Powered by creative ick and morbid imagination, Stopmotion stars Aisling Franciosi as Ella, an aspiring stop-motion animator working under the emotionally abusive tutelage of her mother (Stella Gonet), a legend of the art form. When her mother suffers a health scare, Ella breaks free, retreating to a decrepit apartment to bring forth a stop-motion movie inspired by a scary story told to her by a young neighbor (Caoilinn Springall). Lest you think this is a creepy kids’ movie along the lines of Henry Selick’s Coraline, it’s worth noting that the girl suggests Ella use raw meat as the skin for the puppets she makes, then the flesh of a dead fox they find together outside, then . . . I’ll spare you spoilers and an upset stomach. Director and animator Robert Morgan, making his feature debut, effectively blends the two modes of filmmaking involved here. The movie’s dark magic occurs when the stop-motion story and the narrative proper bleed into each other (often literally), with goopy puppets invading Ella’s space while she—perhaps psychologically, perhaps in reality—finds herself trapped in theirs. Franciosi, so good in the likes of God’s Creatures and The Nightingale, fully commits here, so that Ella unnervingly registers as both victim and perpetrator. If anything, Stopmotion has too many ideas it wants to pursue, from the costs of creativity to mother-daughter dynamics to artistic compromise to body horror. It’s a combination of the Roger Corman murder-sculptor satire A Bucket of Blood and the Kelly Reichardt artistic process love letter Showing Up, as directed by the Mad God of stop-motion animation, Phil Tippett. That’s an ambitious undertaking, one that Stopmotion comes tantalizingly close to realizing.
(2/23/2024)
