MoMA opens a century-spanning animation exhibition with stop-motion among 13 techniques

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition It's Alive! A Century of Animation from the Collection opens on 1 August 2026 and draws from a collection covering 13 animation techniques, including stop-motion, pixilation, pinscreen, cel and rotoscope. The exhibition is structured as an archival survey rather than a single-studio showcase, placing physical frame-by-frame practices alongside experimental, educational, commercial and digital animation across roughly a century.

For stop-motion discovery, the exhibition is useful because it exposes museum-held works and makers that do not normally appear in current trade-news coverage. Twenty films are screened in the gallery without their normal soundtrack so visitors can concentrate on image construction, while optional audio remains available separately. The curatorial framework therefore provides a concrete route into MoMA's animation holdings, preservation history and technique classifications for later title-by-title research.