There is an inherent mystery behind all creative acts: Where does it come from? Sometimes this is a mystery even to creative people who may be so inundated by the ideas flooding their brain that they barely know where to begin. *raises hand* Sometimes that mystery comes with an inherent dread: if the art that springs forth is strange or disturbing, what does that say about the artist?
Stopmotion, the feature debut from British animator Robert Morgan, gets at the enigmas and anxieties of artistic creation like no film I’ve ever seen before. This is a movie in which style is substance like no film I’ve never seen before. Perhaps more unsettling: This is a uniquely disturbing movie for anyone who grapples with, you know, their own fertile yet unknowable mind.
Will Stopmotion speak to people who aren’t creative? I’d like to think so, but I don’t know… except its protagonist, 30ish Ella (Aisling Franciosi, terrifyingly brilliant), an animator living and working somewhere in an undefined place in the UK (London, maybe?), doesn’t think she is very creative. Ella is working with her overbearing, condescending animator mom (Stella Gonet), who is suffering from crippling arthritis in her hands to the point where she is unable to do the delicate, precise stop-motion work on her own, so she directs Ella: “Half a millimeter to the left,” Mom barks in Ella’s ear in their little home studio, directing the minuscule manipulation of the little puppet-star of what will probably be Mom’s last film, about a sad Cyclops lady.
Ella despairs of her intellectually and creatively impoverished situation. When her boyfriend, Tom (Tom York), asks her, “Don’t you wanna make your own films, find your own voice?” she replies, despondent, “I don’t have my own voice.”
Now, I firmly believe that all of us upright monkeys are naturally, instinctually creative, except that it often gets crushed out of us at some crucial early point in our lives. The regimentation of schooling can do it; clearly Ella’s mother did that for her. And then something happens to change Ella’s situation, and her imagination is unleashed. But it’s been so long, maybe forever, since she’s been able to acknowledge her own creative wisdom that she is not able to trust or even accept what her brain is telling her…
Spoiler: Ella has her own voice. Oh my, does she ever.
Stopmotion is not primarily an animated movie, but it harnesses the inescapable creepiness of stop-motion animation — the uncanny valley of jittery movement that highlights the fact that we’re watching an inanimate object come alive — in ways that challenge the very concept of an “animated movie.” For as Ella begins work on a stop-motion animated short of her own invention, about a little girl being stalked by a malicious creature called the Ashman (“the man no one wants to meet”), the physical and emotional isolation she’s been living with becomes outright desolation, and her story takes on a life of its own to the point that reality and invention get mixed up and her characters come to life in her real world.
At least in her own mind. This is also not a fantastical movie: it’s about a descent into madness, and only Ella — not anyone else around her — is haunted, even stalked by her own work: creative demons, indeed. Stopmotion is not for the squeamish; it is bloody, meaty, visceral, an unforgettable expression of the old axiom about writing (and by extension all art): it’s easy, you just sit down and open a vein. But the gore is only in service of the real horror, which is unusually psychologically astute and utterly unnerving to anyone of a creative bent and perhaps struggling with their own imagination: that some stories demand to be told, and will, must out, no matter how much you resist them.
more films like this:
• Censor [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Hulu US | Kanopy US | BFI Player UK | Curzon Home Cinema UK]
• Raw [Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | YouTube]
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