Anomalisa. It's not one that I'm really itching to see either, but it is supposed to be a very good film. I haven't seen it either, but it is one that I would like to catch up on.

Mary and Max is one that

that I've seen and really want to see. It seems like a very endearing and charming movie. It actually, the stills that I've seen of it, it has a black and white. I don't know if it was shot in black and white or just lit that way and designed that way to look like it's in black and white. But yeah, it looks like a really charming story. The Wolf

Eli Price (10:35.576)
chilling and creepy. I've never heard of this. Yeah, it's a Chilean I think. Okay. It's set in Chile and I think they speak, I mean they're speaking Spanish. Obviously the original title is in Spanish but the Wolf House. I don't know the concept of it. I've looked at it before. I just can't think of it off the top of my head but it's very well highly rated and like the little short

pieces of the trailer and it looks very like eerie and the way it's like lit and I want to say like the guy that made it just like had all these like arbitrary rules that he put on himself like I think it's shot all in one take well like so obviously it's not one take because it's stop motion animation so it's a bunch of pictures but the way like the camera moves and like the whole

Eli Price (11:37.377)
And like he had kind of like these, I guess philosophical rules too, like we're not, you know, this isn't a set, it's like a work area sort of thing. Just kind of like these mindsets he wanted to have, which is really interesting. That is. I mean a lot of times that's, you know, when artists like put those arbitrary rules on themselves, like you really get something special.

So that's one I definitely want to see and then the last one I wanted to mention is called mad god Which came out I think I think it has like a 2021 release when you like look it up, but I think it actually like Released here in the US last year. Okay It is I'm looking up so I don't get the director's name wrong. It's got by a guy named Phil Tippett And it's kind of this apocalyptic story

I've heard really good things about it. Apparently it's one of those where it's just like a trip of a movie. And so you just have to be in the right mindset to know that you're getting into something kind of wild and fever dreamish before you watch so that you're not so caught off guard that you can't enjoy it sort of thing. So that's definitely one that I want to try to catch up with sometime.

from it that looked really cool. But yeah, stop motion animation is really cool. It is. I definitely want to watch more. Same. I had pulled up a list of stop motion features and I mean...

You know, it's not like live action movies or hand-drawn animation movies or CG animation movies. Like, there's so much work into it that, like, there really is just a limited number of these things. You could watch all of the, like, stop-motion animated, like, feature-length movies, probably pretty reasonably. Like, there's a... I think there's less than a hundred. There's more than that, I think. There's a... I think there's a good bit more than that, if I'm not mistaken.

Eli Price (13:50.422)
Like some of the letterbox lists that I looked through were pretty extensive. But you know, I would have to vet how many of those are like fully stop motion animation or not. But yeah, it's definitely something that I would like to dive into sometime.