From King Kong to Wallace & Gromit to Anomalisa. The animation form whose physical-puppet basis gives it weight no CGI character has quite matched.
Stop-motion animation is one of cinema's oldest forms — King Kong (1933) was substantially stop-motion — and one of the most-labor-intensive. The technique requires physically posing puppets for each frame of film, typically at 12 or 24 frames per second. A standard feature-length stop-motion film requires roughly 100,000-150,000 individual frame-poses. Production schedules run 2-4 years.
What stop-motion delivers, in exchange for the labour, is a specific physical weight that CGI animation still does not quite match. The puppets are real objects in real light; the lighting interacts with actual physical surfaces; the imperfections of the medium (the slight shake of an imperfectly-locked puppet, the texture of the felt or clay) read as physical presence rather than as digital artefact.
Laika is the Portland-based stop-motion studio whose output across the 2010s has been the most-ambitious continuous run in the form's history.
Stop-motion's labour-intensive production process is, in some sense, a structural advantage. The directors who commit to the form are doing so deliberately, with full awareness of the production costs. They are typically not making films they could have made more easily in another medium; they are making films whose specific aesthetic the medium uniquely supports. The result is a tradition of stop-motion work that, decade after decade, includes some of the most-distinctive animation features being produced.