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| Images courtesy of IFC Films |
The difference between humans and puppets is that puppets return to their boxes when the show ends.
British filmmaker and animator Robert Morgan has carved out a bloody niche for himself over the past twenty-five years. His work is gory and disturbing, often diving into body horror and sexual fetishes with nightmarish creatures and a hefty dose of surrealist imagery. While he has made many short films, Stopmotion (2024) is his first full-length feature film.
Ella Blake's (Aisling Franciosi) mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), is a famous animator, but unfortunately, she has developed arthritis in her hands, which makes them useless. Suzanne uses stop-motion to make her films, and as a result of her chronic condition, she has Ella manually move the figures while she directs her actions. After a while, this causes a strain in their relationship, as Ella feels like she has little control over her life and that her artistic abilities are being stifled. She longs for nothing more than to make her own animation and indulge her gestating ideas. When her mother has a stroke, Ella seizes her chance to take over the studio and do her own work, but as she goes out on her own, she finds that creating art is more complicated than it seems and that it's easy to lose oneself in the process.
Stopmotion combines live-action with stop-motion animation, which makes for a refreshing change from CGI-laden horror films. Ella meets a strange little girl (Caoilinn Springall) while working in her studio, and although she seems innocent at first, she is full of dark and grotesque ideas for Ella's personal film. Throughout the narrative, Ella lacks the confidence to stand behind her creations and instead relies on others to inspire her, almost as if higher forces are manipulating her. She is like the figures in her studio, and all her actions and decisions are being guided millimeter by millimeter to create a story she isn't writing.
Visually, this film starts conventionally, but it becomes more fantastical and ambiguous as it progresses. Once the second act kicks in, it starts to veer into nightmare logic territory, and by the third act, it embraces pure symbolism. The writing feels thin, and it would have made the ending hit harder if they had spent more time fleshing out Ella's character and adding in that connective tissue. The sound design is excellent, and composer Lola de la Mata atonal soundscape is creepy and compelling.
Often, for artists to make it big, they have to water down their art to appeal to a larger demographic, and one can't help but notice that, compared to Morgan's previous work, Stopmotion is less transgressive. This is not to say it is terrible by any means, but it lines up thematically with Ella's character arc and her intense Imposter Syndrome. As Ella descends into madness, the little girl, who has now assumed the role of a muse, prods her to incorporate more organic matter into her figures, to add rotten flesh and bones. Real art is created with blood, sweat, and tears, and while the latter two are often literal, the former is usually meant figuratively. Not in this film, however, the actual creation of life is made with a pound of flesh, or rather, a pound of clay.
--Michelle Kisner