Just a random thought that occurred to me after watching The Fantastic Mr Fox again… have there ever been any significant stopmotion animation works where life sized models were used?
This might not be quite what you meant - some of Norman McLaren’s works used live actors to execute stop motion animations -
Neighbours, arguable his most famous creation
Pas de deux
A Chairy Tale
Would Sledgehammer count?
Or Ok Go’s End Love?
Or Jitlov’s Wizard Of Speed And Time?
Best answer! Jittlov is a real life special effect.
Those are all good (and valid stopmotion works), but what I was looking for was stopmotion done with life-sized, non-living models.
Jan Svankmajer’s Neco z Alenky, AKA Alice.
It’s actually a combination of live action (Alice herself) and stop motion. But the stop motion models are…well, not all of the models were purpose built.
'Way back when they started doing animation, a fellow named Dawson animted life-size dinosaur models. That would seem to defeat the purpose of using animation, since you can build more convincing and much more easily animated miniatures than life-size figures, but the technology was new. Dawson applied for a patent on it, and tried to keep Willis O’Brien from using stop-motion because iof that. Would’ve been a disaster.
This is a tough question.
Maybe there is some of Gilliam’s work that uses large as/larger than life models. I remember seeing some half-finished stuff in ‘Lost in La Mancha’ and wondering what exactly he had planned to do with it.
I thought maybe Blu had done something, but almost all of his stuff centres around painting. Big Bang Big Boom is the closest I’ve been able to find but although it has a couple of larger than life objects posing as life forms, the style is more about the continuous painting.
If you mean what I think you mean, I’m pretty sure they were meant to be string puppets.