Thanks O! I honestly don't have any problem with CG itself at all... in fact when it's well done I love it and consider it an art form all its own. What does annoy me though is how much total crap CG is pumped out all the time in the lower-budget films (sci-fi channel, I'm lookin at YOU! ). On the stopmo message board where I hang out there's a strong core group of CG haters, mostly guys who lost their jobs in the industry when it took over in the monster movie business, though there are also quite a few stopmo animators who made the transition - case in point Phil Tippett.

But for me personally, I was already hooked on stopmo before CGI even existed, and it's largely due to the same reasons I love dreams. There's a certain intense surrealism just in the way the puppets move... even in the shows I loved as a kid like Gumby (very surreal actually!) and Davey and Goliath. Just something about the sculptural/textural qualities, and the stylized movement, that when I got a bit older drew me to the amazing creature films of Ray Harryhausen, and to King Kong etc. Those movies are like some bizarre dream creatures emerging into the normal human world and wreaking havoc.

But I had an epiphany in the early 90's when I discovered the magical and fantastic world of Eastern European Puppetfilm - in particular the films of the Brothers Quay (not officially Eastern Euro, but they do it better then the Europeans themselves do!) and Jan Svankmajer and the Tool music videos, which are very similar to the work of the Quays. Heh, I'd post some videos of some of it here but it would just make my work look bad! I might make a thread about it somewhere though. This purely miniature world that's obviously created by artists and populated entirely by living puppets is what captivates me the most... to me it's more like actually being totally immersed in a dream.