Stop motion animation is, in many ways, inherently creepy. Maybe it's the dead-eyed look of the puppets. Maybe it's their movements, which can seem both lifelike and uncanny. Or maybe it's just its close association with Christmas specials. Who knows! Whatever the case, horror movie Stopmotion recognizes this creepiness, and how the meticulous craftwork needed to create the animation could very well drive you nuts.
When arthritis prevents renowned stopmotion filmmaker Suzanne Blacke (Stella Gonet) from finishing her latest film, her daughter Ella (Aisling Franciosi) essentially becomes her hands, until Suzanne is felled by a stroke. Determined to finish the film, Ella isolates in her own studio, but is soon visited by a young girl (Caoilinn Springall) who wants to instill her own vision into the movie.
That vision includes the use of meat and dead animals in the creation of the puppets. And then it gets really weird. The film within a film owes a lot to the work of the Brothers Quay, and Jan Švankmajer, and frankly I kind of wanted more of that creepily beautiful movie than the one that surrounds it, which gets a little muddled near the end. Give us more stop motion horror! Or at least something to take the place of A Nightmare Before Christmas, because we're long overdue.
I watched Stopmotion on Shudder.
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