Stop Motion is an old and respected art form. Prior to the invention of CGI, it was the main way to create animation that looked 3D and/or realistically textured, and for this reason, it developed into both a medium in its own right, and as a means of creating special effects for live-action works.
However, stop motion is also notoriously time- and labor-intensive to produce, even compared to other forms of animation. It's also flat-out impossible to utilize in certain mediums, such as 3D video gamesnote . Certain elements such as intense action sequences or complicated character designs are also extremely difficult if not impossible to produce with stop motion. For these reasons, a lot of modern creators will resort to mimicking the appearance of stop motion using other mediums that are easier and/or cheaper to work with, usually computer animation.
In order to pull this off, expect the creators to deliberately mimic many of stop motion's telltale quirks. The framerate or animation will be more limited than what is otherwise possible in the medium, and surfaces will be made to appear as if they were constructed of the materials typically used in stop motion, such as plasticine, clay, fabric, or paper. The models may display deliberate "imperfections" that sometimes show up in stop motion, such as fingerprints and dents, in order to make them appear as if they've been handled by stop motion animators.
Compare Retraux, where a newer work is deliberately produced in an older medium or made to look like it is. Compare other tropes where one form of animation imitates another, such as Cel Shading and Painted CGI (where 3D animation tries to match the look of 2D cel animation), Animesque (non-Japanese animation that looks like anime), and Disneyesque (non-Disney works mimicking the style of Disney animation). May overlap with Art Shift if Stop Faux-tion is used for a smaller segment of work that normally uses a different medium or art style.
Examples:
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Anime
- Pingu in the City was a Japanese reboot of Pingu, which used CG animation to recreate the claymation appearance of the original cartoon.
Films — Animation
- Aardman Animations made their name as a stop motion studio, but starting with Flushed Away (which was done as a result of being Christmas Rushed) they branched out into making CGI films that take after the style of their stop motion work to varying degrees of faithfulness.
- Earwig and the Witch was Studio Ghibli's very first All-CGI Cartoon and they specifically went to look at Aardman Animations and Laika for inspiration on how the film would look in CGI. The end result ends up looking like a blend of Studio Ghibli's signature 2D style and Laika's stop-motion films but with fluidly animated CGI.
- KPop Demon Hunters is in CGI but is animated at a lower framerate to mimic the Limited Animation of Korean anime.
- The LEGO Movie, its sequel, The LEGO Batman Movie, and The LEGO Ninjago Movie are almost entirely CGI, but are made to look as if they were animated in stop motion using actual LEGO models in the style of brickfilms.
- Their next film, Piece by Piece, is entirely in CGI but keeps the same animation style.
- Lightyear animates Zurg and his robot army in the style of the various go-motion robot characters seen in 1980s-era live-action films as part of the film's efforts to come off as a science fiction film from that time period.
- Minions: The bedtime story Scarlet tells the minions (which doubles as a veiled threat if they fail her) is rendered to look like stop-motion, with lower frame rates and sets that look like miniatures.
- The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run used a low frame rate for the characters' CGI animation, giving them a jerky stop-motion effect to mimic the 2D feel of the show. The rest of the movies used the traditional smooth CGI animation.
- The Willoughbys: The movie is an All-CGI Cartoon, but the animation looks like it's been done in Stop-Motion.
- Wreck-It Ralph: The Nicelanders are animated with jerky stop-motion movements, to resemble how they are animated in an 8-bit game (which their game takes place in).
Films — Live-Action
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: The Scarlet Witch crawling through a mirror is accomplished by using a CGI model of Elizabeth Olsen that has jerky Uncanny Valley animation reminiscent of some of the stop-motion effects as seen in director Sam Raimi's earlier Evil Dead movies.
- Krampus: Omi's story of the titular creature coming to her village and taking everyone but her is shown in a CG segment made to mimic multiple styles of stop-motion. Omi herself is animated in a style similar to the characters in Laika's films, the other characters are shadow puppets, and the effects are done in a paper-cutout style.
Live-Action TV
- Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: The "Brain Friends" segment in "Friendship" is CGI made to look like stop-motion clay figures, probably due to how much more elaborate and involved the segment is in contrast to the more reserved use of real stop-motion in the rest of the show.
Video Games
- Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: Invoked very specifically with the character Dollman — a doll with a human's soul in it — whose movements have a far lower frame rate compared to everything else around him, giving the impression of him moving in stop-motion in an otherwise realistic world.
- JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade: Haunted Island: The game uses CGI animation that's designed to resemble stop-motion in the style of The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, the game also uses 2D animation at some points, especially for the Mini-Games.
- Kirby and the Rainbow Curse: The environments and character models look like they came from a claymation film.
- Resident Evil Village: The "Village of Shadows" storybook cutscene that opens and plays over its end credits is animated to look like a dark fantasy stop-motion sequence evocative of films like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.
- Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures: The game is CGI, but with such details as fingerprints on the models in order to replicate the stop motion of the films.
- Yoshi's New Island: The game employs an overall handicraft look. Some things, such as Yoshi himself, look like "plain" CGI, while other elements of the game world, such as interactable and various enemies, look like paper cutouts and claymation models.
- South of Midnight: The characters are CGI but have a claymation like texture and jerky movements like a stop motion movie.
- The Midnight Walk: The gameworld looks crafted and the characters move in stop motion during scripted scenes.
Web Animation
- CAPTAIN YAJIMA is a CGI animated short animated in Blender, but given a Rankin/Bass design for the characters, while also adding effects such as strings on spaceships to give a lower budget stop motion style. One of Ian Worthington's other shorts, "Dried Up Old Bones", uses the same technique.
Web Video
- Maybe in Midwest Angelica. The premise of the series is the government is recovering Found Footage of "real" events and a movie made with stop motion years before they happened. However, after so long it becomes more ambiguous how much of what we're seeing is the movie and how much is tapes the government recovered from other sources. Despite the series itself not using stop-motion, the team did still make some pretty sophisticated practical effects props for the REDOAK video when we see "behind the scenes" of the movie.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball: Some of the 3D characters including Miss Simian, Clayton, and Banana Joe are animated with choppier movement than others that makes them resemble stop motion characters.
- Big City Greens: Used for the Outpost Infinity sequences in "Virtually Christmas", with the characters animated in twos to resemble a jerky stop-motion animation.
- Big Nate: The series is produced in CGI, but is animated in a stop-motion framerate of 12 frames per second.
- Blue's Clues & You!: For the first few episodes, the animated characters were animated somewhat stop-motion like, using twos and threes for their movements, to mimic the animation of the characters in the original show. Averted with the rest of the series which animated them smoothly with no stop-motion animation.
- The Fairly OddParents!: A New Wish is animated in CGI with a low frame rate to mimic 2D animation.
- Franny's Feet uses CGI, but is animated in a style similar to stop-motion cutout animation, as well as having a low framerate.
- Gabby's Dollhouse uses this for only one character - Baby Box. As she is made from cardboard, she specifically is animated at a lower framerate than the others.
- Go! Go! Cory Carson is computer-animated, but has a low framerate similar to claymation.
- LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy: Unlike other LEGO Star Wars projects, the series is animated in the stiffer, on-the-twos style of a stop-motion brickfilm while remaining CGI, much like The LEGO Movie.
- Lloyd of the Flies, a production of Aardman Animations, is an All-CGI Cartoon, but it uses a similar framerate to Aardman's more familiar stop-motion productions, creating the illusion of 3D claymation models within the show's animation style.
- Remy & Boo uses a stop-motion framerate despite being CGI.
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys is a CG movie by Goodtimes that acts as a sequel to the Rankin-Bass classic. The original was stop-motion, but this sequel is very cheap CG. The lack of sufficient interstitial frames makes the whole thing look much like stop motion, though it's unclear whether this was intentional or simply a result of the low budget.
- South Park is the Spiritual Successor to animated shorts created using Stop Motion with construction paper; however the show, aside from the Pilot Episode, uses computer animation to replicate this style. This allows each episode to be produced entirely within the week before they air, in contrast to most animation which has to start production several months or even years before release, enabling the show to be extremely topical.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: The Season 16 episode "Go Fetch!" is rendered entirely in CGI, and animated in a stopmotion-esque style similar to the movie Sponge on the Run.
- The works of Elizabeth Ito, such as Welcome to My Life and City of Ghosts, are CGI but are animated so as to resemble claymation.
- Wolf King was designed
to blur the lines between CGI and stop-motion, with the characters resembling stop-motion puppets and the show being animated at a low framerate. Curtis Jobling, the author of the show's source material, has a background in stop-motion, having worked on Bob the Builder.