Stop motion animation and Halloween seemingly go hand-in-hand. Ever since Mad Monster Party from Rankin Bass in 1967, a number of Halloween (or macabre) films have been shot using stop motion animation. The most famous is arguably Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Burton recently released Frankenweenie just in time for Halloween.

All of the above films, except for maybe Mad Monster Party, exhibit finely detailed craft and puppets that move as if they were real. They are multi-million dollar productions that hundreds of people worked on to bring to life. That’s what makes the following short film all the more impressive. One man took numerous pumpkins to bring a short stop-motion film to life. It’s rather amazing, and is far more delightful than it has any right to be.

Incredible Pumpkin Stop Motion from Auke de Vries on Vimeo.

Stop motion is already a laborious process that requires the animators to take thousands of individual photos and string them together into a cohesive whole. The animator here also had to cut out each and every pumpkin individually for every shot. It’s only fair that he gets all the recognition in the world for pulling this off.

For more awesome pumpkins, check out Pumpktris. It’s a fully playable game of Tetris, but inside a pumpkin.

[h/t: John Nack]