subject
Puppet
What is being animated?
Definition
A poseable figure built for incremental movement, often with an armature, body padding, costume, surface skin, replacement face parts or mechanical controls.
Overview
A stop-motion puppet is built, not sculpted once and left alone: an internal armature (ball-and-socket or wire) supplies the pose-holding skeleton, over which body padding, a surface skin -- silicone, latex, foam, or fabric -- and a costume are built up, with the face handled either as a single sculpt worked by hand between frames or as a full replacement system (see replacement face systems). The construction choice is a durability calculation as much as an artistic one: a hero puppet in a feature production is posed by hand thousands of times across a shoot measured in months, and every material and joint has to survive that handling without the surface cracking, the paint scuffing, or the armature loosening.
That durability requirement is not unique to film. Building the puppets for the 2026 stop-motion co-op game Out of Words, puppet fabricator Sofie Kjaer told Vice about a four-year character-development cycle built around exactly this problem -- puppets are finished, sent off to animation, and refined again as wear shows up -- with materials chosen for how much handling they can take: the Prince puppet needed months of extra development specifically because its jacket material had to withstand thousands of touches from animation director Danail Kraev's hands over the course of frame-by-frame animation. Kraev's own description of that process -- 'you go frame by frame, and start performing in a very slow pace' -- is the same handling that stresses a puppet physically; every animation session is another round of exactly the touches its materials have to survive.
Feature puppets that hold up under that handling are themselves worked examples of the craft: Corpse Bride (2005) and Coraline (2009) each built full casts of poseable character puppets across long production shoots, and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) pushed the same fabrication problem further with 3D-printed replacement parts, including the replacement faces detailed on that page. The puppet is the object all of the fabrication chapter's other pages build toward -- armature, skin materials, hair materials, and replacement face systems each solve one piece of keeping this single built object performing, and looking consistent, for the length of a production.
Aardman's puppet department gives the same durability problem an animal-specific answer. Head of puppets Kate Anderson described building the flock for Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) around randomized rubber feathers: each feather's size is varied before the plumage is 3D-printed as a mould, and painting a single puppet's full coat of feathers takes a week on its own. Anderson drew the contrast explicitly: "Laika uses color 3D printers, which enables them to play with different materials, but we remain traditionally 'Aardman' with plasticine heads and beaks" (Animation Magazine, 2023-12-06) -- the same fabrication problem (durable, repeatable, huggable-looking coverage across thousands of touches) solved two different ways depending on a studio's own material tradition rather than one converging on a single industry answer.
Puppets built to survive that handling often outlast the production itself. Corpse Bride's cast has since travelled the museum circuit -- alongside puppets from Frankenweenie, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, and James and the Giant Peach -- most recently in the Center for Puppetry Arts' 2026 exhibition Frame by Frame: The Art of Stop-Motion Animation, drawing on loans from the Walt Disney Archives, Warner Bros. and Netflix. Curator Emily D. Myers frames the survival of these objects as the point of the craft, not an afterthought: "Stop-motion animation exists at the intersection of puppetry, sculpture, filmmaking, and performance" (Creative Loafing, 2026-08-07) -- the same built object that has to hold a pose for thousands of exposures is, afterward, asked to hold up as a physical artifact under museum lighting and public scrutiny.
Workflow
- Design and sculpt a maquette to lock proportions, silhouette and range of motion before committing to a build.
- Build the internal armature (see armature) to the maquette's proportions, adding reinforced hardpoints wherever the puppet needs to be tied down or rigged.
- Mould and cast the body surface in skin material (silicone, latex or foam) over the padded armature, leaving access for face or costume changes as needed.
- Build and fit the costume and any hair (see hair materials), then paint and detail the surface.
- Integrate the face system -- a workable single sculpt or a full replacement set -- and test the finished puppet's durability against the number of touches the shoot will require before it goes to camera.