Stopmotion

Stopmotion feels born out of the sheer mental challenge of being trapped in a room with macabre creations that come to life over weeks of painstaking labour.

The director and animator Robert Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature.

Morgan’s feature debut is as stunning, diabolical and boundary-pushing an emergence as any filmmaker could hope to achieve.

Stopmotion is a one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted horror film with a great performance from Aisling Franciosi.

The movie’s dark magic occurs when the stop-motion story and the narrative proper bleed into each other (often literally), with goopy puppets invading Ella’s space while she—perhaps psychologically, perhaps in reality—finds herself trapped in theirs.

In “Stopmotion,” the debut feature from Robert Morgan, the medium—the painstaking and time-consuming process of stop-motion animation—may be unusual but the resulting film, an undeniably grisly but ultimately tedious tiptoe through the genre tropes, certainly is. This is all the more frustrating because in the middle of it all is a performance by Aisling Fransciosi that is so strong and committed that viewers will wish that the rest of the film had made the same kind of effort that she clearly did.

The film falters when it attempts to mold its best instincts into a discernible narrative shape.

Robert Morgan has been making stop-motion shorts since the late 90s and has received plenty of accolades throughout his career. Drawing inspiration from Svankmajer, the Quay Brothers, Lynch and Cronenberg, the British artist created a particular brand of bizarre and surreal animation that constantly deals with the psyche through means of body horror. He wholeheartedly embraced the uncanny since the beginning of his filmmaking journey, and has used stop-motion to its full potential in order to disturb and disgust the audience. Now, over two decades after he begun his career, he released his feature length debut, a mix of live action and the animation style that made him known in the first place. Stopmotion is an exploration of the creative process and how the art can consume and destroy its artist. It follows the story of Ella (Aisling Franciosi), daughter of renowned stop motion animator Suzanne (Stella Gonet), as she tries to find her own artistic voice. Ella's mother wants to finish her last project before she passes away, and she needs her daughter to be her hands. She has arthritis and can't animate anymore. It leads to a situation in which Suzanne is the brains and Ella simply obeys her orders. When Suzanne's health declines, our protagonist needs to finish the project by herself, but finds it difficult to do so without someone dictating her every move. But everything changes when she meets a mysterious young girl living in the same building as her. While Morgan has a clear control over the animated sequences, the same can't be said about his live action yet. It is evident this is a first time effort by the director, as lots of scenes lack the confidence so visible in his stop-motion material. There is an artistic vision for the project, that is undeniable, but it lacks polishment when it comes to storytelling and purposeful visual information. The dialog is unnecessarily expository, and a couple of shots feel pointless both narratively and aesthetically due to the way they're edited together. A lot of the work ends up falling in the trappings of so many contemporary "arthouse" horror films, attempting desperately to work as metaphor or allegory and forgetting to be something concise by itself. It's one of those films that seems to beg for an interpretation, and it loses some of its potential in the process in order to appeal to some "plausible explanation" happening in the "real world". That's not to say the film doesn't have its strong points. Franciosi is a great main character, and she perfectly portrays this woman's descent into madness. Morgan brings his ability to shock and distress into the live action world, mainly through, as expected, body horror. The special effects are as squirm-inducing and bloody as necessary, and the animation is simply gorgeous (or as gorgeous as decaying flesh can be). His sense for creepiness dominates the whole movie, and the way things escalate from "normal" to his particular brand of fleshy diseased grotesqueness is interesting to experience. Sound design also plays a big role in creating the film's atmosphere, from indicating we're always seeing things from Ella's perspective to focusing on the highly detailed and texturized sounds of meat, puppets and everything in between. However, Stopmotion misses the opportunity to explore the uncanniness of stop-motion/human interaction on a deeper level. Even if it contains some creative and horrific visuals, the movie never commits to the hinted insanity, and ends up being much more restrained than necessary. It is constantly uncomfortable, but the buildup doesn't lead to the big explosion of disgust it promised. It's still well crafted and disturbing, but it doesn't go all the way. I'm sure it will find its audience, as it has enough charm to be a curiosity and enough metaphor to please the "YouTube film-explainers". It left me a bit underwhelmed after exploring Morgan's catalog as a preparation for it, but I still hope it gets some recognition and the director gets more funding to create more hybrid features in the future if so he desires. He's already proven to be a unique voice in the animated world, so keeping an eye on his future work, be it live action or animated, is certainly worth it.

The Beekeeper is a classic John Wick-style Jason Statham movie. I had fun, but in these kinds of movies, you expect things to escalate from easy to hard. The whole movie was like a beginner-level killing spree. Everything was so easy. Even for Statham.

Robert Morgan tem as manhas de filmar em stopmotion, isso é fato, e a ambientação com a fotografia soam sempre imersivas. mas a história de perde em uma série de elementos óbvios e num ritmo lento e chato. Com poucos sustos, resta torcer pra algo extraordinário acontecer, ou que fuja as expectativas, mas fora a tentativa de imiscuir o filme dentro do filme com a realidade retratada, sobra tédio mesmo.

The little girl who showed up early and said "it's boring, make a different movie" was right.

This is one of those movies that thinks extremely highly of itself. So weird! So edgy! So avant garde! But this is really just a distraction from a pointless narrative featuring an unlikable protagonist. By the end, the film is utterly insufferable, drunk, as it is, on its own farts.