Anyone who has even caught a hint of the less child-orientated offerings that the art of stop motion animation has unleashed, knows that the animators who dedicate their lives working in confined rooms, moving armature a millimetre at a time have to be a little off in order to do what they do. With Phil Tippett’s supremely squishy Mad God being a more recent example of how unsettling this branch of animation can go, animator Robert Morgan has made his live action, feature debut with Stopmotion, a twisted tale that sees a frustrated animator living in the shadow of her overbearing mother gradually lose her mind one frame at a time. So, cray-cray Harryhausen, then…
With a story that’s sure to make you treat any interview Nick Park interview concerning Wallace & Gromit with high amounts of suspicion, it’s time to dive deep into the latest indie horror sensation.
Despite being a talented animator in her own right, Ella Blake lives in the shadow of her commanding mother, Suzanne, who once was a pioneer in stop motion animation but has now lost the use of her hands thanks to crippling arthritis. While a more charitable person might say that Ella is helping her mother finish her last film, in actuality, Suzanne is something of a demanding perfectionist and actually treating her daughter like an appendage or even some kind of puppet to finish the task.
This life of restriction and constantly being subject to withering bouts of passive aggressive comments is leaving Ella feeling crushed and disconnected, but her musician wannabe boyfriend, his animator sister, Polly and their circle of creator friends strive to keep her filling connected, but when Suzanne suffers a stroke and lapses into a coma, Ella unsurprisingly spirals.
Renting a private space and vowing to complete her mother’s work, Elle is visited one night by a strange girl who bluntly declares Suzanne’s feature as boring and suggests that Elle finally creates something of her own. But when the animator struggles to come up with anything, the child suggests a story about a little girl lost in the woods who is being pursued by a malevolent figure.
Despite the fact that she’s once again merely taking direction from someone else rather come up with her own material, Elle forges on, taking up the strange girls increasingly weird suggestions by recreating her puppets out of actual meat and before you know it, the malformed forms of Lowly the Girl and the sinister Ash Man start invading her rapidly crumbling psyche.
As her mother’s health deteriorates and Elle’s friends try to intervene, the troubled animator needs to try and wrestle with some elusive truths, such as who exactly is this child who has helped her create this dark scenario and what affect will her obsession have on her and the ones around her.
Quick hint for the slower readers out there: nothing good.
Burrowing itself neatly somewhere between Rose Glass’ Saint Maud and Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor, Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion treads some familiar ground when keeping tabs on a troubled woman as she rapidly loses her grip on reality. The blurring of the things she’s sees compared to what’s actually happening is ripe territory for independent horror and anyone who has watched any one of these recent slow-burning, brooding, unsettling descents into madness may initially feel that Stopmotion feels a mite too familiar to truly get under your skin. All the usual trigger points for a tidal wave of misfiring brainwaves are present and correct, with an inability to cope with death, a domineering parent and gnawing obsession making expected bows to the discordant sounds of an off-beat score – but being similar in cinema isn’t exactly a crime; it’s how you stand out that’s remembered and Morgan does precisely that by delving into his noticable talent on moving creepy little models about.
There’s always been something about stop motion animation that’s been delightfully off-beat, with the nuances of every gesture being extraordinarily important, but while such Hollywood heavyweights such as Guillermo Del Torro and Tim Burton have delighted in flirting with the macabre, Morgan’s work is more like a freakish nightmare you’d often experience either trying to muscle through a fever dream, or accidently catching an animated oddity on TV around two in the morning and it’s exactly that sort of imagery that he brings to the table here.
The stop motion sections are sublime, and feel like the grotesque merging of Tony Hart’s Morph and David Cronenberg as the influence the little girl has on Elle manifests in deeply unhinged ways that starts with fashioning her puppets out of raw streak, or the bits of a dead fox (“It’s a wonderful medium, isn’t it? Bringing dead things back to life.”) and soon moves on to self mutilation and murder. Needless to say, the animation – naturally performed by Morgan himself – is the movie’s high point, but that’s not to take anything away from Stopmotion’s human lead.
If one thing can be said for elevated horror’s continued obsession with the fracturing of a woman’s composure, it almost never misses when it comes to giving us a standout performance from its female lead and Aisling Franciosi is no different as she hurls herself gamely into the void for our entertainment. Delivering a worryingly relatable series of long exhales when dealing with her mother (her pet name of “poppet” sounds worryingly like “puppet” when mother is giving the orders), her coiled spring game is pretty impressive, but the real fireworks predictably kick off once she unravels and reality take a holiday. Whether it ends up becoming a star-making turn in the same vein of Anya Talor-Joy similarly dramatic turn in The Witch will remain to be seen, but fingers crossed, eh?
However, if Stopmotion has a glaring flaw, it’s that if you’ve watch even a couple examples of elevated horror tackling insanity, then aside from how gooey it gets, there’s a real lack of genuine surprises located within. If you truthfully can’t guess the identity of the strange little girl almost instantly, then it pleases me to welcome you to what I assume is your first ever horror film and all parts of the film that take place outside of Elle’s self destructing imagination pretty much unravels how you’d expect.
However, if your bag lays more with the unsettling, the hallucinogenic and the gloopy, then Stopmotion will no doubt be up your dark, gnarled street as it prods the maddening position of have a butt-load of talent, but not a shred of imagination to do anything with it. Stopmotion is guaranteed to move you – even if it’s only a fraction for every click of the shutter.
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