Welcome to "This Week in Genre History," where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world's greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.
In the past 25 years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, making computers the principal tool for the artform. DreamWorks and others have followed in the Disney company's footsteps, creating visual wonders through this incredible technology. But those often indelible films don't represent all that animation can do. Sometimes, the old-fashioned techniques can be just as powerful.
On Feb. 6, 2009, a company called Laika revealed its first full-length stop-motion animated film, a dark children's adventure based on a Neil Gaiman book.