Review: In ‘Stopmotion’ the Puppets Outshine the Humans  – The Village Voice

It’s a little on the nose that Robert Morgan’s first feature would be titled Stopmotion —  the writer/director’s been an unabashedly gross-out micro-body-horror stop-motion animator-provocateur for 30 years. (Samples of his short-film oeuvre, including 1997’s The Man in the Lower Left-Hand Corner of the Photograph, 2001’s The Cat with Hands, 2011’s Bobby Yeah, and 2019’s Tomorrow I Will Be Dirt, are on YouTube, and mostly NSFW.) Decidedly post-Lynch and crust-punk quasi-Quay, Morgan’s films — tiny oozing anxiety-dramas peopled by waxy humanoids with too-realistic timeworn faces and wary eyeballs — have the discomfiting traction of bad dreams you’re forced to stay asleep for.

Animators, though, often grow maddened with the lonesome, time-devouring process of personal animation — you could say it’s built into the demands of the form, and therefore frequently colors the films themselves. And so, looking to actually have careers that pay rent, they toggle to features, mitigating the frame-by-frame torture with live actors and shoots that won’t last the best part of a year. The returns are usually, in a word, diluted. (Perhaps only Jan Švankmajer has figured out a live-action sensibility — grotty surrealist satire — that mates with his mad-storybook animation.) Morgan’s move with Stopmotion is to pull a Repulsion, following Aisling Franciosi’s Ella, the cowed daughter of an aging, dictatorial, and arthritic animator (Stella Gonet, who killed as a vampiric Margaret Thatcher in last year’s El Conde). Acting as her mother’s hands on their tabletop stop-motion puppet set, Ella escapes occasionally for partying with a hunky boyfriend (Tom York), but otherwise her life is conscripted by the day-long drudgery of budging puppets a millimeter at a time, as her mother barks orders behind her.

We’re not supposed to take Tomorrow I Will Be Dirt as a cry for help, are we?

When a stroke takes Mom out of the mix, Ella sets up an animation shop in a strangely empty flat, in a strangely empty building, and is instantly pestered by a strangely parentless girl (Caoilinn Springall), who starts commandeering Ella’s film — turning it into a predation scenario, using dead flesh —  and who is obviously from the outset a persona conjured by Ella, her younger self perhaps, or a just the impish slice of ego required to cleave away from the mother’s control.

It’s a disappointing path, more than a bit dimestore Freud, hardly managing to reveal Ella’s fracturing psyche to us in convincing terms, and instead succeeding only in having us assume most of what we’re watching is simply Ella’s confused imagination. In the process, though, you do get a tantalizing primer in how modern stop-motion animation works, and how Morgan’s own physical process musters his greasy weirdness out of everyday substances. But using his own perfectly disgusting and phobia-loaded animation tropes as the product of a dissolving consciousness — and Ella does dissolve, into self-mutilation and other irrational nastiness — puts Morgan’s project in a kind of meta-quandry. Like, we’re not supposed to take Tomorrow I Will Be Dirt (watch it and don’t thank me) as a cry for help, are we?

In any case, the movie’s rather haphazard plotting and hallucinatory subjectivity doesn’t encourage deep thinking — the kinds of eruptive action Morgan uses in his shorts only musters head-scratching in the larger narrative frame. Franciosi, most memorable in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018), has a pensive Jessica Harper-in-Suspiria watchfulness to her, but she gets little help from her puppet-focused director, who remains more fluent in the viscous, if laborious, other-world of frame-by-frame nightmares. ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

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