There has been excitement in our house this week, as the boys received the StikBot Pirate Movie set to review. Perfect to keep them entertained in the British summer! The set is for aged 4+ and contains everything you need to make a stop animation except a phone or tablet.


Inside the box is one StikBot with accessories and 1 sheet of stick on clothes. As it is our first set, we didn't have another StikBot which is a shame. However, to get to grips with the idea of stop animation one is fine. Additional StikBots can be bought at a reasonable price.

The scenery board is double sided and can be used as a beach or cliff scene. The rest of the set can be made by popping out the parts from the foam board. This is simple and the pieces fit together easily and are numbered. Children will need help with this and I found myself doing it for mine.

The StikBot itself is a person with suction cups on its hands and feet. This enables you to move them and hold things. It takes a little bit of practice to get them moving without pulling them off the board. If this happens, having it set so you have ghost image helps as it shows you where the StikBot was in the last shot.

Once we had made the set up, the final thing we needed to do was download the Zing StikBot Studio app. My 9 year old immediately got to grips with how to work it. The app contains voice over recording, sound effects and music. The only thing we can't work out is how to delete a shot. Sometimes my boy was a little snap happy and pressed the photo button before moving his hand out of the way. We found it frustrating that we couldn't delete a frame. (If there is a way and you know, let us know!)

Update: You can delete a frame by going into the movie, moving the highlighter to the frame you want to delete and holding down until the option to delete comes up. Phew! This will be helpful.


When it comes to storing the set, simple pieces like the trees and sharks could be easily dismantled. However, after putting it together, I don't want to dismantle the ship and boats so we will have to find a large box for it.

My 7 and particularly my 9 year old like this set. I can see the request for another StikBot coming very soon. It is something they can do together and they love making little films so I can see it being used quite regularly.

Here is a short video showing us putting the set together and our stop animation attempts. Big man's first and last attempts over a day are there and you can already see an improvement.



Have you got any of the StikBot sets? Which would you recommend?