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How does stop-motion animation make puppets and objects appear to move?

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Animated scene from The Wild Robot showing a round-eyed robot with a fox perched on its shoulder in a forest clearing. — Animation Scene from the 2024 science fiction animated film *The Wild Robot*, directed by Chris Sanders.

Stop-motion animation creates the illusion of movement through a meticulous, frame-by-frame process. Rather than capturing continuous motion, animators photograph successive, minutely varied positions of objects—such as puppets, marionettes, or clay models—to record the different phases of a subject's movement.12

When these individual still photographs are projected in sequence, typically at a rate of 24 frames per second, the human eye perceives them as fluid, continuous motion. This technique relies on the exact timing and choreography of the objects, as each frame must be adjusted incrementally to build the final sequence. While the process is labor-intensive, it allows for a unique, tactile form of expression that has been used to create everything from folkloric puppet stories to sophisticated, character-driven films.23