There is nothing quite like the tangible craftsmanship of stop-motion animation. In comedy shorts like Hardboiled or fantastical wonders like Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, the frame-by-frame labor of love adds depth to storytelling. It does so in a way that other forms of animation can’t. In Stopmotion, the one who controls the mold loses control. Her creative passion slowly unravels her sanity.
Ella (Aisling Fransciosi) is a stop-motion animator. But, she spends most of her days assisting her mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), with her projects. Her mother is a notable artist who can no longer mold the puppets due to severe arthritis. So Ella spends her days beneath the breath of her mother, following each instruction.
Don’t you dare move. Don’t move a muscle. Don’t blink. Don’t you dare move. Don’t move a muscle.
Suzanne
When Ella’s mother falls ill and gets admitted to the hospital, Ella vows to complete her mother’s work. Ella locks herself away in an old apartment building. She focuses on completing the story until an eerie little girl interrupts. The girl urges Ella to abandon her mother’s story to create a new one. As Ella starts this new project, her realities blur. She descends into a more disturbing madness than the story she tries to create.
Robert Morgan’s first feature shows his talent for the spooky. He excels at engineering tense atmospheres. Stopmotion as a vehicle for horror, works. The creepiest moments of the film are during the animated moments. The girl puppet in the story looks disturbing. The scenes that show the puppets crossing into reality achieve the macabre effect with minimal effort.
There are small choices made in the film that show how Morgan uses small details to aid the story he’s trying to tell. For example, in a scene where Ella is waking from a dream, her boyfriend asks her a question yet the sound is muffled suggesting that she’s present physically but not mentally. There’s another scene where Ella is having sex with her boyfriend. Instead of caressing him with her hands like we’d normally see during an intimate scene, her fingers are pinching along his back. It’s as if she’s molding his skin like a puppet. These moments prelude the behavior she has yet to exhibit as she pursues her story in which she soon becomes lost.
Stopmotion is part psychological horror and part body horror. However, outside of the horror, there needs to be a narrative that people can easily digest. The story seemed a bit muddled, especially the stop-motion story within the film. Both stories need a focus that audiences can grab onto that won’t leave them scratching their heads in the end. Movies are show don’t tell, but this film seems to lack enough tell to make sense of what we see.
Creative people often find themselves lost in their art, consumed by the pressure of completing their work. Creative expression is a great way to move through emotions but here, Ella drowns in them. She straddles the line of genius and insanity until she finally topples over. At the same time, she lacks identity within her talent.
The young neighborhood girl in the film that urges Ella to pivot into a new story about a girl in the woods being pursued by the Ash Man serves as Ella’s younger self. She’s Ella when she was full of fire, grit, and passion. And it’s that defiant little girl that’s been shut away in a chest for so long, that it makes Ella doubt herself and her abilities.
Her mother dictated her life for so long that Ella’s new freedom reveals her emptiness. Who is she beneath the veil of her mother’s overbearing malevolence? The more she attempts to control the narrative, the more she loses control.
Stopmotion sees an artist attempting to mold the cruel and gross parts of their life into art. But bringing dead things to life is no easy feat, especially if one of those dead things is your creativity.
Stopmotion is now playing in theaters.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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