Stopmotion, Mad God and the Fearsome Power of Animation

Stopmotion, Mad God and the fearsome power of animation

Stopmotion, 2023, directed by Robert Morgan

Mad God, 2021, directed by Phil Tippett

[Note: Stopmotion contains strobe effects in its opening sequence, so it’s one to avoid if that’s a danger for you. Please note I’m not an expert and the fact that I don’t give a seizure warning about a film doesn’t mean it’s safe; I’m just sure Stopmotion isn’t.]

We are entering a lucky age in everyone understands that ‘animated’ doesn’t mean ‘children only’, and horror is starting to twitch new limbs. It’s early days and animation is labour-intensive so there’s only a handful so far, but with surprise masterpieces like The Wolf House (2018) making waves it’s starting to be a good time.

And in particular, there’s a lot to hope from stop motion animation. There’s no reason 2D animation can’t be frightening, and there have been some interesting attempts like the 2007 French anthology film Fears of the Dark, but you’ll notice I said ‘interesting attempt’ rather than ‘terrifying ordeal’.

The 2013 anime Yamishibai delivered a series of shorts that were nicely creepy, but on the other side of the anime page, only last year Netflix released Japanese Tales of the Macabre – and if you know anything about the Junji Ito manga stories it’s based on then you’ll already know it as an infamous failure. It is, and not in the good sense, a shocker: a feat of adaptation that somehow managed to be extremely faithful and yet drain all the fear out of the most frightening horror writer alive. (Yes, Junji Ito is our greatest living horror writer, come at me. You can’t scare me; I’ve read Junji Ito.) 

I want to see a really frightening 2D horror movie and if you know of any please say so in the comments, because I have yet to see anything that surpasses The Secret of NIMH (1982) and the Richard Adams adaptations (Watership Down, 1978, and The Plague Dogs, 1982), and that’s a long old wait. Honestly the best recent use has been Skinamarink’s [link to previous review] repurposing of old Fleischer cartoons, and it’d be nice to see that treated as inspiring. 2D can be scary, but its best days are not yet with us. We have things to look forward to.

But stop-motion is another story. A physical object moving when it shouldn’t is inherently creepy: Freud’s notion of the uncanny – those neck-crawling doubts about how much something is alive – are all over the screen. Stop motion horror is a place for dark brilliance and I couldn’t be more excited.

Or sometimes disappointed. 

So I’m going to talk today about two stop motion horror movies on Shudder, one great and one rather a let-down. You don’t turn up just to listen to me grouse, and if I’m going to say something bad about a film I’d like to balance it with praising something else, and even the lesser work has good things. But sometimes a contrast can tell you something striking. 

Let’s talk about Mad God (2021) and Stopmotion (2023). 

I was really excited to see Stopmotion, and half an hour in I couldn’t wait to see how it panned out. So if I get salty in this review, please understand that it’s because there were the makings of a masterpiece in Stopmotion and I really wish they had come together. 

Ella (Aisling Franciosi) is a young animator under the extremely intense direction of her mother Suzanne Blake (Stella Gonet), and that’s some thoroughbred casting right there. Suzanne was a legendary animator in her day – from what we see and hear of her work she was a kind of female Ray Harryhausen, except, well, abusive. 

The real man, let’s be clear, was not: his daughter Vanessa is a trustee of his foundation and accepts posthumous awards on his behalf where she speaks passionately of how humble and inspiring was the ‘great man’ she called Dad, and it’s really very moving to see how dear to her he was. In Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2011) she even laughs at how he used the family oven to bake his creations so that their food always tasted of latex. If your daughter forgives you for ruining every dinner she ate in the whole of her childhood I think it’s safe to assume you were a loving parent. 

Suzanne is not a loving parent. Arthritis has taken her power to animate and Ella is under orders to finish her last film, but there’s a quiet fear in their every second together as Ella tries and tries and tries to follow her instructions and gets nothing but criticism. Suzanne is driven by the frustration of a thwarted artist, yes, but also by the hostility of an uncaring mother, and if anything the latter seems the force more, well, animating. 

Ella makes a tentative suggestion that she might bring some of her own ideas to the project, and Suzanne pulls a vicious chess-move: she crushes Ella with silent anger, leaves her to stew in anxiety, then later sits her down and asks to hear ‘your idea’ – a situation where only something perfectly finished, polished and impeccable could possibly be worthy of mention, and of course Ella can’t do that because creativity needs a safe space to explore, so she says nothing and goes back to obeying Suzanne. ‘I don’t have a voice,’ she tells her boyfriend, and of course she doesn’t, because Suzanne won’t let her talk. She is, as Ella herself says, ‘the hands’ to her mother’s ‘brain’, and it’s clear her mother is only using Ella’s hands because she has no other choice, not because she sees any real skill in them. 

Ella is a fictional animator in a film directed by a real animator who specialises in horror.

What is she to do but go creatively mad? 

Let’s talk about movie craziness. I don’t mean fictional depictions of real mental illnesses: I mean that very specific, florid, artistic kind of craziness in which a dramatic character gets carried away with a morbid obsession that manifests itself in metaphor. The film has an aesthetic that eats the protagonist. 

Films that recklessly misrepresent actual medical conditions can be irresponsible because we get a lot of our ideas from the movies and it affects how we see people – but nobody believes ‘fictional mad genius’ is a diagnosis. We are in the realms of the symbolic here and everybody knows the rules of the game. It’s a way to liberate the imagination and go full tilt, and there have been some great films in this tradition. 

But here’s the thing: you need to handle it with impeccable skill, because if you don’t you fall hard. Get it right and you create a beautiful fever dream. Get it wrong and you beat the audience over the head with an analogy at once so obvious and so unrealistic that they walk away personally annoyed with you. 

Half an hour in I was prepared for a beautiful fever dream. The animation was good enough. The cast was superb. The set-up was right there. I am so disappointed that I walked away annoyed, because it didn’t have to be like this. 

Stopmotion’s plot is about classic movie craziness, the spectacular fall of a mad artist. Suzanne has a stroke early on; Ella tries to finish her mother’s movie, then bins it so she can make something of her own. She’s blocked until she meets a little girl who might as well be wearing a T-shirt reading ‘Hello I’m your imaginary friend’, and the little girl takes over as scriptwriter, telling Ella to shoot a new animation in which the puppets are made of mortician’s wax and dead meat. Ella sinks into making the movie; her psyche takes over and leads her down dark lanes; reality dissolves by the end. You know how this works. 

And the set-up really lent itself to this: seeing the first scene with her mother, both clad in monastic smocks and communicating in artists’ shorthand and locked in the kind of boundaryless unspoken disaster that would damage any daughter’s psyche – well, I couldn’t wait to see where this was going to go. We are in safe hands when it comes to the animation: Robert Morgan knows what he’s doing and his puppets are powerful. He’s been making animations for a very long time – you can find them on his YouTube channel, and you should because they’re excellent. Here it is, go have fun/take some damage: https://www.youtube.com/@MrMorgansOrgans.

Now there’s a feature film with his work in it, and it’s all about being a stop-motion animator, which if he knows about anything he must know plenty about. This should be great! And there are some great aspects to it. In particular it’s very acute about capturing the precise feel of making art: Ella poses and snaps, poses and snaps, and we experience how much care there is in every small moment, and how much time it will take to get anything substantial, and how absorbed in your own patience you have to be. Being someone who creates fiction by sitting down in a silent room and poking button after button on a computer myself, I really felt that rhythm.

Morgan knows what it takes to spend day after day after day quietly accumulating small acts until they make up something that the audience will gulp down in a few minutes or hours, and he knows how to show it on the screen. It was one of the most immerse depictions of art-making I’ve ever seen; my hands carried the feel of it right back up to my keyboard when I returned to my own place of Making Things Up. There was no lack of skill or atmosphere at play here. 

So what’s the problem? 

If you’re making a live-action movie with small animated moments, you need to be as obsessed with the live-action story as the animation, and that’s not how Stopmotion watches. If Morgan had let himself be a little crazier it would have been better, but it works to deliver a ‘proper’ feature-length plot and I’m not sure that’s what it’s interested in. 

For a start, the movie doesn’t trust us to understand the metaphors. The power of films like these is that when the metaphors turn rabid we can see what bit them: we can connect the hallucinations to the reality and it’s energising. We participate in the crazymaking until we’re fully involved.

But Stopmotion won’t let us play. It enacts a lovely spottable metaphor on the screen, and then turns around and tells us straight out what it symbolised. The metaphor of Ella-as-puppet is obvious from the start, for instance – her mother even calls her ‘poppet’, which for the non-etymology-nerds out there originally meant ‘doll’. Poppet, puppet, we get it, yes? But we still have to listen to a speech later on in which her mother literally calls her a puppet with no autonomy, which takes the fun out of hearing the echo – and, more than that, diminishes Suzanne’s character by making her treatment of Ella seem less like a human being with blind spots and more like a thematic monster only there to provide message. 

And we keep getting told things like that. Characters keep telling us in dialogue that Ella has no creativity of her own and needs people to tell her what to do, and we didn’t need to hear that: it was obvious in her relationship with the relentlessly bossy Imaginary Girl. Although the girl is her own imagination, so that’s a metaphor in dispute with itself and I’m not convinced that it’s ambivalent rather than just confused. 

The Imaginary Girl herself is another issue. The revelation that she’s a figment of Ella’s imagination is no twist at all; that’s guessable from the first time we see her – but neither does she reveal anything about Ella’s psyche that we didn’t already know, which is that Ella is a messed-up and infantilised person with doubts about her own creative ability and, well, that’s it. The trouble is that the girl is neither a character nor an artistic flourish: she is, from a writing perspective, something familiar and pedestrian – two things you don’t want in horror. To wit: she’s a plot contrivance, finding a way to get Ella making stuff so we get to see it. 

You can develop plot contrivances to be something more once they’re up and running, but Morgan doesn’t. It’s not Caoilinn Springall’s fault, she does well with what she gets – but plot contrivances need to be either hidden carefully or worked up into greater richness, and because the Imaginary Girl gets neither, she sticks out. 

Add this to the fact that characters tend to spell out themes in dialogue, and we have a problem. Narratively the girl moves things along – but thematically she actually muddles things up. Does she prove that Ella is in fact imaginative, and could have been great if her mother hadn’t made her fear her own creativity? Does she prove that Ella isn’t capable of functioning undirected, even if only by some kind of accidental tulpa, making it right that in the end Ella accepts failure? Does she prove that abuse broke Ella’s spirit or that her abusive mother was right to dismiss her?

These are questions a metaphorical-madness movie cannot afford to leave unclear – and which an uncontextualized contrivance can’t answer. You don’t solve a character’s relationship to their own self by making them talk into a mirror: you need to bounce them off other selves so we see their edges. But Stopmotion doesn’t have any characters strong enough for Ella to do that; even Suzanne spends most of the movie unconscious, and the Imaginary Girl can’t fill that gap because she’s diegetically not there. 

While the conclusions can be confused, the central Ella-as-puppet conceit is pretty obvious, which makes it wearying to hear it repeated in dialogue. But then again, ‘obvious’ is not a synonym for ‘bad’. To quote YouTuber Dan Olson talking about superhero comics: ‘It’s not good because it’s subtle.’ (Quoting from memory because I couldn’t find the source; if anyone can put me right there please do.) Film, and especially film free to depart from live-action, can go so deep into the lushly evident that ‘obvious’ transfigures into ‘inescapable’. That isn’t really the problem.

The problem is that Ella’s art doesn’t express Ella’s distress.

Yes, it’s gory . . . but that can’t be all. What’s wrong with Ella is very clear, and it’s very good. She’s a smothered talent under the control of her tyrannical genius mother. It’s both primordial and naturalistic, a story full of dramatic potential.

But the film she makes? It’s a little girl in the woods fleeing a monster – and the monster is male. More than that, it’s archetypally male: invasive, predatory, sexual, really just a variant on the Big Bad Wolf that Ella initially proposes and her little girl scriptwriter dismisses. It is malevolent maleness incarnate.

In a film where Ella had sexual trauma, or lack of experience with men, or struggled with her own masculine side, or really anything that would line up with this, that’d be fine. There could be any number of character undertows that gave the Ash Man his power. Maybe Ella’s been kept ignorant of men and fears them as the unknown. Maybe bad experiences with men have tied her tighter to her mother’s apron strings. Maybe she has some really tangled-up feelings about her father. Maybe being raised by a female artist in a male-dominated industry leaves her seeing men as a monolithic obstacle. Maybe men are nice to her and she’s riddled with guilt for being tempted to leave her mother for a romance or a mentor or a group of buddies. There can be reasons. But in Stopmotion, I can’t find one. 

The monstrous Ash Man is visually scary and the stop-motion scenes where he pursues the girl are right on the nerve. But – I feel like this needs italics – that’s not Ella’s problem. 

Ella doesn’t have any issues with men. She has a boyfriend who seems perfectly nice, at least at first, and when he turns out to be unsupportive his sister turns out to be even worse, so his maleness isn’t the problem. There are no other major male characters in the film; Ella’s father is so absent she might as well have been sculpted by Suzanne rather than gestated, and honestly that might have given Morgan more free rein to do his thing. With what we get, Ella’s mother has clearly harmed her psyche, but not her sexuality. There is not, in any sense, a male monster menacing her. She certainly is being menaced, but the menace is female. Her monster is matriarchal.

And what we see of that monster before the stroke is viscerally disturbing. Suzanne controls Ella’s movements down to the millimetre and turns to ice the moment she’s displeased; in one of the most genuinely uncomfortable moments, she grows angry, tells Ella, ‘Don’t you dare move,’ and the way Ella – a grown woman – freezes in paralysed submission makes it very hard to believe Suzanne never abused her physically. Their relationship has tiny moments of intimate violence: Ella’s movements in and out of the studio are continually directed and then told they’re wrong, and Ella makes a quiet retaliation by cooking her mother some meat that she wordlessly leaves uncut so her mother has to tear it with her teeth. This is mother-daughter enmeshment of the most horrific kind. If you wanted to, there could be so much to work with here!

But Ella’s movie? 

A man chases a little girl through a forest. It’s an archetypal horror all right – but it’s not an archetype of the kind of horror Ella is living. There’s nothing forest-like about Ella’s personal nightmare: she lives trapped in a highly controlled space where the monster needs no trees to hide between. She is not lost in a wood; she is trapped in a room. Ella’s folkloric habitat isn’t a forest, it’s a lair. And the Big Bad Wolf isn’t after her; it’s an evil witch or a wicked stepmother. Or, since Suzanne’s myths tend to the Greek, a female Cronus devouring her child. Or a convent under the eye of an unforgiving God, considering at the habits they wear as they work. There are archetypes galore that would fit. 

We are hearing the wrong story about this story. 

A few comparisons occur here, because Stopmotion is a film that wears its good taste on its sleeve. 

Narratively the obvious companion is Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, another tale of a hag-ridden artist destroying herself beautifully. Nina Sayers is a gifted ballerina who might just make it to stardom; she’s under the thumb of a mother who uses Nina’s birth as the excuse for why her own career ‘never left the corps.’ (The corps de ballet, ie the chorus.) Her mother wants Nina to succeed so she can enjoy it vicariously; she also doesn’t want Nina to succeed because that involves a life outside her mother’s control. Nothing but absolute perfection is acceptable for Nina, but to dance the lead she needs to embody not just the White Swan of blameless girlishness but the Black Swan – ferocity, selfishness, sexuality, shamelessness, all the traits her mother has emotionally beaten out of her.

As Nina’s quest for perfection forces her to confront this other side she becomes possessed by Black Swannishness and it all ends in glorious disaster, and we see it coming, and that’s absolutely fine because this is tragedy and watching the gorgeous inevitability play out is how we enjoy it. 

It works because the Black Swan is an embodiment of Nina’s problem. She is controlled by a fearsome female force and isn’t allowed to be one herself, and to break the bounds of her stunted idenity is a kind of annihilation. However lavishly grotesque its crescendos, the story never rings false because it has a clear eye on the emotional truth of this particular crazy artist, and that eye never loses focus. 

The symbolic works when it knows what it’s symbolising. 

You can say the same of the 2017 horror-comedy Dave Made A Maze. Alas, it’s no longer on Shudder, but to summarise: Dave is an amiable mess of a guy who never quite seems to get it together. He has artistic talent but is always starting things and never finishing them, and his home is cluttered with all the art-project gifts his girlfriend gave him hoping that this time, this might be the one, this might be the elusive essential thing that helps him get it together and actually make something.

It’s never worked before because – although this is not diegetic – he’s a painfully accurate portrait of someone with undiagnosed ADHD, and the problem isn’t the projects but the process. Dave has potential but he doesn’t know how to keep hold of it, and the people who love him can’t help because they don’t know what it’s like to be him and none of their advice applies. 

Dave gets lost all the time, and when his partner and friends come into the flat to find he’s built a maze out of cardboard boxes, the fact that it’s smallish when they enter, and they then discover an interior so huge and convoluted that they can’t find their way out – well, it’s a very Dave kind of place. It looks like there should be a simple solution, but from the inside it’s impossible. The comic-yet-horrifying dangers of the maze are Dave’s problems exploding into cardboard reality, and for a film made out of boxes it packs a real punch because it knows what it’s doing. The special effects are the story: they’re the problem of the hero made flesh, or at least papercraft. 

Another comparison that occurs is Hereditary (2018): another artistic family – dollmaking and miniatures, indeed – reeling from the damage of another unhinged matriarch. I am not very fond of Ari Aster’s films despite his exceptional visual talent, and one of the reasons is that he has a certain repetitive pattern with his gender dynamics: trouble comes from women, who are unruly and emotional, while men tend to end up dead and their worst offences are those of psychological or moral weakness.

Hereditary is his earliest and clumsiest attempt here: we spend the first half of the film following the tense intertwined dynamics of a family of disturbed women in which men are secondary, and then suddenly there’s a male lead because the daemonium ex machina literally says that it wants a male lead because it just does and that’s that. It’s not as good as it should be given how good it looks. 

So it’s another example of a story rooted in mother-daughter abuse that somehow slews into a male demon – but at least Aster has enough going on, including actual male characters whose experiences are significant to the plot, that you can let it go if you just Magic-Eye the story somewhere in the second act. It lost me, but it might not have lost me if I didn’t have other problems with Aster, and it doesn’t lose everyone. 

Stopmotion does not have other things going on. 

There are no significant characters except Ella, her mother and her imaginary girl, who are essentially the ego, superego and id of the same psyche. That’s quite telling, actually, because if you’ve sat through as many student-written plays as me you’ll know that ‘a play in which there is only one character, but played by several different actors representing different parts of their personality all talking to each other’ is an extremely common device in fledgling scripts. Stopmotion hides it better than these, but it’s an odd thing to come across in the work of so accomplished and decorated an artist. 

Except that it is, of course, Morgan’s first feature-length film. Before this, his longest work was the 23-minute Bobby Yeah (2011). He co-wrote the script of Stopmotion with Robin King, whose credits include an award nomination, but from what I can work out from IMDB, King is also trained on shorts and new to feature-length. 

And in that context it does make more sense to see a conceit so, well, amateurish. Stopmotion has really, really good scenes, but doesn’t quite have a full story. Morgan and King, especially Morgan, are extremely experienced creators of animated shorts, and extremely inexperienced writers of full-length movies. Hopefully they’ll catch up with themselves, but this is a maiden voyage script and it shows. 

Morgan’s other shorts are available online, and checking them out for this review flagged something up: character interaction is not a part of his writing he’s ever really developed. Character-on-character violence, absolutely: his characters do dreadful things to each other, and they do them very coherently. He can follow a sequence of bodily action and bodily reaction with perfect artistic logic no matter how surreal it gets. Bobby Yeah, for instance, is technically about a strange rabbit-man suffering the consequences for stealing a maggot-monster, but the narrative is one physical event responding to another and Morgan drives that story with ruthless precision. 

But that’s when the stories are driven by people’s outsides clashing; what about their insides? His protagonists tend to be psychologically isolated; the closest relationship I found was of the two brothers in The Separation (2003), and that’s a case of conjoined twins wanting to reunite that plays more like a variant on the one-psyche-in-multiple-bodies device than like a relationship between different people. Even his most recent work before Stopmotion, Tomorrow I Will Be Dirt (2019) and Channel X Cartoon Show (2020) are about lone characters lost in hellscapes: one person things happen to. There hasn’t been much flexing his wings when it comes to characters with clashing inner lives. 

If anything there’s a certain incuriosity. Monsters (2004), for instance, is a live-action story in which a disturbed little boy living just by Broadmoor Hospital obsesses about the dangerous lunatics therein while finding – or possibly creating – dismembered animals in the garden. The drama takes place between him and his older sister, who can’t stand him and shouts at him constantly . . . and as a character, she’s written very much from the outside. She talks to a friend on the phone and what she says is pretty much empty noise, telling us nothing about her life beyond her relationship with him. He empties her tampon box and sticks a severed goose head in it, and her reaction seems to be more angry contempt than, say, the shock or humiliation you’d expect a girl in her early teens to feel about this violation of her menstrual privacy. 

In an interview with Film Threat Morgan said this:

The girl is a complete bitch to that kid and it was semi… I don’t want to say it was too semi-autobiographical because I wasn’t that f****d up as a kid […] But there’s a lot of autobiographical elements in that. I mean, that is basically the story of me and my sister and how she was horrible to me. 

You’re allowed to feel what you feel about your sibling and I wouldn’t care to comment on the actual sister involved, but I will say that if you write it this way rather than trying to get inside both heads, it’s worse for your script. ‘Being horrible to me’ is a character’s reaction; if it’s the scriptwriter and director’s reaction too, then that character is going to play as thin – which, in Monsters, she does. 

A character in a short film with little to no dialogue doesn’t need an inner life. They can be all outer action – and if the short is as violent as Morgan’s often are, exchanges of wound for wound are a solid story. But if you’re going to have dialogue delivered by human actors whose faces we can see, you need something more than what Morgan’s shorts have always relied on, which is a single psyche the world acts upon. You need multiple psyches – and Stopmotion doesn’t quite conjure them.

Ella only engages fully with characters that manifest her feelings about making art: her mother, who’s just a body in a bed for most of it, and her imaginary girl, who’s only there to prod Ella into doing things that the plot isn’t giving her other reasons to get on with. Ella has a boyfriend and he has a sister, but both are lightly sketched enough that when they start letting her down it comes out of nowhere, and she doesn’t seem that emotionally invested in them even at the beginning of the story. She’s constantly telling them she can’t do this or that because she has to work, and their main traits are that they don’t get how important her art is to her. Ella’s sole relationship is with her own imagination, so the story Ella is telling really matters because it’s all the story we’ve got. 

But it doesn’t matter to Ella’s story as a human being. 

The Ash Man just a generic monster. It could have been anything else. There is a story here about Ella’s relationship with her mother; it’s even an excellent story, potentially at least. But we don’t see it reflected in the art that’s supposed to be expressing Ella’s inner life: her animated horrors have nothing to do with her real ones. There is a grand matriarchal monster here who just falls out of the story and leaves us confused. 

Not every story has to be about women, and not every story with a female lead has to be about inter-female relationships, and frankly as a female artist it can be frustrating to be limited to that. And not every work by a male artist is forbidden from portraying splintering female psyches – heck, Black Swan is directed by a man and it’s great. But if you’re going to have an archetypally female monster in your live-action and an archetypally male one in your stop motion, and no clear reason why, well, you’re creating thematic confusion in a genre where thematic clarity is the only thing that holds a crazy story together. 

And with this much visual power on the screen, that’s a terrible waste of meaning. 

By the end the film descends into wincing body horror and it feels inevitable – but also a bit, well, a descent into easy shocks rather than a descent into the pit. What’s on screen will make you squirm, but that’s because it’s all-purpose grisly rather than because it’s thematically potent. And crazy-artist horror needs to be particular. 

More than that – well, I think I’d just have cared more about Ella’s fate by the end of the story if she’d seemed to care about anyone else. That’s another common mistake for beginners: to treat a protagonist as important by treating other characters as less important, when in fact the fastest way to make an audience like someone is to show them liking someone else. Ella doesn’t seem to feel much about anyone except insofar as they reflect on her, and that has the opposite effect to the one I think was intended. It’s another result of the film only having one real character, and when that happens the body is the only thing left to break. I would have liked to have some hearts up for breaking too. 

Give it its due: the stop-motion sequences are properly horrific. They deserved to land full force, and intertwined better with the live-action story they would have. But at the end of the day they feel like they’re only there because they look cool. 

And they do. They honestly do. But I wish there was a more thought-through script to support them.

Or instead we could let the demons take the wheel.

What if looking properly horrific is enough? What if we don’t need a script because the images can speak for themselves? What if the story simply places before our eyes horrors so undeniable and immense that we descend with them?

You know, I originally meant to review Mad God by itself. Shudder is the platform that released it beyond the festival circuit, and everyone with a Shudder subscription should watch it. Anyone interested in horror should watch it at least once in their life. Anyone interested in film should watch it. 

The trouble is that it doesn’t need words to justify itself, and that made it hard to say anything intelligent except, ‘Go look at it! You should really go look at it!’, which is good advice but doesn’t sound very smart. Sometimes visual media doesn’t lend itself to verbal analysis.  

I went into this movie innocent. It was stop-motion and I love stop-motion; that was what I knew about it. It looked like it might be cool and fun.

Lightning cracked across the screen and I turned to my partner. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘this is melodramatic, but it’s actually got some style to it.’

Twenty minutes later I was pinned to my seat with rusty nails. 

I think a part of me is still there. She’s bleeding, but who would notice in the screaming wilderness of Mad God? 

The facts are simple but important: this is the personal project of animator Phil Tippett, a giant of his field who’s worked on everything from Star Wars to Robocop to Jurassic Park. He began it in 1990; he finished it in 2021. That is who he is, and that was how much he wanted to make this film. 

Tippett is a great down to his very toenails, and it shows. You won’t need me to tell you Tippett’s a lifelong admirer of Ray Harryhausen, and if you’ve seen the works of Jan Svankmajer you probably won’t need me to make that comparison either. It’s there on the screen, because it’s in company with them. It’s a peer. They would be very proud of their horrible baby. 

I could tell you the plot, but I’m not sure that would give you the point. The movie is a descent into Hell. That’s basically it, and that’s all it needs to be. We intermittently follow a gas-masked figure with a suitcase-bomb who intends to destroy the place – and you want him to, you want him to destroy every last breath and atom of it, because it is a world of absolute cruelty. Not even poised and dignified cruelty, but disgusting cruelty, degrading cruelty, canker-smeared cruelty that somehow still carries the utter beauty of an outlandish talent stretching itself to its very limits. 

You think it’s bad when the monkey on the vivisection table turns its head and meets your eyes? You think it’s bad when you see the endlessly-destroyed golem slaves in the factory hellscape are capable of suffering? You think it’s bad when giant creatures strapped in chairs are electrocuted through the head so they shit into the mouths of creatures trapped below? Oh, my darling, it can always get worse. 

And yet it’s lovely. 

This is a wild film; not even feral, but entirely loose from the regular world. The cruelty is exuberantly inventive; the scene-setting is masterly; the creatures move with a kind of charm that only hands-on work can create, however much grime those hands have under their fingernails. It’s anguishing, but with the kind of joy that comes from seeing just what extraordinary things human beings can create. There’s a humour to it, and a compassion – not for the viewer, of course, but for the sheer fact of pain. If you’re in the right mood you could watch it as a dark farce; it’s certainly a film you get bragging rights for sitting through. And talent breathes – or at least wheezes – in every frame. 

If you’re looking for something light, nope, and if you’re having a movie night, well, you’d better be very sure you know the tastes of your friends if you don’t want to spend the rest of your social life as ‘the one we’re worried about’. But if you want to see what people can do when they answer only to their own imagination? There is nothing like this in the world. 

I wrote this far before learning that Phil Tippett did, close to the end of making Mad God, suffer a mental health crisis and was hospitalised for a while. In an interview he describes the film as having ‘busted my brain … I couldn’t tell the difference between me and the movie’. I want to write about this respectfully, not only because so extraordinary a talent deserves more than a cheap joke, and not only because it’s wrong to write callously about somebody getting sick, but because in real life the connection between ‘crazy art’ and ‘person dealing with mental illness’ is never as simple as it is in the movies. 

Stopmotion is about a stop motion film being made by a movie-crazy artist. Mad God is a stop motion film made by an actual artist who at some point in his life needed psychiatric treatment. Mad God is fiercer and stranger than Stopmotion’s film-within-a-film (which is actually a very traditional narrative, more traditional than Morgan’s shorts). I’ll criticise Robert Morgan’s scripts for taking too little interest in characters’ inner lives, but Phil Tippett’s inner life is none of my business. All a viewer needs to know is that people aren’t invulnerable and a man working under conditions that taxing has every right to need some medical support, and if he needed it, it’s good that he got it. 

But as a work of art standing finished and separate from its creator, Mad God does at least show one thing: that if what you want is to animate horrors, you don’t need a fictional mad artist to justify them. You can have a film made by a living artist who actually was hospitalised for mental health problems – and who hopefully now is feeling much better, because dying beautifully just as you finish your masterpiece is not required in reality – and someone like me can sit down and watch it knowing nothing about any of that, and still find themselves mesmerised. Really beautiful horror needs give no account of itself. 

And the thing is, in his short films Robert Morgan knows that. They’re surreal and bold and mean as fuck, and just as capable of following through on a crazed idea without any obligation to start sensible. 

It’s wrong to say a fine maker of short films should never branch out into feature length, so I’ll say instead that Stopmotion watches like a film where Morgan either didn’t really want to, or hadn’t yet figured out how to. His visuals are superb; his character writing cuts corners. The little-girl-in-the-woods animation actually plays better without the rest of the movie around it (even though I’d watch Aisling Franciosi in pretty much anything), and I’d rather watch a perfect short than a film where the story works against the art any day.

It’s harsh to say, but Stopmotion feels less like the story of art fracturing someone’s reality than like watching an attempt at realism fracturing someone’s art. Or, more charitably, like it has the visual makings of a masterpiece embedded in a journeyman script. If the animation is going to be about the animator character, it needs to learn more about writing character. 

But Mad God shows that if you don’t want to ground the frenzy in anything more naturalistic, you can just . . . not.

If Robert Morgan decides he prefers shorts, more power to him. If he chooses to carry on making feature films with animated sections, I’d love it if he refined his scripts up to the level of his animation; a film that good would be a marvel. And maybe next time he will. Artistically, it can always get better. 

But if an artist doesn’t want to do that, they don’t have to. The wild art can be its own justification. 

. . . Though of course it might take you thirty years to get it up to feature length. Art-making’s a maddening bastard that way. But for the sake of all our psyches, let’s hope for better things. 

In the Heart of Hidden Things (The Gyrford series) by Kit Whitfield

Jedediah’s father walked out of his life forty years ago. Now he’s back. He won’t apologise, he doesn’t explain – and, impossibly, he hasn’t aged a day.


If you asked the folks of Gyrford, they’d tell you Jedediah Smith looked up to his father. After all, Corbie Mackem was the Sarsen Shepherd: the man who saved the Smith clan from Ab, the terrifyingly well-meaning fey who blighted a whole generation with unwanted gifts.

Corbie was a good fairy-smith. And if he wasn’t a good father, well, that isn’t something Jedediah likes to talk about. Especially since no one knows where Corbie’s body lies: the day of his son’s wedding, forty-odd years ago, he set off to travel and was never seen again.

These days Jedediah is a respectable elder, more concerned with his wayward grandson John than with his long-buried past, and he has other problems on his mind. There’s the preparations for Saint Clement’s Day, and the odd fact that birds all over the county have taken to hiding themselves, and the misbehaviour of Left-Lop the pig – which has grown vegetation all over its back, escaped its farm and taken to making personal remarks at folks in alarmingly alliterative verse.

But then disaster strikes. Ab is back. And Corbie, thought long dead, returns to Gyrford – younger than his son . . .

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