“Stopmotion” Available on Blu-ray!
Living under her arthritis-enfeebled mother’s tremendous stop motion reputation and browbeaten into being the hands of completing her overbearing mother’s last film, Ella Blake can’t find her own voice in the animated art form. During one already tension filled morning, Ella’s mother has a stroke and falls into a comatose state. The unfortunate opportunity opens a door for Ella to complete her mother’s final masterpiece on her own as she moves out from the traumatic memories of her home and into a vacant high-rise apartment to be left in occupied solitude, but when a curious and brash little girl finds her mother’s story mundane and offers an alternative, more grotesque story, one which insidiously fascinates with disturbing themes and grisly creativity, Ella finds herself starting afresh, listening to the yarn of a young girl’s chilling vision, whole slowly cracking under the immense pressure of completing a film worth calling her own.
With the timesaving, cost-efficient computer-generated imagery, many once popular animation techniques have nearly become a lost art in the recent feature film pool. Stopmotion is one of those dangerously close to extinction animation styles, which has played a pivotal part in some of the most thrilling and magical films in history, such as, but not limited to, the live-action dominion of Desmond Davis’s “Clash of the Titans,” Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” films, and Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” to the fully animated features of Henry Celick’s “Caroline,” another Burton film in “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” and Phil Tippett’s “Mad God.” Stopmotion animator and filmmaker Robert Morgan aims to add his entry to the dwindling, yet sustaining for now, artform with his 2023, debut full-length film “Stopmotion” co-written by Morgan and Robin King (“Mnemophrenia”). The UK film is produced by Alain de la Mata and Christopher Granier-Deferrere under the French production company Blue Light and is presented by the UK’s British Film Institute, or BFI, with IFC Films and Shudder.
In the tragic lead role of spiraling down through pressurized suffering , trying to surface and take a breath from Ella Blake’s domineering mother’s shadow, is Aisling Franciosi, an Irish actress who also had a principal role in the segmented Dracula tale of “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” released the same year. As Ella Blake, Franciosi plays into the young woman’s meek and submissive behavior as a subservient daughter to her conceited mother (Stella Gonet, “Spencer”). All the while on the inside, Blake’s bottled voice contains lethal doses of self-destruction, barring her indefinitely inside the mental boundaries of her psyche, and never surfacing between the already emotional scarring and the grief for mother’s authoritarian parenting as Blake herself becomes very much like the armature puppet she manipulates into position for her film, needing that command structure to follow orders. That need to be creative is so strong within Blake she fabricates another persona splitting soul into a dissociative disorder that takes the yoke and, ultimately, control over her and her project. And, in some distressing and grim fairytale type of way, the voice recreates a story that parallels Ella’s life with the Ash Man (effects and prosthetic-cladded actor James Swanton, “Host”) chasing down and manipulating a wax puppet version of Ella in a grotesque mirror dynamic between Ella and her mother. Tethering Ella ever so barely to reality is flexible boyfriend Tom (Tom York) and his flaunting animation corporate head Polly (Therica Wilson-Read, “Suicide Club”) to what’s in front of her rather to the voice inside of her but their truth is far too combative for Ella to stay fastened to a much strong influencing voice that’s far too close to her. The upcoming “The Beast Within” actress, Caoilinn Springall, rounds out the cast as the little girl of the apartment building.
As much as I wanted to seep and soak into “Stopmotion’s” one-frame-at-a-time madness, I couldn’t help but to think I’ve seen this story before. A sort of déjà vu encircles me and hits me squarely in the gut as I lament over the possibility of feeling the same way I felt before with another film. Then, it struck me like a bolt of lightning that this storyline shares similarities with the 2021, Prano Bailey-Bond film, “Censor.” Now, I’m not saying “Stopmotion” is a direct carbon copy but follows a familiar pathway, a movie industry outlier forced by life and submersed under the weight to finishing what the heroines have started only to crack in deep obsession. On a high level, character impetuses that lead to the same conclusion are in stark contrast and Ella Blake’s descent fathoms family trauma and fixation with trying to be an individual and not just a minor component of a bigger, more impressive, machine that overshadows the necessary cog that makes the whole operate. Coupled with surreal imagery, otherworldly stopmotion animation, and physical effects that’ll make your skin crawl, or melt like wax, “Stopmotion” enlivens an animator filmmaker’s creativity outside the personifying vocation, blending genres and animations to exact a reality bending mania. Morgan’s fragmented segues evoke an alternate reality that skips the portions where the audiences’ minds might fill in the gaps. There is no gap filling, only essential, contextual moments, as if Morgan is the puppeteer to his story by arranging the movements one frame at a time reflect Ella’s poignant reminders and dour moments that mold her.
“Stopmotion” animates a living hell. The Shudder exclusive lands onto a RLJ Entertainment subsidiary UK label, Acorn Media International, Blu-ray release. The Blu-ray is presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio encoded with AVC, high definition 1080p, on a BD25. Though in spartanly stark and gritty-glum set dressings, “Stopmotion’s” grading is on the lighter side of saturation diffusion, held mostly to a shade array of reds, greens, browns, and yellows. There is numerous isolating, low key-lit scenes concentrated on the framed charactered and engulfing them in darkness but with that, there were no notifiable issues with posterization or banding. Depth, especially in the stop-motion portion of reality, has spatial length and dimensional delineation, a testament to Morgan’s stop motion animator’s background and experience as some examples of the craft often look flat. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 offers a lossless fidelity through the broodiness of Lola de la Mata’s compositional vocal and violin score, stringing through the surrealistic switch of cerebral crossfire. Dialogue creates no challenges with a clear and clean presentation, range of effects heighten in animation’s Foley, and, again, depth creates that an enwreathed sound field through the back and side channels. English subtitles are optionally available. Special features include an interview with star Aisling Francosi, interview with writer-director Robert Morgan, and a behind-the-scenes featurette. The Acorn Media release is rated 18 for Strong Bloody Violence and gore, has a runtime of 94 minutes, and, though not listed, played in region A playback so does seem to have at least dual-regional encoding between A and B. The tangible Blu-ray comes in a standard Blu-ray case with a creepy, head-nesting puppet artwork. The interior has standard appeal with just the disc inside, pressed with the same front cover art.
Last Rites: “Stopmotion” depicts a tragic fall but not from grace in what is a more sad and sullen reality, and the escape is a freshly personified hell of one’s own making.
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