The Stopmotion director says his form of animation is necromancy

Robert Morgan’s nauseating horror film will be released on May 31 Stop motion will begin streaming on Shudder. But hardcore horror fans will get the chance to see the live-action/animation hybrid early in theaters starting February 23 – and they shouldn’t miss the opportunity. It’s best experienced in a theater because of the way the chilling visuals, twisty story, and especially the gristly, eerie soundscape all set the tone.

Stop motion follows a young stop-motion animator as she copes with the death of her domineering, celebrated animator mother and dutifully tries to continue her work. But then she becomes involved in a disturbing new project that comes to life for her – perhaps literally. Aisling Franciosi (star of The nightingale, Jennifer Kent’s chilling sequel The Babadookand a recommended player The legend of Vox Machina And Game of Thrones) plays the animator Ella, whose grief, challenge, and determination to make a name for herself all lead her in dark directions, which play out on screen through the animation she creates.

Director and co-writer Robert Morgan, a stop-motion animator known for his creepy shortsincluded The cat with hands And Tomorrow I will be dirtymakes his feature film debut with Stop motion, and he used his career in the field to give the film a particularly tactile, detailed feel that balances the gory horror elements. Polygon spoke with him at the 2023 Fantastic Fest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, about where he placed himself in this film, how he managed all the animation himself, who he considers the Pope of meat puppet animation, and why stop-motion is so important is. a necromantic art.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Polygon: The title of this film is interestingly ambiguous: there are many different ways to read “stop-motion.” Were you focusing on those different layers?

Robert Morgan: Certainly. It took me a long time to come up with the right title for it, and “Stop motion‘ came up early on when we were writing it. I liked the directness of it, but I also like the fact that there are two or three other possible interpretations. There is a contradiction between “stop” and “movement” – something that is simultaneously dead and alive. But you also stop the movement. There is a somewhat ominous feeling attached to this, which may have something to do with murder.

The line in the film that hits home the hardest is about stop-motion animation as “the art of making dead things come to life.” Was that idea part of the genesis of this project?

It happened organically as we were writing it. I mean, the genesis of it really had to do with my own experience making animated films, and feeling like they took on a life of their own. When you’re really creative about something, and it starts talking to you, it starts telling you what it wants to be – that can be a very exciting experience, but you can also imagine it as a very scary experience. . If there may be an ominous purpose, it always has its own consciousness, creativity. And maybe it doesn’t matter what you want, or what’s good for you; it just wants its own thing.

So that was the genesis of it. But then all this other stuff about the medium of stop-motion slipped into the slipstream of the idea. Stop motion is about bringing an inanimate object to life. There’s almost a black art quality to stop-motion, this idea of ​​evoking things, bringing things back to life. It’s like necromancy. A stream of dark, strange things flows beneath it.

There are so many places in this movie where you see the puppets and they’re not moving – and they look incredibly creepy without the fluidity and personality that animation brings. Is that really true for you as an animator on your own sets? Or is that just something the audience has to experience?

Probably the latter. I mean, I don’t think they’re scary, I think they’re kind of cute! But yeah, if you’ve seen one of those dolls move, and then you look at it again in the set, it’s wearing the threat of movement. Like it could be just come alive. There is a scene in the movie where Ella is on the phone with her boyfriend, looks at her doll and turns his head away. That was a little nod to that sensation, like: Is it looking at me? And you don’t really know their intentions either. You don’t know what they want.

How did you go about mixing a stop-motion character and a live actor in one shot?

It’s a very, very complicated, very carefully storyboarded scene. We built that bedroom on the soundstage, and then we built a second bedroom with a raised floor that matched it exactly. Then we shot the live-action plates with Aisling in bed. And then we measured all the camera angles and lights and everything, and recreated the exact same angles in the stop-motion version. We had to raise the floor because you can’t animate on a real floor. So we had an elevated set with hatches in it so the animator could come out and animate it, and that all came together.

In the Q&A that I saw after this film was shown at Fantastic Fest, you said that this film was a bit autobiographical, just in those terms of how your art takes on a life of its own. But what about the bigger story, about living in the shadow of a great creator while trying to find your own identity? Is that something personal to you?

No, that was pure invention. What I can relate to is the feeling of desperately wanting to be creative, but not feeling like you have anything to say. That was certainly my experience. When I was younger, I wanted to be a filmmaker, I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t know what my voice was. And that’s something I think a lot of artists can relate to.

It’s like you have an overwhelming urge: I want to be part of that, I want to make art. And then you sit down and try to think of something, but it feels like: I don’t know what I don’t know, or who I am, or what I say. And you have to earn that very gradually, through life and by consuming other art. Gradually it happens. So that element, that’s what I relate to. But Ella’s mother only wanted to accentuate it, to make that experience even worse for her. Because she not only lives in someone else’s shadow, she is almost used as a puppet by her mother herself.

Photo: Samuel Dole/IFC Films and Shudder

I noticed her mother keeps calling her “little doll” as a term of endearment, but most of the time it sounds like she’s saying “little doll.”

We deliberately did it sometimes as a ‘puppet’, sometimes as a ‘puppet’. We deliberately blurred the line there.

You said the entire film was made in 25 days.

So every time there’s animation and live-action together, everything was shot within 25 days, at the same time as the live-action shoot. After the shoot, while we were editing, I set up a little studio in my living room and shot all the film-within-a-film stuff – all the Cyclops stuff, the mother’s film, and all the Ella films. I filmed that myself, with no money and no budget, in my lounge, while I edited the film. So it was intense post-production. It just kept going. But the great thing about that is that because I’m no longer on a tight schedule, I was able to loosen things up and tailor the animation to the montage as it was forming.

Can you speak to the blue egg with which the film opens, and which we see as a recurring element? There’s a lot of symbolism in this movie, and I felt like I followed most of it, but the blue egg escapes me in terms of what you’re supposed to feel in response to it.

It’s mysterious. I can’t really talk about it. For me it has something to do with death, and something to do with creativity. That’s all I can say about it. So watch the movie again!

I think people who know the history of stop motion will inevitably think of Jan Švankmajer while watching this film. Was he an influence?

If you’re going to make meat dolls, Švankmajer is your man. He made a movie called Meat lovethat’s just a one minute video, very simple, very short, with two steaks dancing and having sex before being cooked.

I saw it as a student. I was like, I didn’t know you could do that. It’s so weird and funny and sick. So the idea of ​​making meat puppets was very interesting. And he kind of looks like the Pope of that kind of animation. He’s really a pioneer in finding that macabre style of stop-motion animation and actually mining it.

There have been others. Before him there was Władysław Starewicz, an animator from the 1920s. He made quite strange, macabre films with stuffed animals and insects and things like that. And Charley Bowers, an American animator, used re-stuffed rats and cats and things like that in the 1920s. So there is a tradition of macabre stop-motion, but Švankmajer stepped to the fore and exemplified that more than anyone.

This is a very lame movie. Why so over the top with the sound? What did you want to achieve with it?

Just to create a sensual experience. For me, cinema is partly narrative, but also spectacle and sensual. So you feel the deep-rooted quality of the film: the details in the image grow with the details of the sound. For me, 50% of the experience in a movie is the sound. That’s why I wanted the sound to be as sensual and detailed as the images. It’s about creating a visual image And sensual experience for the viewer.

Stop motion will be in theaters from February 23 and on Shudder from May 31.