dwarf

dwarf kicked off as one man company by Tsuneo Goda in September 2003.
Since then, the produces, production managers, directors, animators and managers joined and we do have our own studio now.

dwarf is the animation studio which produces the characters and animation.
Above all, we’re good at a traditional shooting technique, “Stopmotion Animation”, so we put out a variety of works.

We’d like to see many people through making the characters, feature and short films, TV CM etc. Excited about new things or difficult things, we try to make the work people will be able to care for in 20 years.

Tsuneo Goda

＊“dwarfs" are, there are various translations about them, little people from fairy tales and fantasy world.
We started making the characters and animation with “Domo”, so we looked for the word beginning with “d” and finally named our studio “dwarf”.

Stopmotion Animation

dwarf is specialized at Stopmotion Animation, as well as Character Design.
Stopmotion Animation is a traditional shooting technique that we shoot consecutive frames by moving puppets and props (and sometimes the camera itself) in a very small amount between frames. Putting 24 pictures together, we just have 1 minute movie.

At Stopmotion Animation, one is called Puppet Animation where puppets are mainly used, and another is called Clay Animation where clay is mainly used. In either case, Stopmotion Animation is created frame-by-frame, and therefore we call it “komadori” in Japanese; “koma” meaning “frame”, and “dori” meaning “to take a picture”. “Domo”, “Komaneko”, “Wallace and Gromit”, “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, and “PINGU”, etc… All of these are filmed using this technique.

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