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What is pixilation in the animated film Neighbours by Norman McLaren?

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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.

In the context of animation, pixilation is a stop-motion technique in which live actors are photographed frame by frame, similar to the way puppets or other inanimate objects are animated.1

In his short film Neighbours (1952), the Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren utilized this process to manipulate the movement of human beings, making them appear to move like automatons. It is important to distinguish this animation technique from "pixelation," a term used in digital media to describe the visible display of individual pixels in an image.12