There was a time when we people with glasses were forced to marvel at the genius of Jan Švankmajer’s short films. “Švankmajer! Genius!” was our mantra. Then ours, alas, started shooting feature films and our glasses exploded in a collective CHEPPALLE. Then there were the quay jokers of the Quay Brothers, who were also extraordinary on the short route, less so on the long one. Then came Lee Hardcastle, who pushes himself less and has always had the decency to limit himself to short films, one more beautiful than the other. Look how kind I am, I’m linking you beautiful, legal and free stuff. In short, despite the fact that stop motion is a very interesting and courageous technique (and the more time goes on, the more “senseless” it is: in an era of AI that is making even the good old green screen obsolete, animating by hand hand-modeled figures in a hand-built set makes vinyl lovers look like daring futurists), the problem always seems to be making it work in a feature film with a complete narrative.
It’s a mess, my lady
Enter Phil Tippett with the incredible Mad God which however is a trip to be accepted as it is. Enter, above all, this madman called Robert Morgan who puts together a short film that is sicker and more perverse than the other (including an episode of The ABCs of Death 2) and which you can easily watch on his YouTube channel. Come on, look at them and then tell me if I’m right: Morgan is an absolute lunatic. Finally, after an honored career featuring little monsters made with his toenails, dangling eyes, a very disturbed vision of childhood, Morgan debuts with this feature film which is simply called “Stopmotion” because, drum roll, it’s a METAFILM ! Help. Given the track record of his colleagues, there wasn’t much to hope for. The first part, objectively, suffers a bit from the continuous attack of flying metaphors, stuff so loud that you actually fear that these characters have the depth of wax figurines; all made worse by the rarefaction of the dialogues, which leads the film towards atmospheres dangerously à la Possum (which is not a compliment). And instead…
The little nail monster <3
And instead the second part, for those who have a moment of patience, becomes more and more horrible, perverse, funny and bloody and never takes its foot off the accelerator until a final shot of rare perfection, including quotes from Peeping Tom, Dead of Night, dream sequences and experiences that seem like dreams, wide angles, visual and sound distortions. And holding the plot on her shoulders is the very courageous Aisling Franciosi, who we already admired in that other little walk that was The Nightingale and who we will soon see again in the remake of Speak No Evil; Franciosi trusts the director blindly and immerses herself in the project with great dedication (she even learned to animate the figurines, as Morgan explains in this interview).
Watch it in action here
The plot, precisely: the young and submissive Ella lives with her tyrannical mother, an entertainer who is losing the use of her hands and is therefore becoming increasingly sadistic and intractable. She is helping her complete her latest film, but she doesn’t have the strength to rebel and search for her own artistic voice. For a series of reasons, Ella takes the opportunity to move to a studio to dedicate herself to her film, her visions and her fears; her boyfriend Tom supports her and puts up with her, his sister claims to want to help her find a “real” job in the world of commercial animation. But Ella snubs them, preferring the company of a mysterious bitchy little girl who is none other than her Id. In short, Ella goes crazy for her film like her mother before her, she lives (and dies) for her art, which he absorbs her entirely, engulfs her until he transforms her into one of his characters. At this point the plane of reality and that of fiction have already reversed several times and it is useless to try to go back from a maelström in which dead flesh, living flesh and mortuary wax have the same tactile consistency and the same ethical value . The party sequence is a riot of uncanny valleys that open up dizzily before our eyes.
Sick metaphors
The film also plays with the moral ambiguity between humans who are alive but dead inside, alienated from work, from drugs, from normal life. Tom is a mature and conscientious boy who finds a balance between work and music, but Ella, now lost in her vortex of paranoia and narcissism, mocks him by telling him “You don’t make music: you dress well and go to work”. The world of commercial art, Morgan clearly illustrates, really sucks; however the discussion is ambivalent: after all, Ella lives a shitty life at her mother’s house, she probably gets by on savings and refuses to open up to the concept of the future.
BU!
Morgan creates a film, and a film within a film, in which the characters have something to say and which engages you emotionally. It would have been better to delve deeper into the mother-daughter relationship, but the brief sections show a sadistic mother frustrated by the fact that she is losing the use of her tools (her hands) and a submissive, plagiarized daughter who cannot manage either the presence or especially the absence of the mother. As her mother says, Ella has no control over anything. Repressed at a level deeper than the social one, incapable of reading herself and others, fundamentally psychopathic, Ella has nothing left but to obliterate herself and others like so many wax dolls crushed between her fingers.
DVD odds:
«The uncanny is the return of the repressed»
Sigmund Freud, i400pupazzetti.com
>> IMDb | Trailer
