Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion was one of two secret films to screen at Sheffield’s Celluloid Screams film festival. The story charts the slow mental health decline of animator Ella (Aisling Franciosi). The daughter of a renowned stop-motion animator, Ella is desperate to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Sadly, as much as she dreams of creating a film of her own, Ella lacks vision and is instead chained to her sick mother’s concepts, and spends her days following her strict instructions. After her mother ends up hospitalised, Ella is suddenly granted an opportunity to be creative, but is still unable to conjure an original idea. Then she meets an imaginative little girl (Caoilinn Springall) and she finds herself creating a macabre tapestry that may be more real than she realises.
Stopmotion is a dark and devious exploration of the drive of an artist. Ella becomes consumed with creating her film, and her drive blocks out everything else. Her need to be creative and express herself sees Ella ignore every red flag out there. She also closes herself off from those around her, including her boyfriend, Tom (Tom York). As her obsession takes over, Ella becomes a puppet in her own project, and is pushed to the limit, both physically and mentally.
Playing Ella is The Nightingale’s Aisling Franciosi, and once more the actor is thrown through the emotional wringer. Ella is a complex character, but Franciosi expertly brings her to life. On screen in some form or another, for the entire film, Franciosi never fails to grab the audience’s attention. With Ella spending much of the story alone, manipulating puppets, Franciosi has to communicate Ella’s plight through her exquisitely expressive face. On occasion, Stopmotion takes on the air of a silent movie with no dialogue spoken for long portions of the film. Here, Franciosi is relied on to push the narrative forward through her body alone, and does so beautifully. Her performance hypnotises the viewer, rendering them into a fugue state, allowing Franciosi to influence their emotions, making the audience another puppet for Ella to control.
The story in Stopmotion is a familiar one, but writer and director Robert Morgan constructs a compelling space within which to tell it. Art’s power to consume its creator has been analysed extensively over the years, but Morgan’s interpretation brings enough inventiveness to keep it feeling fresh. Stopmotion is told through a mixture of both live-action and stop-motion animation, and at several points, through a blend of both methods together. The mixing of mediums ensures that Stopmotion never feels entirely natural. It embraces its strangeness from its first scene and the animation sequences feel genuinely chilling. The puppets themselves are beautifully grotesque, the designs themselves enough to unsettle before Ella’s exotic materials have been revealed.
Thematically, Stopmotion shares a kinship with Censor and has the potential to become a similarly regarded cult hero. Morgan’s ingenuity with blending stop-motion and live-action creates a creepy space for his tale of obsession-induced trauma to play out. Stopmotion is then made whole by Aisling Franciosi’s utterly absorbing performance. A strange and twisted genre gem, Stopmotion is a sneaky and scary surprise across the board.
Stopmotion
Summary
Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion is a compelling tale of the dangers of obsession and art’s ability to consume. Excellently constructed animation plays against an incredible live-action performance by Aisling Franciosi to create a thoroughly creative macabre nightmare.
Stopmotion was reviewed at Celluloids Screams 2023.
