Memory studies and theory have engaged extensively with literature, photography, documentary and narrative film and other visual arts. As a time-based media form that works with artistic materials, animation transmutes the unseen raw material of human nature, memory and experience into artsbased creative imagery. Stop motion is a special case in that it shares formal, spatial, material and temporal features with non-animated film. Its creators can additionally work with a range of objects, materials and artistic techniques that originate in the real world to depict what is unseen, but felt. To develop an understanding for how this technique is used to depict memory, forgetting and amnesia, I explore concepts from Greek rhetoric of oratory persuasion, and the cultural products that were available to them – text, art and architecture – to then map their ars memorativa to contemporary analogies in mostly arts-based stop-motion animation. Then, rather than examining the meaning of a selection of works (the Quay Brothers, Adara Todd, Hiraki Sawa) that include implicit and explicit themes of forgetting and amnesia, I develop phenomenological and heuristic approaches for how these films work, stylistically and formally, and, invoking Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘vibrant matter’ (2010), demonstrate how they present relational actants. The aim is to offer an analytical framework for animation techniques and how the artists’ animation of matter can act as a performative vehicle and reified intermediary for experiences of individual or cultural memory, and for the loss of these.