technique
Cutout animation
Stop motion
Definition
A sub-type of stop motion in which flat figures and set pieces -- cut from paper, card, fabric or photographs, then jointed at pivot points -- are nudged frame by frame under an overhead or rostrum camera, rather than posed in three dimensions like a puppet or clay figure.
Overview
Cutout animation shares stop motion's basic method -- incremental physical movement, one photographed frame at a time -- but restricts its subject to a flat plane. A figure is built from separate jointed pieces (head, torso, limbs) pinned or hinged at the points where they need to rotate, then laid under a camera shooting straight down rather than into a three-dimensional set. Because the material has no volume to model, the craft problems are different from puppet or clay animation: registration (keeping the flat surface aligned frame to frame), silhouette design, and whether a joint is hidden or exploited as part of the character's look.
Cutout's oldest and most historically distinct lineage is silhouette animation -- flat, solid-black figures shot against a lit background rather than fully-visible line or photo cutouts. Lotte Reiniger's Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed / The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) -- catalogued here as the-adventures-of-prince-achmed -- is the technique's founding work and the earliest surviving feature-length animated film, two years before Disney's first sound cartoon; see silhouette-animation for the trick-table method and its legacy.
The category has stayed useful precisely because paper and card are cheap and fast to iterate compared with a sculpted puppet. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's original The Spirit of Christmas shorts -- catalogued here as the-spirit-of-christmas-jesus-vs-frosty -- used cardstock cutouts shot on video as a quick pitch piece years before South Park became a cel- and digitally-styled production. John Korty and Charles Swenson's Twice Upon a Time (1983), Lucasfilm's first animated feature, went the opposite way on cost: Korty's own 'Lumage' process, developed over twenty years, shot prefabricated cutout shapes on large sheets of glass lit from below to emulate stained glass, and came in far cheaper than the equivalent runtime would have cost in cel animation.
Cutout also mixes readily with other techniques inside a single production. Chris Sullivan's Consuming Spirits (2012) -- catalogued here as consuming-spirits -- spent fifteen years in independent, largely solo production combining cutout figures with hand-drawn animation and three-dimensional stop motion in the same film, shooting at a rate of roughly 300 frames -- about ten seconds of finished footage -- per day; it premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.
LIGHT HOLE (2026), Kodansha's branded stop-motion short directed by Toru Katori for Geek Pictures (catalogued here as light-hole), complicates cutout's usual flat-under-camera setup. Animation director Takuro Oishi has described building the film's cities and characters not as flat photographed paper but as constructed three-dimensional forms, cut and folded from paper actually printed with pages from Kodansha manga -- Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Attack on Titan and Initial D among them -- so the printed page doubles as both source material and physical construction stock. Oishi singled out a shot built around a giant's arm as needing an entirely new shooting method the standard flat-cutout approach could not support. The film is a useful boundary case for the category: it keeps cutout's core material logic -- paper, pre-printed rather than painted, cut and assembled by hand -- while abandoning the flat plane that defines classical cutout animation, sitting closer to three-dimensional papercraft model animation than to Lotte Reiniger's trick-table lineage.
Workflow
- Draw the character turnaround and separate it into jointed pieces -- head, torso, upper and lower limbs -- at the points that need to rotate independently.
- Cut each piece from paper, card, fabric or a printed photograph, then join them at the pivot points with pins, thread, or small brads, loose enough to rotate under gentle pressure.
- Lay the assembled figure flat under a top-down (rostrum) camera, using a peg or registration system so the surface stays aligned from frame to frame.
- Animate by nudging each piece a fraction of a degree or millimetre between exposures, swapping in alternate pre-cut pieces for extreme poses the joint itself cannot reach.
- Shoot the frame, and repeat; clean up registration shadows or pin marks in post rather than trying to hide them on set.