2D and 3D techniques have long dominated mainstream animation, with stop-motion something of a red-headed stepchild relegated to filmmaking’s fringes. Even so, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, a stop-motion retelling of the classic tale, earned the 2023 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, and Zhang Xu Zhan’s Compound Eyes of Tropical, also a stop-motion offering, claimed the Best Animated Short Film Award from both the Golden Harvest and Golden Horse awards in 2022.

Exquisite tiny sets

In an era in which AI is the new hot topic, painstakingly handcrafted stop-motion animation has managed to establish itself as a kind of retro countertrend. The labor-intensive technique draws on a huge number of physical props that are deployed in a filmmaking process that requires making tiny adjustments to the positions of physical objects in physical sets and photographing each change. These individual shots will then be assembled and projected in sequence to create the illusion of motion in the finished work. Though meticulous and demanding, this process forefronts changes in lighting, colors and textures to create an aesthetic that 2D and 3D animation lack, which is why it has always had proponents within the film industry.

“When you really throw yourself into the creative process, it can feel like you are playing with toys,” says Huang. Pull back a bit from the camera’s view, and the set takes on the appearance of a tiny stage or perhaps a dollhouse populated with exquisitely sculpted people, animals and props.

Huang Yun-sian’s TurnRhino Original Design Studio, a 330-square-meter townhouse in Toucheng, Yilan, is stuffed to the gills with props. On entering, we feel almost as if we have been transported to the fantastical Prospect Garden from Dream of the Red Chamber. Every item here, from the miniature temple plaza, to homes filled with everyday items, to cute god images, human caricatures, and students in blue suspender skirts, resonates with the memories and experiences of Taiwanese viewers.

This stop-motion animation set looks like a miniature stage!

A slow and meticulous process

Though there are plenty of examples of commercially successful original content made using stop-motion animation, stop-motion takes a very long time to produce: a one-hour film typically requires a minimum of three to five years to make. And while the prop-making portion of the process is often a group effort, the cinematographer is on their own once the cameras start shooting. Given that it takes at least 12–24 photos to produce one second of stop-motion footage, Huang says that if every­thing goes smoothly a filmmaker can expect to get a maximum of about ten seconds of film from a day’s work.

Stop motion’s long production times, high costs, and technical and staffing challenges severely limit the number of works produced in any given year.

Huang Yun-sian, one of Taiwan’s small number of stop-motion directors, founded her TurnRhino studio in 2009. In its early days, the studio subsisted on advertising projects, but then in 2016 it moved into producing original work. Huang’s short film Bart was her first to garner widespread attention, winning Best Animation Short at the 2017 Golden Harvest Awards and earning a nomination for a Golden Horse Award in the same category. Boosted by the acclaim, Huang continued to produce original work, earning a Golden Horse Award for her second short, Where Am I Going?, and yet another Golden Horse nomination for her third, Little Hilly.

Binding together the frame of a stop-motion puppet is a skill in itself. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

Animators typically create dozens of expressions for the same puppet, deploying them as a scene requires.

From artisan to animator

If you ask Huang why she got into stop-motion, she’ll tell you it wasn’t that she dreamed of becoming an animator, but more that she wanted to promote dough-figurine crafts and realized that she could do so through stop-motion animation.

Temple sets are one of the trademarks of her work. The meticulously sculpted red-orange tiles, swallowtail roof ridges, dragon columns, lions and lanterns look just like those of a real temple, with not a detail left out. Huang’s long-term partner, cinematographer Tang Zhi-zhong, says, “Her artistry is so extravagant; there just aren’t many like her.”

Her frequent references to classic temple scenes hearken back to her memories and are healing for her. Huang’s family is from Lukang, which is an important center for both folk religion and traditional crafts. In addition, her father, Huang Xingwu, is a dough-figurine sculptor who studied under the renowned Shi Jiaoyong. Until her sophomore year at university, she used to spend her summer and winter breaks helping her father run a market stall next to temples and in night markets.

After graduating from university, Huang joined the rush into the creative–cultural field, founding a company that sold her work at fairs all over Taiwan. At one point, she even had a counter in a department store. Then the Sushi Express Group happened upon her work and approached her about using her dough figurines as mascots in an advertising campaign. It turned out that the dough-sculpting skills Huang learned as a child had equipped her to handle the most difficult aspects of stop-motion puppet making. Tang says that the ease with which Huang produces creative work is what led her into animation.

Like sugar blowing and mantou modeling, the folk art of making dough figurines was originally practiced only at particular times and places; its products were not meant to last.

Later, with the invention of epoxy modeling clays, figurine sculptors switched to this more durable material. Huang says that in those days you needed only modeling clay in the three primary colors, an understanding of color mixing, and a few task-compatible tools, “all of which you could pack into a barquillo box, and you’d be in business.”

A figurine sculptor would set up a stall onsite, customers would tell them the style they wanted, and they would make it on the spot. The craftsperson would capture the character’s appearance in just a few simple steps to ensure that they could quickly move on to the next customer, and the really good ones could produce fantastic likenesses in a flash.

“Dough-figurine makers strive for customization and personalization, not the mass-production and precision of industry,” says Huang. She says this trait works well with stop-motion animation’s characteristic highlighting of the textures of different materials. Watching Huang craft a puppet, her fingers making light impressions on its skin, her scissors creating its fingers, her sculpting tool stretching an exaggerated mouth, you can see her signature style take shape in real time.

Here, Huang Yun-sian has reimagined her childhood experiences selling dough figurines from a market stall with her father. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

Huang Yun-sian comes from a family of dough-figurine makers, and views animation as a way forward for traditional crafts. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

Wonderfully colorful temples and humorous images of gods are a Huang trademark. The image is from Huang’s 2018 Golden-Horse-winning short Where Am I Going?

Experimental, inclusive

Yu Yu, another Taiwanese stop-motion director, whose The Island of Us was nominated for a Best Animated Short Golden Horse Award, followed a very different path into the field. Her childhood introduction to classics such as Pingu and The Nightmare Before Christmas made her certain that she wanted to go into stop-motion animation. Yu would go on to graduate from National Chengchi University’s Department of Radio and Television, earn a master’s degree in animation from the University of Southern California in the United States, and then intern and work for several well-known US studios including Stoopid Buddy Studios, Bix Pix Entertainment, and Netflix.

Yu’s experience working with top international stop-motion teams has provided her with a deep under­standing of the industry. She says that though stop-motion is difficult to produce, it allows film­makers to experiment and to make use of a wide range of materials, from clay, paper, and wool felt, to marionettes and even such things as coal, melting ice and fogged glass. Coupling these materials with different camera techniques enables stop-motion’s infinitely varied aesthetic effects.

“This is what continues to attract people to stop-­motion in spite of the medium’s difficulty,” says Yu. “Stop-motion works are nominated for Academy Awards nearly every year, and are popular selections at art-oriented film festivals.”

With computer technology becoming ever more ubiquitous, you now sometimes see a single film blending live-action shots with 2D, 3D and stop-motion animation. “Everybody is still trying out different media and techniques.”

courtesy of Shadow Steps Stop Motion Studio

The Island of Us, a short film directed by Yu Yu, was nominated for a 2022 Best Animated Short Golden Horse Award. The film’s use of wool felt as a primary material gives it a charming, dreamlike atmosphere. (courtesy of Shadow Steps Stop Motion Studio)

After working internationally, Yu Yu returned to Taiwan to “tell her own stories.”  (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

Taiwan in focus

When choosing a subject and a medium, animators are necessarily limited by the culture and materials available to them. The Czech animator Jan Švankmajer is a case in point, known for incorporating traditional Czech marionette techniques into his work to create classic puppet animation.

In Taiwan, stop-motion directors are experimenting with using local materials borrowed from traditional crafts. In addition to Huang, with her use of dough-­figurine techniques, there are others like Zhang Xu Zhan, whose career has oscillated between art and animation. Zhang Xu’s family has operated the Xinxing Paper Sculpture Store for more than a century, providing residents of New Taipei’s Xinzhuang District with paper offerings for the dead. Zhang Xu’s original animated work combines elements of the funerary culture he has been immersed in since childhood with the paper crafts passed down within his family. This work includes Si So Mi, which was nominated for a Best Animated Short Golden Horse Award, and this year’s Compound Eyes of Tropical. The latter was based on a Southeast-Asian folktale about a mouse-deer crossing a river, infused with elements drawn from Taiwanese folk culture, such as lion and dragon dances, to create a unique blend of dark humor, terror, and the supernatural.

Huang shares that she was a bit clueless when she first started animating, and hadn’t really explored the use of local culture. It wasn’t until a foreign director candidly explained that her work contained too many scenes drawn from famous films that she started drawing material from the lives she saw around her.

Now she finds creative inspiration in Taiwan’s bustling temples, oh-so-familiar images of Mazu, Nezha, and other gods, classic snacks, elderly street vendors and other elements of everyday life. These have become her filmic focus and the roots of her uniquely Taiwanese stories.

Huang Yun-sian (second left) led a group to France’s Nuits en Or film festival to tell Taiwanese stories through stop-motion animation.

Compound Eyes of Tropical, a stop-motion short that makes use of paper arts techniques, shone brightly at domestic and international film festivals, raising awareness of traditional Taiwanese crafts. (courtesy of Zhang Xu Zhan)