Junk Head
Originally released in 2014 as a 30-minute short called 'Junk Head 1', it was then extended in 2017 to a full-length film. It's set in a dystopian future, the earth has become uninhabitable and humans have lost their fertility as a consequence of genetic tampering. A lone cyborg explorer is sent on a mission into the underground world to uncover the secrets of the Marigans, a super artificial life-form with incredible reproductive capabilities. During this perilous descent through a subterranean labyrinth, he encounters some disturbing shit.
Junk Head is an amazing piece of work, meticulous and beautifully crafted, the product of 7 years of work. The man at the helm, Takahide Hori, is a wizard of technical, artistic and creative film making. Guillermo del Toro called it a ‘work of deranged brilliance.’
The film comprises some 140,000 stop-motion shots and runs for 101 minutes.
The Wolf House
The Wolf House is a 2018 Spanish-German film crafted by Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León. While the plot of the film is rather simple, it's jarring and disorienting animation style makes it an experience that is nothing short of nightmarish. Its characters decompose and reform without warning as the background shifts and changes. Painted figures suddenly turn three-dimensional and inanimate objects aren't inamate.
The film took inspiration from the real case of Colonia Dignidad, a commune founded in Chile by former Nazi soldier Paul Schäfer in 1961, where dozens of children were sexually abused.
With horrific source material like this the Wolf House is about as dark as dark gets. The film has been described as “The Three Little Pigs” if it were embedded with immense trauma.
The many different styles of animation take a bit of getting used to at first, it's claustrophobic and gives you and uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach, but it is a real labor of love and unlike anything I’ve seen.
Bobby Yeah!
This truly magnificent short film tells the story of Bobby Yeah - a subhuman creature who experiences a series of increasingly bizarre, nightmarish encounters after stealing a malevolent baby's favourite pet. It was directed and animated by Robert Morgan and independently made over a 4-year period and completed in 2011. Although only 23 minutes long it's 23 minutes that will scar your brain for much longer. I'm not even going to try to describe it, I won't be able to convey how it will make you feel. Just watch it.
Madame Tutli-Putli
An exquisitely made short by filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, collectively known as Clyde Henry Productions. The groups task at the beginning the film making process was to devise a method of giving the puppets a real-life appearance. After considering various approaches they came upon the idea of a compelling new effect, tracking human eyes on the faces of stop motion puppets. The team worked on the film for four years and in the process have created a film with real emotional content. The effect is incredibly powerful and extremely poignant and a true master class in what can be done with stop motion animation. It has won a armful of awards and to celebrate its nomination for Best Animated Short Film it was announced that the film would be made freely available for viewing online, but with a caveat—each of the 23,287 frames had to first be unlocked, one by each visitor from a unique IP address. Once the entire film was unlocked, it was made available for viewing to all.
Mad God
Mad god is a grotesque, squelchy assault on the senses. Without any dialogue whatsoever the film explores hellish landscapes full of hideous monsters, deranged surgeons and other frenzied beings. It tells the story of an unknown assassin who descends upon a ruined world and travels across a land full of evil mutants, where everything is mulch: killed, crushed and disemboweled in order to create another generation to be killed, crushed and disemboweled but this film is more than a simple gross-out, it meticulously recreates a universe of relentless cruelty and horror.
Made by Phil Tippet who is behind the special effects for everything from Star Wars to Starship Troopers, Robocop to Jurassic Park, it has been over 30 years in the making. He seamlessly fuses stop motion, puppetry, live action, mime, fluid and fire effects, the gigantic and microscopic and what he comes up with is one of the most disturbing, weird, visually overwhelming films I've ever seen.
Curious Alice
More animation that stop motion but worth a mention. Clocking in at only 12 minutes, Alice is tested first by her parent’s booze and drug cabinets as she falls down the rabbit hole, and then later by her encounters with a strung-out bunch of drug-addled Wonderland creatures. The film has the March Hare pumped full of amphetamines, the Mad Hatter quaffing sugar cubes laced with acid, the dormouse comatose on barbiturates and the Caterpillar puffing down on a weed-filled pipe. The film was made by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1971 and meant for 8- to 10-year-old students, to warn against the wonders of drug use. The jury is out on how effective it was, some say it made the world of drug abuse somehow appealing. Watch it and make up your own mind. Pass the pipe.
Le Squelette Joyeaux AKA The Merry Skeleton
One of the most famous films from The Lumière Brothers, who are often credited as the Fathers of All Cinema, "Le Squelette Joyeaux" (also known as "The Merry Skeleton") is arguably the first stop-motion film (it is believed this is a stop motion film due to the way the skeleton falls apart and comes back together, but some say it's a special kind of puppet that gives this illusion) Made in 1897, the film is only 45 seconds long, but it's pretty amazing to think that it was made over 120 years ago.
Jennifer strings
Jennifer makes some beautifully intricate short stop motion clips. Her work 'Centers on a deep exploration of the self. On her Instagram page 'Known as myself' you can see the journey her
work has taken.
Floris Kaayk
Floris Kaayk crafts fantastical worlds where reality takes a vacation and imagination runs wild. He blurs the lines between truth and fiction, leaving audiences both bewildered and intrigued. From pseudo-scientific documentaries about modular organisms to fictional diseases turning humans into metal, his creations are a rollercoaster ride through the corridors of his mind. In every project we journey with him into the surreal, where the only limit is the bounds of his imagination.
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