Stopmotion is now streaming on Shudder.
It’s telling that, for his first feature-length film, stop-motion animator Robert Morgan chose to write a story about a stop-motion animator descending into madness. The process behind this beloved filmmaking style is famously exacting, requiring patience and attention to detail. And the way Morgan does it – largely alone, handcrafting creatures out of an abattoir nightmare – makes the prospect of breaking with reality during the creation of one of these projects more plausible. And that’s basically what happens in Stopmotion.
That’s not to say that this is an autobiographical film. The protagonist is a woman, Ella (Aisling Franciosi), and the daughter of a legendary stop-motion animator named Suzanne Blake (Stella Gonet). Tweaking the archetypes of genius artist and submissive protégé – both usually male prerogatives in the movies – for female characters lends Stopmotion some novelty, even when those characters behave in otherwise stereotypical ways. It’s just nice to see a woman being a monstrous, egotistical tyrant for once, you know?
And Suzanne is a tyrant, breaking Ella down by telling her that she’ll never amount to anything while treating her as a pair of surrogate hands. Suzanne’s own fingers are no longer dexterous enough to animate on their own – her struggle to pick up a fork at breakfast is the first of an intensifying series of body-horror moments – and so Ella spends her days manipulating characters down to the half-millimeter under Suzanne’s dissatisfied eye. That is, until Suzanne’s illness lands her in the hospital, freeing Ella to make her own movie out of her mother’s shadow.
The problem with that is that Ella isn’t sure what exactly she wants to say. Enter the obvious plot device of an unnamed little girl (Caoilinn Springall) who shows up in Ella’s life shortly after she rents an apartment and strikes out on her own as a filmmaker. Part morbid inner child and part self-destructive muse, the child follows Ella around dictating a new story about a scared girl being pursued by a terrifying monster known as the Ashman. On the first night, she sees him; on the second, he gets closer; and on the third – well, you don’t want to know what happens on the third night.
It's clear from the start that there's something strange about the girl, if only because she's encouraging an unstable filmmaker to sculpt characters out of mortician's wax, raw meat, and the rotting flesh of a dead fox. Over time, Stopmotion becomes more surreal and visceral as the worlds of Ella, the girl, and the Ashman begin to merge: The first time a character from her movie comes to torture Ella, it’s a dream, but don’t worry – things continue to escalate from there. This is where Stopmotion really starts to get good, culminating with a grisly act of self-mutilation on which the camera lingers for several nauseating seconds.
The creaking, distorted score from Lola de la Mata enhances the discomfort factor, which is completed by Morgan’s own animations. Similar to the figures in his “D is for Deloused” segment in the 2014 anthology The ABCs of Death 2, the puppets Morgan creates for Stopmotion are lumpy wax figures with melted-looking limbs and raw-looking streaks of red above their half-formed mouths. They make gurgling sounds, move like they're in pain, and are all around distressing to look at – a definite advantage given the major role they play in creating the film’s horror. (Bloody prosthetic makeup does the rest.)
When Stopmotion gets gross, it gets good.
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Stopmotion is nothing without its film-within-a-film. Franciosi does a capable job as tortured artist Ella, but her performance isn’t pushed to the extremes that a premise like this can accommodate except in a few key moments. The production design and cinematography in the live-action segments are bare and functional, perhaps betraying Morgan’s lack of interest in scenes that don’t feature any murder or grotesque puppets. To be fair, the parts that do are as disgusting and darkly beautiful as one might hope, a great showcase for Morgan’s style and a reason to watch this movie all on their own. He’s a servant of his own creations – which, come to think of it, is the kind of thing that can drive a person mad.
