Word: motioning
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...Aardman Studios they make art by hand, in a form called stop-motion animation whose history stretches back to the first days of cinema. It certainly goes back to the solitary youths of many Aardmanites. Nick Park, the studio's resident genius, was one of those kids who played with clay in a corner of his Lancashire home until, like Dr. Praetorius in Bride of Frankenstein, he made those little figures come alive...
...That notion must have drifted over to Bristol. After two features and dozen of shorts whose wit and grace proved that stop-motion deserved to survive in the digital era, some of the Aardmanites agreed to go to California and make a computer-generated feature with the company's American partner, DreamWorks. (Not Park; he stayed home...
...input. You certainly won't see thumbprints on the characters, as were occasionally visible in the fingers-on-clay movies. This one is as polished as a formica table top in the kitchen of a neat-freak housewife. The question is whether the Aardmen lost some of stop-motion's charm, its humanity, when they went digital...
...None of this is to say that stop-motion animation is inherently noble, or that computer cartoons can't bear the imprint of one creator-can't have soul. It's in a way a matter of corporate identity for a hand-made film studio. Should Aardman go fully into 3-D? For stop-motion specialists, is CGI a hare-brained scheme, like the ones Wallace is always hatching, needing Gromit to extricate him? Or does it represent the inevitable next step? Once the Aardmen have made a film with computer, can they return to the old ways? Go back...
...recent weeks, even the majority Shi'ites-who most benefited from the fall of Saddam and from the democratic process the U.S. helped set in motion-have come to distrust the U.S. Many Shi'ites complain U.S. forces aren't doing enough to stamp out the insurgency, but are instead targeting Shi'ite militias who-in their view-are merely protecting the community from Sunni attacks...