Vintage Stop-Motion: Embracing Nostalgia, Humour and the Right Imperfections
It can be a challenge to convince clients to embrace classic styles of animation.
Brand managers often worry that it’s childish or “too cartoony”. Agency creatives don’t like the term “retro”. But they DO like to leverage the triggers that nostalgia has to offer.
Vintage stop-motion is all about embracing the imperfections and transporting viewers back to the recent past. There’s an inherent magic to it – where life is breathed into raw materials like plasticine.
It’s a tactile style that’s got human finger-prints all over it. It drips in craftsmanship and patience – which is immensely satisfying to viewers. And it’s a trend well worth getting on board with.
Where animation holds its own
Australian studio, Mighty Nice, argue that animation taps into particular brands of nostalgia and humour that are utterly unique.
Stop-motion has always been a great vehicle for humour. Historically, it was a chance for brands to be fun again – and even funny – without appearing childish.
Now, with technical leaps forward in rendering, Mighty Nice is bringing classic stop-motion looks back, with high-end, digital character animation.
KO for your boiler: Stop-motion violence is a victimless crime
There might have been some confusion between Australia vs Austria when the Austrian Government approached Australian animators for a campaign.
The brief? Animate a punchy environmental message to encourage homeowners to stop using fossil fuels to heat their homes over winter.
Mighty Nice used their stop-motion experience to create a fully CGI film with all the charm, comedy and humanity of plasticine animation.
Our hero, Hilde, steps into the ring to battle her old boiler – and walks away with the title belt (and energy savings)! The script was funny and expressive, calling for a cartoony fight sequence that pulverised the oil heater. Luckily, stop-motion violence is a victimless crime.
“KO for your boiler taps into the anarchic, under-designed chaos of 80s and 90s stop-motion animation,” said Mighty Nice boss, Darren Price. “It’s territory that was fun for us to wrestle with.”
Claymation has a long history of non-verbal storytelling – with characters using funny sounds instead of words for extra off-beat humour.
The plasticine style gave huge scope for humour and exaggerated faces on both characters. Clay can be smashed, twisted and tortured to create hilariously intense battles. The boiler character in particular took a bashing, a squishing, and a throw-down in this spot.
Metro by T-Mobile: Digging deep into retro Christmas feels
The creative for this animation called on a style from deepest childhood – the classic Rankin Bass Christmas films. That meant an in-camera, stop-motion movement, with a heavy dose of nostalgia… but still set in a contemporary world.
Much of the aesthetic of this classic time came from the limitations of the medium back then. To capture that for today, Mighty Nice “intentionally set limitations”. These included:
- Building marionette-style mouths
- Dropping frames in the motion
- Character and camera rigs that actually create wobbles.
Mighty Nice ECD, Darren Price, told LBB, “As a team, we live for challenges like this, and this project particularly resonated with me. I loved this style as a kid and it’s a thrill to trigger those old school feels, whilst creating something new."
InsuranceLine: Keeping their grubby fingers on it
Mighty Nice faced the challenge of creating something cute and hand-crafted for InsuranceLine, without tipping over into ‘childish’. An animation advertising funeral insurance… at a backyard birthday party for retired tortoises… that wasn’t too ‘cartoony’? Sure. Sounds simple.
The solution was plasticine, but sophisticated. Playful, but in an elevated way. Not easy, but Mighty Nice nailed it.
Stop-motion animation moves in a very distinct way – physically manipulated by an animator’s hands. Mighty set out to replicate some of these imperfections – creating an animation style with an organic feel that allowed for:
- Bulging eyeballs
- Asymmetry
- Imperfections in rotations of arms and legs.
Aside from the inherent charm of plasticine, the team wanted a tactile look. The end product appealed to older audiences who don’t traditionally watch a lot of animation (but did with their kids back in the day).
Stop-motion is also acted with wonderfully comedic framing. It’s filled with “holds” that allow for a deadpan delivery that suited the dry comedy in the script.
Showing restraint was important in convincingly recreating this style of classic British stop- motion. Mighty Nice didn’t just embrace the imperfections in the materials and textures – they also deliberately limited the camera work.
Director Gary told LBB, “There are imperfections in claymation which give it a unique character. It was a lot of fun to explore our capabilities under these constraints. It left us wanting to work more in this way...”
Considering vintage stop-motion for your next campaign?
As digital imagery becomes ever more precise, audiences are hungry for the human touch – nostalgia, humour and the right imperfections.
Mighty Nice believes in making space for the happy mistakes that make animation magical and authentically less modern. Merging the 90s nostalgia of stop-motion with the sophistication of CG character design works – and audiences are here for it.
It’s never been more important to add the personal to every pixel – bringing warmth and humanity to a digital world. Mighty Nice is doing exactly that.
Mighty Nice is a Nexus Studios company. We make mighty films, amazing experiences and talked-about, award-winning campaigns for some of the world’s biggest and nicest agencies and brands.
