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I love the art of stop-motion animation, and I couldn’t be happier that there’s a studio like Laika keeping the art form alive. They recently released the film Kubo and the Two Strings, which is easily one of the best films I’ve seen this year. As a tribute to the art of stop-motion, Vulgar Efendi created a wonderful video that shows us how stop-motion animation has evolved through the years. It starts with the year 1900 and takes us all the way through 2016. It’s 116 years of stop-motion awesomeness in only three minutes! You'll find a full list of films featured in the video below.

The films included are:

- The Enchanted Drawing (1900)

-Fun at the Bakery Shop (1902)

-El Hotel Electrico (1905)

-Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)

-The Cameraman's Revenge (1912)

-The Night before Christmas (1913)

-Häxan (1922)

-The Lost World (1925)

-The Tale of Fox (1930 version)

-King Kong...

We delve deep into the mists of time to discover the origins of the sequel, and come up with an unusual prime suspect…

If you want to blame somebody in particular for the rise and lingering popularity of movie sequels, you may want to point an accusatory finger at Johannes Gutenberg. Several hundred years before the first moving image was projected onto a wall somewhere in the late Victorian era, it was with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg and his contemporaries that the concept of the sequel almost certainly began.

The first book to go into mass publication was the Bible, which was hardly the kind of book you'd dare to attempt to follow up with a sequel (though Jerry Bruckheimer may have tried, had he been a 15th century publisher). It was the modern novel, an invention that properly came into being in the 1700s, that...

To begin with, something I'm outrageously proud of. Not only did my partner and I attend the public celebration of animator and special effects genius Ray Harryhausen's 90th birthday, but I was able to do the Great Man a favor. In his memoir Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, the author records how he was influenced in his youth not only by King Kong (obviously), but by Fritz Lang's Metropolis and something called The New Gulliver:

"I was sixteen when I saw the Russian film The New Gulliver (1935), a tour de force of stop-motion model animation which is virtually unknown today but, at the time, was one of the earliest and most complex examples of live action and puppet animation. Directed by Alexander Ptushko, it told of a small boy who dreams of the land of Lilliput where workers revolt against the monarchy. For me, the movement...