Ask anyone to name the best stop-motion film ever made and you will hear the same title back. Coraline came out in February 2009, and it has spent the seventeen years since becoming the default answer to a question most people have never actually sat down and worked through. The reputation is deserved. Henry Selick’s film was Laika’s first feature, it was nominated for Best Animated Feature, it has grossed north of $185 million across its original run and its re-releases, and it built 28 identical puppets capable of more than 200,000 facial expressions between them at a point when nobody was sure a stop-motion studio could survive in America at all. ComicBook has called it a stop-motion masterpiece, and that is the correct word for it. Its 2023 re-release behaved like a new hit rather than a nostalgia run, which does not happen to films the culture has merely agreed to be polite about. None of what follows argues otherwise. It is also, I think, the wrong answer.
The best stop-motion film ever made is Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and I am not making an aesthetic argument that you are free to shrug at. I am making a factual one. In the twenty-four years the Academy has handed out a Best Animated Feature award, exactly two stop-motion films have won it, out of roughly eighteen that have been nominated. Coraline is one of the sixteen that lost. Del Toro’s film is one of the two that did not, and it got there by beating a Pixar movie, a DreamWorks movie, and the entire computer-animated field in a single night. Everything else I am about to lay out is the craft that earned it, but the record is where the case starts, because the record is the thing nobody can argue with. Taste is negotiable. A list of who beat whom is not, and that list has been running for a quarter of a century with almost nobody keeping score.
The Academy Has Given Stop-Motion Its Top Prize Exactly Twice
The category is younger than most people assume. The Academy created Best Animated Feature in 2000 and first handed it out in March 2002, and the reason it exists at all is widely credited to Chicken Run, which came out the year before the category did and had nowhere to go. Aardman’s Nick Park then won the first stop-motion Oscar in the category his own snub helped force into being, for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2006. That is winner number one, and it arrived four ceremonies into the category’s existence, which at the time looked like the start of something. Seventeen years passed before there was a second.
In between, the medium lost with almost comic regularity. Corpse Bride lost to Were-Rabbit. Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox both lost to Up in the same year. ParaNorman, Frankenweenie, and The Pirates! Band of Misfits all lost to Brave. The Boxtrolls lost to Big Hero 6. Anomalisa and Shaun the Sheep Movie lost to Inside Out. Kubo and the Two Strings lost to Zootopia. Isle of Dogs lost to Into the Spider-Verse. Missing Link won the Golden Globe and then lost the Oscar to Toy Story 4. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and Memoir of a Snail both lost to Flow in 2025, and the 2026 ceremony had no stop-motion nominee at all. Roughly eighteen nominations, two wins, one medium.
Then on March 12th, 2023, del Toro’s film beat Turning Red, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Sea Beast, and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. It was Netflix’s first win in the category, and it beat one of those films — Marcel the Shell with Shoes On — that was also stop-motion, in a year when the discipline somehow had two of the five slots and still had to get past Pixar to convert one. It also took the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, the Critics’ Choice, the Producers Guild award, and five Annie Awards from nine nominations, including Best Feature, Directing, Character Animation, and Production Design. That is not a split decision or a surprise upset that looks strange in hindsight. That is a sweep, and it is the only time a stop-motion film has ever managed one.
The Numbers Behind It Are Close to Absurd
Here is the part I find genuinely hard to hold in my head. Animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen has said that at peak the film had 41 animators working, and that across production the team averaged 3.8 seconds of finished animation per week. Not per animator per day. Per week, as an output rate. The shoot ran roughly a thousand days, 935 of them actual filming, on a film that runs 117 minutes. Somewhere between 350 and 375 artists passed through a 75,000-square-foot warehouse in Portland to produce it, at a cost the studio has put at around a million people-hours. Del Toro’s own description of the process is that stop-motion is like milking a mummified cow, which is a joke, and is also, at 3.8 seconds a week, a fairly literal description of the yield.
To make that arithmetic work, ShadowMachine had to do something the industry had not done. Producer Alex Bulkley has said the production ran as many as 60 animation units concurrently, which he believes had never happened before, and the hedge is his rather than mine. That means the same character was being shot on a dozen or more stages simultaneously by different animators, and every one of those performances had to match. Somewhere in a Portland warehouse there was a wall-sized board tracking which Geppetto was on which stage on which day, and the studio built 30 separate Pinocchio puppets and 18 Geppettos to feed it. Hansen’s line about why is the best sentence anybody said about this movie: if there had only been one Pinocchio, it would have taken ten years to shoot.
The puppets themselves make the point twice over. Pinocchio used roughly 3,000 individually 3D-printed replacement faces rather than the movable silicone skin most of the cast wore, for a reason that tells you everything about the priorities on this production. Puppet fabrication head Georgina Hayns has said silicone “looked like rubber,” and Pinocchio needed to read as wood. He is a boy carved out of a tree, so the surface of his face had to have grain in it, so the team printed three thousand faces. And del Toro put the animators’ names in the opening credits alongside the voice cast, because his position is that animators are actors. All of this was done for $35 million, which is a little over half of what Coraline cost in 2009.
Del Toro Spent Fourteen Years Getting It Made, and Then Lost His Co-Director
The film was announced in 2008. It sat in development with no financing from 2012 to 2017, a stretch long enough that most projects quietly stop existing, and Netflix did not revive it until October 2018. Fourteen years from announcement to release, on a movie nobody in Hollywood was asking for, in the slowest and least forgiving medium available. Nothing about that timeline suggests a director who had an easy version available and picked the hard one for effect. There was no easy version. The film exists because one person refused to let it stop existing across fourteen years and one global production shutdown, and because a streaming service eventually decided a passion project that old was worth $35 million.
He did not make it alone. Mark Gustafson co-directed, and his own history runs straight through the medium’s best work: Will Vinton Studios in the eighties, and animation director on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. He shared the Oscar on that stage in March 2023, and he died of a heart attack on February 1st, 2024, at 64, less than a year later. It is hard to read the win as anything other than the high point of a career built entirely inside a discipline that almost never gets one. From the stage that night, del Toro said: “Animation is cinema. Animation is not a genre. Animation is ready to be taken to the next step. We are all ready for it. Keep animation in the conversation.”
I will concede the strongest objection before somebody makes it for me. Kubo and the Two Strings is the film animation professionals cite most often as the technical ceiling, and Kubo reaching a Best Visual Effects nomination is something stop-motion essentially never touches. I do not think it is wrong so much as incomplete. Kubo is the medium at its most spectacular. Pinocchio is the medium proving it can beat the computers at the only table where that gets scored, with a story about a father who builds a son out of dead wood and then fails him, told in a form where every gesture had to be built by hand.
Del Toro is now funding a stop-motion training studio with Netflix and a school in Paris, because the people who know how to do this are, in his words, all over fifty years old. He has called the medium a tiny cult kept alive by slightly crazy people, and said that in an era of AI creeping into every other kind of animation, this one is AI-proof. That is a man who knows exactly what he made and exactly how close it came to being impossible. Coraline is a masterpiece and it deserves the affection it gets. Pinocchio is the one that won.
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