English animator Robert Morgan has deservedly accrued a shelf of awards over the past quarter-century or so for shorts like “The Cat With Hands,” “The Separation” and ickily awesome “Bobby Yeah.” Their macabre, surreal nightmares are at once threatening and oddly winsome, with a sinister aesthetic equally redolent of the Brothers Quay, early David Lynch and the painter Francis Bacon — all of whom count among the director’s admitted influences.
He’s been in no hurry to adopt a longer format, and his first feature underlines the wisdom of that reluctance. Not unprecedented among his work in its mix of animated and live-action elements, “Stopmotion” demonstrates the difficulty in stretching such a singular, fantastical sensibility to suit a full-length project’s storytelling requirements.
This “Repulsion”-like tale of a fragile young woman’s descent into madness, starring “The Nightingale’s” Aisling Franciosi, arrests attention with its vivid, escalating eruptions of grotesque imagination.
He’s been in no hurry to adopt a longer format, and his first feature underlines the wisdom of that reluctance. Not unprecedented among his work in its mix of animated and live-action elements, “Stopmotion” demonstrates the difficulty in stretching such a singular, fantastical sensibility to suit a full-length project’s storytelling requirements.
This “Repulsion”-like tale of a fragile young woman’s descent into madness, starring “The Nightingale’s” Aisling Franciosi, arrests attention with its vivid, escalating eruptions of grotesque imagination.
- 2/22/2024
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
In Robert Morgan’s feature-length debut, Stopmotion, animator Ella Blake (Aisling Fransciosi) vows to finish the work of her ailing mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet). She shuts herself away from the world in an old apartment building, in total dedication to the painstaking process of moving sculpted figures a centimeter at a time. But she soon begins a new work altogether at the behest of a spooky little neighbor girl, only for the unsettling art they create and Ella’s perception of reality to bleed together. Pity, though, that they don’t bleed together enough, as the macabre dream logic that many of Stopmotion’s sequences employ is too often undermined by plot rhythms familiar from so many horror films about trauma.
Morgan swiftly demonstrates his animator’s eye, communicating his ideas with the quickness and clarity of a short film. The very first scene tells us everything about Ella and...
Morgan swiftly demonstrates his animator’s eye, communicating his ideas with the quickness and clarity of a short film. The very first scene tells us everything about Ella and...
- 2/18/2024
- by Steven Scaife
- Slant Magazine
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