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‘I Have To Animate Conan Someday’: Stop-Motion Savant Justin Rasch On His Love Of Toys, Craft And Literature’s Most Famous Barbarian
Conan the Barbarian is about to clash with an eldritch foe unlike any he has faced before. In a social media ad campaign and custom stop-motion video timed to the September release of a new limited-edition action figure, the Rob De La Torre-era Conan takes on a Lovecraftian Cthulhu in a visceral, hand-animated battle.
Teaming on the project were Heroic Signatures, the figure’s manufacturer and IP owner, and Justin Rasch, an award-winning stop-motion filmmaker and co-founder of Stunt Puppet Pictures, whose credits include Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings, and Paranorman, and whose lifelong passion for Conan finally found its moment.
Origin Story
“Oh yeah. Always. Since I was a little kid,” Rasch said of his Conan fandom, recalling his first encounters with the Cimmerian.
A baseball coach who doubled as Rasch’s babysitter when he was just a kid kept a stack of Conan comics in his exercise room. “I would just pore over these comics… I didn’t really know comics that much at that age. So I was kind of introduced through Conan.”
From Marvel’s run to the oversized Savage Sword of Conan volumes to Frank Frazetta’s iconic paperback covers, Rasch absorbed it all. “Those were so compelling that it actually made me want to even leave the world of the comics that I come from and kind of start this kind of young adult storytelling fantasy stuff. So yeah, man, I was a big fan. Big fan.”
That fandom carried into adulthood, where Rasch added Conan figures, video games, and collectibles to his shelves. But professionally, the chance to animate his sword-wielding hero never arrived, until now.
“He’s been on my ‘I have to animate Conan someday’ list forever,” Rasch said. “When [the toy company] contacted me… I’m like, oh my God, this is the Conan people. Like this is as close as it gets, something I can barely even imagine.”
Crafting a Campaign for the TikTok Generation
For Rasch, who co-runs Stunt Puppet Pictures with his wife, Shel, the project isn’t just about finally animating a personal hero; it’s about tailoring the medium of stop-motion for social media, where most audiences will encounter the piece.
“There’s this whole new font called social media, right. I’m an old guy. I come from a different world,” he said with a laugh. “But these bits of 10 and 15-second entertainment are like this whole new media, and I jumped into social media about five years ago. I found a lot of success with showing my stop motions that are about 10 to 15 seconds long.”
That constraint informs how he builds Conan’s story. “Narratively speaking, it’s limited. We have little blips of a scene, a moment, something that’s exciting, catches your eye. Tells a little bit of a story,” he explained.
Inspiration came directly from the comics. “There’s a cover that I loved and responded to instantly of him fighting these big, kind of purple tentacles. And it’s gorgeous. I’m like, oh my God… I’ve never seen someone fighting tentacles with a battle axe before. That’s going to be super badass.”
The resulting short is designed as a powerful hit of action and nostalgia. For Rasch, that’s the sweet spot where craft and marketing meet. “All of a sudden, the effectiveness of connecting with people online and then people telling me like, dude, I bought that toy because I saw your cartoon… I’m like wow, that’s powerful. And then people want to try animating toys because it taps into something of nostalgia in us as little kids who played. Seeing your figures come to life is really magical. It’s the most magical thing I’ve ever seen with animation.”
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The Puppet That Isn’t a Puppet
One of the unique challenges in the Conan project was the figure itself. Unlike the custom-built puppets Rasch usually animates, this was a collector-grade action figure designed for display. “They’re not puppets, right?” Rasch said. “So I was able to do motion with this figure because it has all of these extra shoulder joints that allow it to crossover itself in a way that was incredible. Of course, that means for your collector, as pose-ability, there are all these extra things you can get out of your little display figure. So yeah, it absolutely informs the motion I can create.”
The figure’s fidelity made it possible to achieve more dynamic sequences, like Conan gripping his battle axe with both hands, without breaking the illusion. “For animators, that’s incredibly important,” Rasch noted. “It was huge.”
Familiar Icons, New Stories
Rasch has animated some fictional characters, and he sees Conan as part of that same storytelling lineage. “It’s super helpful,” he said of working with a well-known IP. “Your fans already have the back story, they already have the tones, the moods… If you’re doing it right, your characters are on model right away. If not, they’ll call you out. I know this because I’ve been called out before,” he laughed.
The new short draws from Conan’s comic history but isn’t a retelling. “It’s kind of simple in this case because we’re just doing high action, a moment in the comic series. And this is a new story. This is Conan, for sure, as a character. But the story is new. It’s this multiverse thing.”
That balance of fan knowledge and new invention excites Rasch. “Robert Howard’s stories are like 100 years old, right? This character is almost 100 years old. That’s amazing, man. To really break that down and to think that he’s still a character people know. I go to work and I’m working with 23-year-old kids, and I’ll be like, ‘Conan,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we know Conan.’”
A Stunt Puppet Future
While Conan may be a dream job, Rasch is also looking ahead with his own original projects. Through Stunt Puppet Pictures, he and Shel are developing two pilots – one a toy-based concept, the other a high fantasy story whose details are being kept under wraps, but which we’ll know a lot more about before the year’s end.
“We’re modeling, rigging, building sets, getting everything ready to launch next January,” Rasch said. “We are going to go in production on the pilot and we’re self-funding it, doing it all ourselves on YouTube.”
For now, though, Conan’s clash with a Cthulhu-like colossus takes the spotlight.