The animated films that inspired Mr Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs.

Ever since pioneering animator Mr Ray Harryhausen brought cantankerous, sword-slinging skeletons to life in 1963’s Jason And The Argonauts, stop-motion animation has thrived on the big screen. Despite the advent of CGI, 3-D trickery and VR, films such as the Oscar-nominated Anomalisa and Mr Wes Anderson’s dogs-topia Isle Of Dogs prove stop motion can be just as compelling as any other movie-making technique. As an homage to the genre, here are five stone-cold stop-motion classics.

You can’t talk about stop-motion and not mention Czech surrealist Mr Jan Švankmajer – and especially his surrealist breakout film, Alice. Based loosely on Mr Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland-set yarn, it follows a young girl whose vivid daydreaming leads her into a nightmarish fantasy of pyromaniac mice and sock-puppet worms. A mixture of live action and the kind of topsy-turvy stop-motion wizardry Mr Švankmajer is known for, Alice is a pitch-black take on a cornerstone children’s tale – one, the director says, examines the nature of our dreams and how morality doesn’t always apply in them.

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For anyone who’s had to endure toothache and the chemical highs of the dentist chair, Mr Harry Everett Smith’s cult trip-out will resonate. It depicts a series of waking dreams following a dental procedure carried out on a young woman – one to the gates of heaven, and another back to Earth for a fight to the death with German philologist Mr Max Müller. Presented in a number of cuts before its mainstream release in 1962, Heaven And Earth Magic is still frequently screened across the world, and was once live-scored by Warp Records’ beat-wrangling experimentalist Flying Lotus.

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For one reason or another, stop-motion films tend to veer towards the murkier aspects of life – the universalisms we real-world humans would rather not confront. Not so in Mr Karel Zeman’s 11-minute masterstroke though, a sensorial glide through the delights of figure skating. Cue glacial semi-viscous ice and shimmering lights emulating the collective glow of a crowd at a sporting event. Inspirace was a huge influence on the work of Mr Terry Gilliam as well as on Mr Anderson’s new Japan-set dogs’ film.

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Stop motion’s defining sequence – a five-minute sword fight in which Greek militant Jason and his crew do battle with a gang of skeletons – took Mr Harryhausen four months to perfect. Still, it changed cinema forever, opening up the possibilities of stop-motion-meets-live-action for generations of young auteurs. Mr Don Chaffey’s 1963 epic was scored by Psycho’s Mr Bernard Hermann, whose booming orchestrations perfectly accompany the film’s iconic scenes.

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One of the great successes of Anomalisa is that nobody really saw it coming. Especially in the hands of Mr Charlie Kaufman, who became an indie-cinema darling after writing Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. However, the film’s subtly devastating ode to loss and grievance slots perfectly into Mr Kaufman’s filmography ­– and was a triumph for stop-motion cinema in the face of CGI and endless comic-book adaptations. It’s voiced by the ever-brilliant Mr David Thewlis as a customer-service expert and author haunted by a letter from an old flame.

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