Return to form: The Stop Motion animation revival

Feature by Kirsty Leckie-Palmer | 15 Feb 2017

Why the palpable reality of stop motion animations like My Life as a Courgette – which screens at this year's Glasgow Film Festival – are essential in our age of fakery 

Since George Méliès first launched his band of intrepid adventurers into a winking moon, cinema has been a way to explore the great frontiers of form. Welles worked in light and shadow, Kubrick’s medium was perspective. Yesterday’s auteurs are remembered, not for the stories they told, but for the ways in which they evolved the form to tell them truly.

Today, the advancement of CGI means limitless freedom of texture, hue and scale. Filmmakers are no longer hampered by the material. Colossal planets are conjured at the wave of a cursor, oceans swell into biblical torrents, and tornadoes… are stuffed with sharks.

Yet the more we’re bombarded with new worlds and fantastical creatures, the closer we cling to the organic; the small; the imperfect. We retreat towards the ordered, colour-block symmetry of Wes Anderson, the simple aesthetic of films like Tangerine, the raw materials that feel like they can be traced by a fingertip, breathed in, tasted. After all, you can’t leave a fingerprint on a pixel.

Take Kubo and the Two Strings (2016). This Kurosawa-inspired, stop-motion epic depicts a young boy who can bring paper to life by playing a magical shamisen, painting vivid stories in the air to a captive audience. Kubo harnesses the artistry of puppetry, origami, sculpture and epic fable. It took five painstaking years to be made. Paper swarms into the air, folding and refolding into birds, warriors, dragons, horses.

It’s beautiful, because we know a deft pair of hands made it so. Someone battled with the medium, skillfully refining and practicing the folds before imbuing the paper with life as Kubo does, one animator to another; a small meta-miracle.

Or Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa (2015), which proves that raw materials can produce raw pathos. The story follows a lonely customer service expert facing an existentially derelict world that’s lost its light for him. Puppets, so malleable, so dependent on another’s determination to be brought to life are the ideal vessels for such a bruising, adult tale.

For children, the world of stop motion is an important place to explore too – sometimes more relevant than the sterile domain of minions and talking cars, a place to discover new and challenging themes. My Life as a Courgette shows at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, and delves into real-world issues: broken families, adults that are less than perfect, and death.

It’s also a place to surrender disbelief; an extension of the world of fingerpaints, Playdough and glue. To enjoy Fantastic Mr Fox is to buy in completely to our title character's bristling whiskers, natty tie and perfectly hemmed corduroys, to feel as if he could step off the frame and into the palm of your hand.

Which is why, in this world of manipulated reality, we should be grateful for something real to hold on to. Stop motion is a pure relationship between form and content; one cannot progress without the other. As a medium, it can never hold up a mirror image of the world, yet it feels anything but artificial. It’s a place to innovate form, process ideas and tell stories more truly. And that’s exactly what we need right now.


My Life as a Courgette screens at Glasgow Film Festival: 17 Feb, CCA, 6.30pm | 18, CCA, 4pm

Read more about Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Festival venues and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny

Follow Kirsty Leckie-Palmer on Twitter at @kleckiepalmer