Spoilers Ahead
2024’s horror spectacle ‘Stopmotion’ dropped on Shudder on May 31st, and it was a grotesque and beautiful exploration of generational trauma, artistry, as well as questions of what shapes and sculpts us into the people we are today? How do we carry it with us? And who do we give credit to as the ‘artist’?
I was excited to see Stomotion after seeing a bit of the trailer on Instagram. Stop motion animation has always intrigued me; as it lives in a place of ‘uncannily human.’ Just off enough to keep me on the edge of my seat. It doesn’t fit neatly into traditional animation, but isn’t a ‘real’ person/object. ‘Stopmotion’ takes full advantage of this fact. With the director, Robert Morgan, receiving awards for his stop motion pieces, it’s no surprise that the medium is used with beauty and disgusting grace. While by no means a perfect movie, it asked a lot of interesting questions when analysed through a feminist lens.
Ella is the daughter of a famous stop motion artist. With her mother, Suzanne, now plagued with crippling arthritis, Ella has become her hands, a puppet for her mother’s work; no creative input, just the hands to make it happen. After a freak accident that leaves her mother in the hospital, she begins exploring her own creative stop motion piece. With the bizarre guidance from a young girl, Ella’s art begins to blur the lines between her psyche and reality.
Women, much like the clay and materials used in stop motion animation, have been molded to fit a specific narrative and expectation. As the feminist existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote in ‘The Second Sex,’ “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” This quote is incredibly applicable when exploring Ella’s character arc and her inability to create something that is originally her own because of how her mind had been warped and shaped by her mother. She takes over her mother’s ambitions instead of pursuing her own. Multiple times throughout the film she states how her mother was the brilliant one, she was just ‘the hands.’
The metaphor for generation trauma isn’t subtle by any means, as the most straightforward part of the film is the first twenty minutes between Ella and her mother. We see the tension of their strained relationship. And when a young child appears mysteriously with the only inspiration and plot to the story Ella is able to tell, Ella’s psyche appears to shift and unable to differentiate between real and imaginative. She does realise that the young girl controlling her story is in fact the younger version of her, reclaiming a narrative that is actively hurting her adult self. This goes from collecting bones of dead animals, to pulling herself apart (quite literally). Even the younger version of her is using her exclusively as a means to an end, forcing her to live in a nightmare that is only escalating.
‘Stopmotion’ creatively uses elements of stop motion animation to explore the idea of ‘making’ a woman by seeing Ella transform and mutate into a pile of wax, void of any distinguishable features to feed ‘The Ash Man’ (the villain of Ella’s and Young Ella’s film). I wish the medium was pushed even further, as the idea was so intriguing and strong. We see women being ‘built’ to fulfill the needs of society at large regularly; whether that is as mothers or fulfilling emotional labour. Ella was built to fulfill a need, and made to her mother’s work without questioning what she wanted to create herself.
With violent artistry, Morgan exposes art and artist, the creation of a woman to fufill a generational, traumatic curse in ‘Stopmotion.’ While there are definite confusing plot beats, and I wish the stop motion element was pushed even further, I would recommend ‘Stopmotion.’ It was a great mix of mediums, as well as a poweful commentary on how women are molded into an image of societal and familial expectations.
WORKS CITED
Beauvoir, Simone De. The Second Sex. Vintage Classic, 1949.
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