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Stopmotion
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (11th July 2024). |
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The Film
 Ella Blake (The Nightingale's Aisling Franciosi) has lived in the shadow of her stop motion animated mother Suzanne (Nicholas Nickleby's Stella Gonet), creatively- and emotionally-stunted – to intimidated into silence whenever she tries to voice her own ideas – merely the hands to her mother's brain as she endeavors to finish her last film before dying. When her mother falls into a coma, Ella vows to finish her mother's project, moving into a loft in a warehouse scheduled for demolition with the help of her part-time musician boyfriend Tom (Poldark's Tom York). Ella's progress is frustrated not only by her own lack of confidence in her creative abilities but also by visits from an inquisitive young girl (Caoilinn Springall) who suggests telling a different story about a little girl in a forest terrorized by "a man no one wants to meet." The girl creates a character from mortician's wax and Ella begins the story but is unable to continue it without the girl's help – "I don't have my own voice," she tells her boyfriend's creative friends – but bristles under the demands of the girl who insists on telling the story piecemeal and increasingly morbid alterations to the characters with literal "raw materials." When the little girl disappears, Ella attempts to continue the story herself but the line between film and fiction, reality and imagination begin to blur and she finds herself being stalked by "her" own creation. On paper, the feature debut of short and animation filmmaker Robert Morgan – whose credits as a stop motion animator include work on the surreal horror/comedy series Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared and a segment of The ABCs of Death – Stopmotion sounds potentially interesting but the only real novelty is the stop motion film-within-a-film medium. The film seems to reflect what is becoming a British Film Institute house style for horror with a dash of Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio) and a helping of Censor – and a heap of Repulsion, the influence of which seems as inescapable for British filmmakers as Psycho for American ones (a seeming nod to Peeping Tom might just be coincidental) – with less emotional resonance. There is something stimulating about the idea of Ella's suppressed creative voice suddenly and recklessly spilling out ideas and feeling that someone else is pulling her strings because she is unwilling to take credit for what she has produced since she cannot control it – apart from when a colleague (The Witcher's Therica Wilson-Read) appropriates her concept into a commercial project and claims to have "smartened it up" – indeed, the more she tries to wrest control by changing the girl's story, the more she becomes aware of what is in her head and that she cannot prevent it from spilling out into the real world. Both narrative and script, however, just mechanically hit the beats of a creative losing their foothold on reality and descending into madness – with the deployment of Franciosi's visage as a creative shorthand for mental fragility and emotional vulnerability – playing less like an engaging drama and more like a portfolio piece to interest the likes of A24. The behind the scenes look at stop motion filmmaking in the digital age while the actual stop motion animation and hallucinations are both well-designed and executed, particularly a moment in which live action seamlessly and startlingly transitions to animation via some interstitial prosthetics and a man-in-a-monster-suit double. The ending fizzles out into predictability, but this really a "surprise ending" film and any sort of logical twist would have been even more insulting to the viewer. While sometimes one looks forward to how a filmmaker might evolve from an imperfect debut, Stopmotion suggests that Morgan has more work to do in terms of story and character development (and not incorporating his stop motion background for a follow-up project might be helpful). 
Video
Digitally-lensed and finished, Stopmotion's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.39:1 widescreen Blu-ray boasts a clean and crisp image with a rather cool grade that gives way to occasional warm and rich saturation while the stereotypical sickly green moody grade is applied more strategically as Ella physically and mentally deteriorates. Especially stunning is the fine detail in the real macro shots of the stop motion creations (the out-of-focus parts in shots of the larger versions of the figures used in some inserts almost looks more like a digital defocussing effect like the "cinematic" modes of some smart phone cameras). The disc is identical in content and likely encoding to the U.S. release from RLJ Entertainment who acquired Acorn, and the MA 15+ logo on the disc art alongside the BBFC 18-certificate logo suggests that Madman Entertainment's Australian Blu-ray is also the same disc. 
Audio
The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is front-oriented for the most part with supportive but not elaborate atmosphere; that is, apart from the stop motion film-within-a-film scenes, hallucinations, and even some waking world sequences where surrounds emphasize the environment to unnerve Ella and the viewer. An English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 descriptive audio track is also included along with English SDH, French, and Spanish subtitles (also evidence that this is the same disc as the U.S. version). 
Extras
Extras are rather sparse, starting with an interview with actress Aisling Franciosi (4:11) who recalls thinking the script was "bonkers in a good way" but having some trepidation as an actor about being directed by a filmmaker used to working with puppets, and describing her character's submissive behavior as a way of navigating her relationship with her mother. In the interview with director Robert Morgan (9:35), Morgan discusses his inspirations for the film, developing the script over a couple of years with co-writer Robin King, sharing the main character's "obsessive relationship with art," and directing actors versus stop motion figures. The behind the scenes (9:26) video offers a look at the different scales of the stop motion figures needed for different shots in sequences, including an actor in a full body suit for some shots with the Ash Man, and Franciosi's stand-in during some of the shots incorporating stop motion and live action. 
Overall
Stopmotion seems novel on paper but in execution it feels more like a portfolio piece for the likes of A24 or Shudder. 
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