Film / Stop Motion

Bring Your Nightmares to Life

Stopmotion is a 2023 British live-action/adult animated horror film directed by Robert Morgan in his feature-length debut and starring (Aisling Franciosi).

The film follows Ella Blake, a young woman with dreams of breaking into the stop motion world as a director and animator, without the shadow of her famous mother hanging over her. When Ella finally gets her chance, however, her sanity begins to suffer as she finds her film might be quite literally taking on a life of its own.

Stopmotiom contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Ella’s mother Suzanne is harshly critical of her and berates her for the simplest mistake, despite the fact that her daughter is willingly acting as her hands to help her move the puppets.
• Ambiguously Evil: The Ash Man is a terrifying presence, but outside of Ella's revulsion of his appearance and the little girl saying she's hiding from him, there is nothing to suggest that he has ill intent. Given that the little girl turns out to be an embodiment of Ella's dark impulses, and the fact that the Ash Man only outright attacks Ella after she murders two people, it's possible that he was actually trying to pull her out of her insanity.
• Artistic Stimulation: Invoked. Polly mentions that her best ideas come to her when she's "tripping her tits off." Ella later takes her up on the offer of acid to give herself some ideas. Averted in that she never ends up taking any.
• Buffy Speak: The little girl suggests that the stop-motion puppets be made of something more "bleedy."
• Downer Ending: Ella becomes completely consumed by her insanity, murders Tom and Polly, and fatally wounds herself to complete her project, spending her last moments in the real world bleeding to death while the little girl claims ownership of what remains of her consciousness.
• Extreme Doormat: Ella is at first completely beholden to her overbearing mother and the film that she wants her to make. Even after she moves on to her own film, she immediately changes everything at the behest of a little girl (a complete stranger, no less).
• Foreshadowing: There are a couple of hints that the little girl Ella seems to bond with is a figment of her imagination. Most glaring is when Tom’s sister leaves Ella’s apartment and walks past her without even raising her head up to take notice of her presence, an almost instinctual thing to do when something enters your line of sight.
  • Crosses over with Harsher in Hindsight. Ella wakes Tom in an early scene by pinching his nose shut until he startles awake, as an affectionate prank. It's much less affectionate when she kills him by covering his mouth and nose to suffocate him.
• Human Resources: Ella cuts out pieces of her own flesh to add to her animation late in the film.
• Improbable Weapon User: Ella stabs Polly fatally in the throat with the tripod of the camera she uses to photograph her stop-motion work.
• Innocently Insensitive: A worker on the film at Polly's company comments that Ella's mother was a genius, and he would have loved to work with her. Ella has worked with her, and it was an unpleasant and damaging process.
• Mad Artist: Ella becomes progressively consumed by her film to an incredibly unhealthy extent. After all, no sane person would take anyone's suggestion to put raw meat underneath their puppets just to make them look more "real." In reality, she's been losing her mind since the project began.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The end of the film comes and no answers are provided about whether anything supernatural ever took place.
• Marionette Motion: The stop-motion puppets avert this, given Ella's skill, but when the Ash Man shows up in the real world, he sometimes moves like this.
• Mushroom Samba: Ella takes a tab of acid from Polly at a party and wanders throughout the rooms, having a hallucinogenic journey that ends with her in a Troubled Fetal Position at her apartment next to a dead fox. Averted - she never actually took any of the acid.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "The Ash Man" - the man no one wants to meet.
• No Name Given: The young girl that helps Ella with her film ideas is never named. It's implied that she is an embodiment of Ella's darker impulses, and is most definitely not a normal little girl.
• No-Sell: Ella tries to strangle the little girl to stop the madness, but a few moments later she reappears none the worse for wear and with a little quip.
• Perverse Puppet: Stop-motion puppets, but the effect is the same. And oh, is it used to great effect.
• Rule of Three: A reoccurring aspect in the film. In Ella’s film the Ashman comes a three night, there’s a constant sound of three loud knocks etc.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: The little girl's suggestions for how Ella's film should go are all way more morbid and gruesome than what a girl her age should be thinking of. It turns out she's actually the embodiment of Ella's insanity pushing her to give into her inner darkness.
• "Well Done, Daughter" Gal: Ella clearly yearns for approval from her mother, which is why she puts up with her controlling behavior.
• Wham Line: After Ella seems to have a hallucination from the drugs her boyfriend’s sister gave her. We are led to believe that everything Ella did and saw was because of the drugs only for Ella to reveal to Tom…
  Ella: (taking out the still sealed drugs from her shoe) I didn’t touch them.