To get into the Halloween spirit this year we challenged our animators, Ed and Iina to carve the best or spookiest pumpkin! They both went away and created something amazing incorporated several elements of Halloween.
Ed went for a spooky pumpkin surrounded by bats and terrifying forest, whilst Iina choose to bring her charmingly evil pumpkin to life with the help of some pesky ghosts! We think they are both amazing and better than any real carved pumpkin that we’ve seen!
Ed’s spooky pumpkin! (Above) Iina’s haunted pumpkin! (Below)
Halloween is also a great time of the year for animations. Other than Christmas, Halloween follows with the most (and best, in our opinion) animated films! One genre of animation that seems to thrive during Halloween is stop motion, with Tim Burton, Henry Selick and Laika being just some of the people behind the success of stop motion.
Some of our favourites animated Halloween films include:
The Nightmare Before Christmas
We were all shocked to find out that the film came out in 1993! This behind the scenes mini-documentary from 1993 shows the scale it took to produce the film, including over 100 experts working over 3 years and filling over 19 stages with the 230 sets and 100s of individual puppet characters. Strangely the process doesn’t seem to be that different from modern-day stop motion animation.
Corpse Bride
Tim Burton strikes again with the 2005 Corpse Bride, which saw him utilise stop motion again. The plot seems to take a much darker turn than The Nightmare Before Christmas, as the characters cross the line between the living and the dead.
Paranorman
A stop motion produced by Laika, about a young boy, Norman, who can talk to the dead. He then must use his special power to save his town from the threat of zombies. ParaNorman is a much more lighthearted and funny Halloween animation in comparison to the Corpse Bride.
Scooby-Doo (both the 2004 live-action animation and the 2008 fully animated film)
It’s hard not to love the gang as they face yet another battle against the supernatural and mysterious! And earlier in the year, we created our very own ode to Scooby-Doo with our animated personas!
And finally, a special mention has got to go out to Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It has to be said that it’s definitely not the scariest of Halloween films, but we still think it’s pretty great. The 2005 film began production in 2003 and was the first full feature-length Wallace and Gromit film to be produced.
Happy Halloween from everyone at Giggle!
