okazakitomohiro writes, translated from the Japanese: "I was invited by Yuiichi Ito of Nyakki to participate as one of the artists in a stop-motion exhibition. I started my activities from a place outside the stop-motion field and have been working on stop-motion from a design perspective, but this time, I'm thrilled to be joining the core figures of the stop-motion world for the first time. I'm currently exhibiting match shooting materials and such from my sixth year."ニャッキの伊藤有壱さんにお声掛け頂き、コマ撮りの展覧会に一作家として参加しています。私はコマ撮り分野ではない場所から活動をはじめて、デザインの視点でのコマ撮りに取り組んできましたが、今回初めてコマ撮り界の本丸の方々とご一緒でき嬉しいです。今6年目のマッチ撮影素材等を展示しています pic.twitter.com/Ng1VkRKRwE
— okazakitomohiro (@oo_kk_aa) May 6, 2026
May 6, 2026
Stop motion animation that's so good it's actually more than you might want in one dose.
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30 comments:
The trouble is that it looks too good -- kind of like CGI made to resemble stop motion.
Give me Godzilla and Harryhausen.
--- more than you might want in one dose
So right. Cool for 0:25 -- but didn't the Fleischer Brothers do this better and far more amusingly almost a hundred years ago?
That's pretty amazing, as a concentration of creative ideas, being explored. What a huge amount of work that went into this short video.
Marching cans and bottles, stop motion for a long-gone beer,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho2QTjp6xVs
"It's not really gone if you can taste it in your heart"
(from its cherished Hallmark greeting card)
I've long noted that, professionally, we all live in our own world, mostly oblivious to the details of any other of the worlds around us, even if we're used to them being around. For instance, I was once in a field that produced a product for the hospitality industry- high end resorts, hotels, restaurants, spas- that sort of thing. And the people I worked around, other manufacturers in the industry, salespeople, and of course the designers and owners of the resorts and hotels, were all a part of my world. Others outside of our world could see our work, but had no idea what actually went into it and probably never gave it a thought. They just used the product, but didn't think about how it got there.
I had no idea there was a stop-motion world.
I second Enigma. If it truly is SMA then it is a fantastic and complicated gem. I have made SMA films. That either represents a lot of time and artistry or really good AI prompts.
What I appreciate most is we may never know which way it was created.
Even the Golden Girls paid homage to this never-forgotten beer,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvGHdO4nPFI
Very Cool. I get more pleasure of watching this for 2 minutes then watching a 120 minute Spielberg movie.
I'm glad there are people in this world so fixated, because I'm not one of them.
AI? Anthropogenic Intelligence... measured in frames, powered by kilowatts of energy, is a high value agent.
"The trouble is that it looks too good -- kind of like CGI made to resemble stop motion."
That sounds as though you trust that it is authentic and there's a problem with it *looking* fake.
But if you do actually suspect that it might be CGI, it's very easy to hit the Grok icon at X and get some kind of fact check. I got this from Grok:
==========Grok below========
It's real stop-motion animation (komadori / コマ撮り), not CGI.
Tomohiro Okazaki (a Tokyo-based graphic designer from studio SWIMMING) creates these through painstaking physical, frame-by-frame manipulation of real-world objects—primarily matches, paper cutouts, printed photos, kiwi fruit, wooden blocks, and similar everyday items—on a wooden table. The video in the post is a compilation of his studies, and you can clearly see hands entering the frame to adjust elements between shots.
Why it's authentic stop-motion: Physical evidence in the video: Frames show tangible materials (e.g., a half-cut kiwi with a matchstick and paper strips, printed eye photos, matchstick "characters," paper shapes, grid-patterned cubes). The motion has the characteristic slight jitter/imperfections of real photography, not perfect CGI smoothness.
Process: Stop-motion involves taking a photo, making a tiny manual adjustment, taking another photo, and repeating (often 12–60+ frames per second of final footage). Okazaki has documented years of this work, including long-form montages (e.g., over an hour of matchstick studies).
Context and exhibition: His pieces are featured in a real-world exhibition ("Komadori-tte Nani? Ten" / コマ撮りってなに？展) at Skip City Video Museum in Saitama, Japan (May–September 2026), alongside other established stop-motion artists. The show covers history, materials, sets, and techniques of physical animation. Yuichi Ito (a noted stop-motion artist) invited him as a featured creator.
Okazaki has been doing this for years (at least since ~2020–2021 for matchstick work), with coverage on sites like Colossal, The Kid Should See This, and his own Instagram/YouTube showing behind-the-scenes physical setups.
People sometimes suspect CGI with hyper-detailed or fluid work like this (especially post-AI era), but everything here aligns with traditional analog stop-motion techniques. The dedication required—thousands of individual photos and adjustments—is part of what makes it impressive. No signs of digital fabrication in the sources or visuals.
@Althouse --
Given that a Japanese person did it, I always accepted that it was genuine stop motion. Given that I was literally educated in human perception, I didn't need to look it up.
The problem is that perception shifts to seamless and fluid motion when the quality and framerate is high enough (see the Phi phenomenon and Gestalt psychology). Old herky-jerky stop motion is what makes the artform unique and fun.
E.g.:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438808000548
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_phenomenon
Like Mike said. For anybody who hasn't done this it takes an enormous amount of time and skill.
The sad thing is that AI is taking over animation.
Automaton Intelligence (AI) has long ruled this roost, guided by the discernment and creativity of AI. Nothing new.
They do SMA with CGI. It doesn't require mechanical motion.
OK, worth it, but I had to stop at 23 seconds due to overload.
Scary good AI song prompted by Rick Beato in four minutes during an interview
Makes me think of Gumby and Pokey, also Wallace and Grommet.
Clever people, teh Japanese.
Really, that was awesome.
My favorite stop-action - The Gulf NoNox ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtb5-axztrg
From a technical standpoint would I need more than an IPhone to create my own stop action films?
Where can I get one of those matches?
"Scary good AI song prompted by Rick Beato in four minutes during an interview"
Not bad but has structural problems, especially with the lines:
I was paper
You were scissors
Cut me out
But I still linger
Should work as a quatrain, but for some reason the AI lets OUT go on and on and on and puts the 'But I still linger' line with the next set of lines. It just doesn't work thematically and makes the chorus (I guess) seem more random than it should be.
Levi - no
Have fun.
Snail stuck on wall in backyard. Set up stop motion video camera anticipating making a vid of a traveling snail. Next day, disappointment, snail was actually dead and didn't move.
I prefer watching Gumby and Pokey. True art.
Where is Godzilla?
In this case, it's impressive that it looks like authentically manufactured AI, but actually is hand made by a human. An inverse Turing test
Well that old time jerky look was the frame rate of 24FPS. Modern video is 30FPS and the refresh rate of modern TV makes everything even smoother.
The frame rate of stop motion animation is arbitrary -- you take a photo, insert a time interval to hold the image, take another photo, insert another time interval, etc. Films with real motion were and are shown at 24 fps, but the old-time stop motion scenes in them were perhaps 12 fps and doubled. That's why they were easily detected as stop motion.
Modern video is sometimes at 60 fps, but viewers often don't like >24 fps in film. Famously, Peter Jackson created a 2 x 24 fps = 48 fps version of The Hobbit. Viewers rejected the look and feel as TV-like and fatiguing rather than comfortable and dramatic. See a long discussion of brain processing time and motion fill in below:
https://gizmodo.com/the-hobbit-an-unexpected-masterclass-in-why-48-fps-fai-5969817
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