Ten seconds of footage. That’s all it took for Conan fans to lose their minds.

When Justin Rasch – the stop-motion wizard behind ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings – picked up Heroic Signatures’ new Blackstone action figure, he did something that’s never been done in Conan’s 40-year multimedia history. 

Not in the Schwarzenegger films. 

Not in the comics. 

Not in the games. 

Never.

So what did he do?

He animated Conan with stop-motion. And the fans ate. it. up.

In this exclusive interview, Rasch pulls back the curtain on everything from the revolutionary technical capabilities that make this figure different from every action figure before it to what he’s planning next that makes these ten-second clips look like child’s play.

A Stop-Motion Legend Finally Meets the Legendary Barbarian 

Justin Rasch’s connection to Conan, like so many other sentinels of the character, runs all the way back to his childhood. 

 His baseball coach had what Rasch describes as “the hugest Conan collection, hugest comic book collection I had ever seen at that point in my life”, a back room filled with hundreds of white plastic-wrapped comics, Marvel issues, oversized Savage Sword magazines. The defining moment, however, came when that same coach gathered the entire team for a sleepover to watch the 1982 Conan the Barbarian on his brand-new VHS player. That night, watching Arnold swing his sword while Basil Poledouris’s score thundered through the speakers, planted seeds that would grow for decades.

Fast forward through a career spanning 2D animation, pioneering CG work at Blizzard, and eventually the pinnacle of stop-motion at Laika, Heroic Signatures approached Rasch about animating their new Blackstone figure. His reaction captures exactly what this moment meant: “I [could not] believe that I’m working with you guys. Talking to [the Frazetta estate], I was kind of blown away, but to now be working with the real Conan people [was] mind blowing.”

Of course, who better to partner with than a person who intimately understands every limitation stop-motion animators have struggled with for years.

The Figure That Changes Everything – Technical Revolution for Collectors

Every stop-motion animator knows a dirty secret of toy animation. “When you’re dealing with toys, they look amazing, but they’re not built for animation,” Rasch explains. “They’re too tight. They’re too limited.” Joints that pose beautifully for display lock up when you need fluid motion. Shoulders that hold dramatic positions can’t rotate naturally. And forget about gripping a sword with both hands.

Thankfully, the Black Stone action figure obliterates these constraints thanks to its design by Eamon O’Donighue. When Rasch first tested it, his reaction was immediate: “The fact that you guys actually got a figure that can do double-handed action is insane.”

Double-handed sword grips mean Conan can finally swing his weapon the way Howard described, with the full-body power of a barbarian warrior. The enhanced spine articulation allows for genuine crouching, lunging, and the kind of dynamic poses that make combat feel real. The shoulder engineering permits overhead strikes, defensive stances, and the subtle body language that turns plastic into performance.

“Two-handed sword swings, any kind of serious crouching in the spines as well as the shoulders, the dynamism of what we’re able to create… or what I’m able to create in animation just goes up so much,” Rasch emphasizes. For collectors, this means you’re holding the first action figure specifically engineered to unleash the full potential of stop-motion storytelling.

The implications ripple beyond single combat scenes. Complex choreography becomes possible. Conan can climb with both hands gripping ledges. He can wrestle creatures, hoist massive doors, and perform the thousand physical feats that define his adventures. Every limitation that forced animators to cheat angles or cut away? Gone. 

Put simple: the Black Stone figure looks good on display, yes. But it looks better when at war.

The Harryhausen Connection 

There’s a reason Conan feels destined for stop-motion, and it goes back to Ray Harryhausen himself. Before creating his legendary Sinbad films, Harryhausen wanted to adapt Conan as the R-rated, bloody saga Howard wrote. He’d seen those Frazetta paperback covers and understood: you can’t soften Conan’s blade. The project never happened, but the vision lingered–waiting.

Now Rasch, who’s been in direct communication with the Frazetta family throughout this project, is bridging that decades-old dream. “Tapping into the Harryhausen atmosphere – be it giant tentacle monsters or skeletons- it touches people,” he explains. There’s something about that nostalgia of old but with animation of modern times.”

But nostalgia alone doesn’t explain why stop-motion serves Conan better than any other medium. “There’s something about stop motion with Conan where you can really go to another world, that fantasy world where you’re not judging the actor,” Rasch notes. No debating whether an actor looks right, sounds right, or moves right. The character simply exists in his otherworldly realm. “And then you’re also able to do a [type of] violence, I think, that is serving the Conan storylines properly.”

This violence factor is crucial. “Stop motion is violent still, and can be totally badass.” It occupies a perfect sweet spot of being brutal enough to honor Howard’s vision without becoming gratuitously repulsive. Meanwhile, “2D animated Conan, unless they really were able to go mature, softens it in a lot of ways.”

What Rasch’s stop-motion animation offers is something entirely different: “It’s fresh. It’s offering something you have not seen before.” Not the sanitized Saturday morning cartoon Conan. Not another actor’s interpretation. Not CGI spectacle that ages poorly. This is Conan existing in that magical space where practical effects meet mythic storytelling, where Harryhausen’s skeletons and Frazetta’s paintings finally converge into something that’s never existed until now.

From Concept to Tentacles – The Creative Process Revealed

Here’s something many people don’t know yet: the animation of the Black Stone action figure was almost depicted as a dungeon crawler. “The original idea someone had was Conan going through a dungeon or something,” recalls Rasch. “And I’m like, no, we’ve gotta do Lovecraft. We’ve gotta do Conan versus Lovecraft, the tentacles.” Good thing Rasch had creative freedom, right?

But Rasch’s process truly is unlike any other animator’s. “I’ll usually sketch up a lot of the camera work and then we go right down to the barn and shoot it in live action so that we can quickly communicate to our clients what we’re doing physically.”

In a way, Rasch’s process required that he quite literally became Conan. Every movement in the final animation – every dodge, every spear thrust, every reaction to tentacle strikes –  Rasch performed first himself. “I’m definitely not trained in weapons, but I’m trained in gymnastics, martial arts, and parkour.”

This hands-on approach stems from legendary animator Ralph Bakshi, the rebel who created the 1978 animated Lord of the Rings and Fritz the Cat. Bakshi’s philosophy shaped Rasch’s entire approach: “[Bakshi] did a speech many years ago that I think about all the time when he was just talking about two young animators. He said: ‘Just go out there and do it.’ [Most people] have no idea how hard it was to make a film in the old days when you had to do it on film. Now, the whole studio is right there in a little box on our desks so, yeah, go do it.”

That “go do something” drives everything for Rasch – as does his love for Conan. “I watched Conan three times while I was [animating at Laika]. I’m not even kidding. I just put on films [like Conan] that I love and that inspires me to keep me moving and grooving and animating.”

The result? “My whole house filled up with artwork.” Physical ice caves. Real tentacles. Actual sets lit by actual lights casting actual shadows. Forget renders that disappear after viewing. Rasch has created museum-worthy pieces of practical art that happen to tell Conan’s story. This level of obsessive craftsmanship for a ten-second animation might seem excessive. Until you understand what Rasch is really building toward.

The Future Beckons – What Collectors Can Expect

Rasch promises: “You haven’t seen nothing. You’ve seen these two little bite-sized clips, but the stuff that I would love to do would blow [our audience’s] heads off.”

This promise of more extends to the project every Conan fan dreams of. “I think across the board, most fans want Tower of the Elephan,” Rasch confirms. “”I could do it. I know the sets. I know the puppets. I know the figures. And I could tell that entire story and the public would lose their minds…there’s so many different moments that could carry that storyline through,” whether as a complete film or episodic web series.

The key difference between his ambition and reality is the present itself: the figures exist now. “I was imagining it before the figures were coming out, doing it with just puppets. So I would sculpt original puppets and then do my version of Conan. But now that we have actual figures, my God.” 

But why stop at Conan? The entire Howard universe beckons. When asked about tackling Kull of Atlantis or Bran Mak Morn’s Worms of the Earth, Rasch’s answer is emphatic: “Of course. Yes, yes please. That’s all I gotta say is yes, yes please. I’m in, for sure.”

The audience is already assembled. “I can’t tell you how many messages I got privately on my social media accounts saying like, where’s the Kickstarter? Where do I send money? How do I do this? There’s an audience ready to go to make this into a longer format story or a web series or a film or whatever we wanna do.”

So, as we can see, the Black Stone figure is itself a foundation stone of something unprecedented: a stop-motion Howardian universe. 

Every collector who joins this movement brings that bar fight, that spider battle, that cosmic encounter one step closer to reality.

Get your Black Stone action figure today, and help us accelerate the Conan stop-motion renaissance.