Malignant Creativity: Robert Morgan On His Shocking Debut Feature ‘Stopmotion,’ Coming To Shudder On May 31

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/malignant-creativity-robert-morgan-on-his-shocking-debut-feature-stopmotion-coming-to-shudder-on-may-31-238718.html
IFC trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Debr5KI1QIU

Stopmotion sprouted from the seed of Morgan’s 2013 Invocation – which starred co-writer Robin King as a Bolex-clicking animator who is subsumed by his stop-motion creations.

“Invocation was a low-budget short we did for Channel 4,” Morgan recalls. “I needed somebody who’d get violently killed, and Robin was up for the task. For years, I’d wanted to make a film about the process of stop-motion animation. I thought it was a fascinating subject for a film to explore the psychological dimensions and the weird, ritualistic, almost occult dimensions of stop-motion animation – bringing things to life and all that. The first idea I had to explore that subject was about a camera that is alive, and the frames were going in and impregnating the camera, like sperm. I played with that for a while, but I realized it wasn’t a feature film, so we made a short. Off the back of that, I carried on exploring the idea and then, with Robin, came up with a more sober exploration of the subject, which is what Stopmotion is about.”

The feature contains three stop-motion shorts within its 93-minute runtime. The first belongs to the protagonist’s mother, Suzanne (Stella Gonet), a veteran stop-motion animator whose arthritic hands make it impossible for her to make frame-by-frame puppet adjustments. The latter two belong to Suzanne’s adult daughter, Ella (Aisling Franciosi), whose animation is a fevered response to her mother’s overbearing nature.