Toy Story changed the animation world forever. As the first movie made completely with computer animation, it pushed studios to step up their game. If you look at the highest-grossing animated films, only about three are from traditional animation, all from the Disney Renaissance.
So, it’s clear that Toy Story (and Pixar) played a huge role in this shift. But what about stop-motion animation? Nick Park, the creator of Wallace & Gromit, remembers how the rise of CGI made his studio worried about its future.
Nick Park, a key figure at Aardman Animations, remembered how Pixar’s success in animation made him worry about the future of stop-motion. He told Inverse,
Advertisement Back when Toy Story first came out in the ’90s, a studio like us, we’re thinking, ‘Oh, boy, how long do we have left?’
So, what did Nick Park and his team do? They kept going, refusing to let new technology change their storytelling.
But we kept going. As long as you’re telling good stories, compelling stories with compelling characters, then it’s just the technique really.
Because of Toy Story – which won a Special Achievement Academy Award, something rare for an animated film – and the rise of computer-animated movies, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2002.
A few years later, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit became the first stop-motion film to win this award, though it wasn’t competing against Pixar. (Interestingly, it was up against another stop-motion film, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride.)
Now, with Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl likely to be nominated this year, it will compete with Inside Out 2. Still, I think Latvia’s Flow has a good chance of winning the Oscar.
Now, we’re not trying to compare them, but it’s important to highlight that Nick Park is one of the key voices making sure stop-motion animation isn’t forgotten, even as technology and artificial intelligence continue to grow.