Director – Robert Morgan, Screenplay – Robin King & Robert Morgan, Producers – Alain de la Mata & Christopher Granier-Deferre, Photography – Leo Hinstin, Music – Lola de la Mata, Visual Effects – Nordisk Film Shortcut (Supervisor – Daniel Karlsson), Stop Motion Animation Director – Andy Biddle, Special Effects – 13 Finger FX (Supervisor – Dan Martin), Creature Effects – Dan Martin, Makeup Design – Scarlett O’Connell, Production Design – Felicity Hickson. Production Company – BFI/Blue Light/Alain de la Mata-Christopher Granier-Deferre.
Cast
Aisling Franciosi (Ella Blake), Caoilinn Springall (Little Girl), Stella Gonet (Suzanne Blake), Tom York (Tom), Therica Wilson-Read (Polly)
Plot
Ella Blake works aiding her aging mother Suzanne, a celebrated stop motion animator. Suzanne seeks to complete her latest film but her hands have become too arthritic to do the work and Ella has to move the models for her. Suzanne now has a stroke and is hospitalised. Ella determines to keep on working. Her boyfriend Tom provides an apartment where Ella sets up a studio and decides to make her own stop-motion film. She is joined by a mysterious little girl who keeps pushing Ella to take things further, including using meat and the skeleton of a fox in the armatures of her models. This takes Ella into a dark and obsessive state of mind.
Stopmotion was the first feature film from Robert Morgan. It centres around the practice of Stop-Motion Animation whereby a three-dimensional model is moved one frame at a time in much the same way as it is in regular animation, giving the impression of fluid movement. Morgan has made a number of stop-motion shorts going back to the mid-1990s. His most high-profile work before this was the D is for Deloused episode of ABCs of Death 2 (2014). Stopmotion played at a number of film festivals before being released to the Shudder network.
There have been plenty of films in which stop-motion effects feature but Stopmotion is possibly the first ever non-documentary film made about the practice of stop-motion animation. In an odd peculiarity, 2023 featured two works of fiction about stop-motion with both Stopmotion and the Poker Face episode The Orpheus Syndrome (2023). Being an animator himself, Morgan gets the painstaking obsessiveness of the process. About the only point I might quibble with is a scene where Aisling Franciosi starts trying to animate her mother’s hand while she is unconscious in a hospital bed filming it with a cellphone – a handheld camera would be far too jerky for stop-motion, which is dependent on the camera sitting in a very static, locked-down position.
Aisling Franciosi enters an obsessive state of mind
However, Stopmotion is a film that is less about stop-motion than it is one that draws you down into a dark, obsessive headspace. Despite the horror label, this it is not a film of jumpshocks but one of slow accruing mood. It is often a slow burn film, one that you don’t always let you know where it is heading. It belongs to the growing genre niche of other films like Saint Maud (2019) and in particular Censor (2021) and the Australian Freelance (2024) – which were both also set around the film industry – works that follow women as they descend into an obsessive and disturbed sense of mind.
Despite his eschewal of regular suspense or jumpshock horror, Robert Morgan does get in at least a couple of quite creepy scenes. There is a particularly good one where Aisling Franciosi is in the shower and digs into her skin to reveal that it is made of mortician’s wax, which suddenly gives the film a whole Phillip K. Dickian spin, albeit with a horror vein. By the end of the film, everything has certainly crossed over well into horror territory.
