Stop motion (also known as stop action) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Clayfigures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Motion animation using clay is called clay animation or clay-mation.

The term "stop motion", related to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen (stop-motion). Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has, in addition, a second meaning, not related to animation or cinema. Stop-motion: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong" (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition).^[1]