Dominating children's TV stop motion programming for three decades in America was Art
Clokey's Gumby serieswhich spawned a feature film, Gumby I in 1995using both
freeform and character clay animation. Clokey started his adventures in clay with a 1953 freeform clay short film called Gumbasia (1953) which shortly thereafter propelled him into his more structured Gumby TV series. In November 1959 the first episode of Sandmnnchen was shown on East German television, a children's show that had Cold War propaganda as its primary function. New episodes, minus any propaganda, are still being produced in the now-reunified Germany,[6] making it one of the longest running animated series in the world.[citation needed] In the 1960s, the French animator Serge Danot created the well-known The Magic Roundabout (1965) which played for many years on the BBC. Another French/Polish stop motion animated series was Colargol (Barnaby the Bear in the UK, Jeremy in Canada), by Olga Pouchine and Tadeusz Wilkosz. A British TV series, Clangers (1969), became popular on television. The British artists Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall (Cosgrove Hall Films) produced a full-length film The Wind in the Willows (1983) and later a multi-season TV series The Wind in the Willows based on Kenneth Grahame's classic children's book of the same title. They also produced a documentary of their production techniques, Making Frog and Toad. Since the 1970s and continuing into the 21st century, Aardman Animations, a British studio, has produced short films, television series, commercials and feature films, starring plasticine characters such as Wallace and Gromit; they also produced a notable music video for "Sledgehammer", a song by Peter Gabriel. During 1986 to 1991, Churchill Films produced The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Runaway Ralph, and Ralph S. Mouse for ABC television. The shows featured stop-motion characters combined with live action, based on the books of Beverly Cleary. John Clark Matthews was animation director, with Justin Kohn, Joel Fletcher, and Gail Van Der Merwe providing character animation.[7] From 1986 to 2000, over 150 five-minute episodes of Pingu, a Swiss children's comedy were produced by Trickfilmstudio. In the 1990s Trey Parker and Matt Stone made two shorts and the pilot of South Park almost entirely out of construction paper. In 1999, Tsuneo Gda directed an official 30-second sketches of the character Domo. With the shorts animated by stop-motion studio dwarf is still currently produced in Japan and has then received universal critical acclaim from fans and critics. Gda also directed the stop- motion movie series Komaneko in 2004. In 2003, the pilot film for the series Curucuru and Friends, produced by Korean studio Ffango Entertoyment is greenlighted into a children's animated series in 2004 after an approval with the Gyeonggi Digital Contents Agency. It was aired in KBS1 on November 24, 2006 and won the 13th Korean Animation Awards in 2007 for Best Animation. Ffango Entertoyment also worked with Frontier Works in Japan to produce the 2010 film remake of Cheburashka.[8] Since 2005, Robot Chicken has mostly utilized stop motion animation, using custom made action figures and other toys as principal characters. Since 2009 Laika, the stop-motion successor to Will Vinton Studios, has released four feature films, which have collectively grossed over $400 million.
Stop motion in other media[edit]
Many younger people begin their experiments in movie making with stop motion, thanks to the ease of modern stop motion software and online video publishing.[9] Many new stop motion shorts use clay animation into a new form.[10] Singer-songwriter Oren Lavie's music video for the song Her Morning Elegance was posted on YouTube on January 19, 2009. The video, directed by Lavie and Yuval and Merav Nathan, uses stop motion and has achieved great success with over 25.4 million views, also earning a 2010 Grammy Award nomination for "Best Short Form Music Video". Stop motion has occasionally been used to create the characters for computer games, as an alternative to CGI. The Virgin Interactive Entertainment Mythos game Magic and Mayhem (1998) featured creatures b