A Wonderful Medium: The Stop-Motion of Stopmotion (2023)

“It feels like you’re bringing something to life.”

Prior to seeing Stopmotion on the big screen on opening night, Elijah LaFolette (who local readers will recognize as the host of Analog Sunday at the Rewind dive bar) and I pre-gamed by watching a string of Quay Brothers shorts. I mention this partly to show how excited we were about Stopmotion, and partly because artists like the Quays and Jan Svankmajer are a better reference point for what you can expect in Stopmotion than creators perhaps more synonymous with the term, such as Ray Harryhausen, Willis O’Brien, David Allen, Henry Selick, or even Phil Tippett.

The brainchild of director and co-writer Robert Morgan, who became internet-famous thanks to his 2001 short film The Cat with Hands, the puppets of Stopmotion are, to a one, grimy, malformed, and often grotesquely organic. Sometimes literally, as the decaying stop-motion animator at the heart of the film begins encasing her armatures in raw meat and rotting flesh.

“I’ve never thought that stop-motion is a cutesy kid thing,” Morgan told Entertainment Weekly. “I’ve always thought it was an uncanny, slightly occult process, building little puppets and then doing this strange ritual on them which brings them to life.”

This view of the process of stop-motion animation – and, indeed, of the creative process more broadly – is one that is at the heart of Stopmotion, even while the film is also a love letter to the form, both its foibles and its unique magic.

As has become de rigueur for serious horror films in the 21st century, Stopmotion is about grief and trauma. Aisling Franciosi (who was phenomenal in The Nightingale, and is no less so here) plays Ella, the daughter of a celebrated but uncompromising stop-motion artist. A crippling arthritis has taken the use of her mother’s hands, and so now Ella works in their place. “She’s the brain, I’m the hands,” she tells her boyfriend.

Ella longs to create something of her own, however, and she has a true and obvious love for the medium in which she works. When a young girl asks her why she should go to all that work, her answer is not some high-flying nonsense about art and suffering. It’s simple, and straightforward, and honest – about the limitations of the form, and the rewards. However, she has also lived too long in her mother’s shadow, and her own creative impulses have been pushed down for so long that they have begun to ferment and turn sour.

When her mother has a stroke that leaves her hospitalized and essentially comatose, Ella sets out to try to complete the last picture that they were working on together. Now, however, Ella’s creative impulses are no longer held in check by her mother’s overbearing presence. They’re free to come out. But repression is trauma of its own, and something that has been locked away for so long isn’t going to come into the light easily, or cleanly.

This is not a movie about the healing power of art. Not a feel-good tale about how creativity can conquer our demons. As any creative in any field can attest, if they’re being honest, our creative impulses are more than capable of being demons of their own, if we don’t know how to reckon with them in a healthy way. And if we’ve been prevented from grappling with them by outside forces, as Ella has, they can poison us as surely as any other form of trauma.

Stories about obsessed writers/artists/musicians/etc. coming undone are a dime a dozen. You can find more of them than you can stories in which those same people live successful, balanced lives. But in so many ways, Stopmotion feels more honest than many of them, especially in how the inner child is presented as… less than wholesome, let’s say.

“The magic of the story is always in the telling,” I wrote on Letterboxd, right after seeing the movie, “not the tale.” The story that Stopmotion is telling may be familiar, almost archetypal, and I have already seen too many reviews criticizing the plot as one that we’ve seen before. But it is in the telling that the story – any story – lives and breathes, and there is no better medium to demonstrate this than stop-motion, perhaps the most hands-on of all filmmaking styles, and therefore the one that leaves the most fingerprints from the creator visible onscreen.

The fingerprints of Robert Morgan are everywhere in Stopmotion, from the unpleasantly damp and waxy puppets to the way that the strobing lights of a party simulate the stop-motion approach. It’s a dark and vicious whirlpool of a film that is in love with its form while also acknowledging that such a love is as likely to drag you under the waves as buoy you atop them. It’s brutal and honest and visually stunning, and provides some of the best nightmare fuel that we’re likely to see all year.

What more could you ask for, really?