Proposing a “poetics” rather than a “theory” of animation, this presen­tation focuses on our phenomenological and cultural relations with stop motion model animation at a particularly frenzied historical moment in which we are personally and collectively trying to “keep pace” with the relentless and technologically-driven speed of daily life. In contrast to that speed, model animation’s visible hesitancies, its material resistances and vulnerabilities, speak both to our bodies and our sense of increasing exhaustion, of being “worn out.” Model animation thus belies “virtual” animation’s “plasmaticness” to reveal the traces of a grave and grounding material “effortfulness” that emerges not as movement’s “other” but rather as its deep existential structure. It makes visible what we intimately and corporeally know but what the demands of our culture would deny: that animation in both life and cinema entails labor and is finite in both energy and its expenditure.