A lonely woman tells her life story to her pet snail in Memoir of a Snail. After the death of her last remaining friend friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver), Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) goes into the garden and releases her longtime pet snail Sylvia. As Sylvia inches her way to her final destination, recounts her sad…
Guillermo del Toro co-directed a new stop-motion version of the classic story with Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Distraught over the death of his young son Carlo, wood-carver Geppetto (David Bradley) carves a pine tree into a puppet made in Carlo’s likeness before collapsing into a drunken stupor. Feeling sympathy for the grieving man, a Wood…
Two scheming demons seek the help of a 13-year-old girl to escape the underworld in Wendell & Wild. Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Jordon Peele) are two demon brothers relegated to grooming their father, Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames), ruler of the Scream Faire. The demons get their chance to escape when Kat Elliot (Lyric Ross),…
A sentient shell enlists the help of a filmmaker to find his family in Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Marcel (Jenny Slate) is a talking mollusk shell wearing pink sneakers who is discovered living in a house with her grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini) by filmmaker Dean (Dean Fleischer-Camp). Dean records a series of interviews…
Stop-motion master Phil Tippett presents his three decades in development magnum opus with Mad God. In a Miltonesque world of monsters, mad scientists, and war pigs, an intrepid special agent travels on a special mission. Along the way, he passes through a landscape of corruption and decay, with plenty of horrors on the road ahead. Throughout…
The mind of a CIA agent is trapped in a virus-infected virtual world in Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway. Special Agent DT Gagano (Daniel Tadesse) is a C.I.A. agent, who is ready to retire and open a pizzeria with his wife Malin (Gerda-Annette Allikas). However, Gagano accepts one last jump to join…
The best goddamn cop on the force has to deal with an infestation of vampire tramps in Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires. Chuck Steel (Mike Mort) is a jacked up action hero cop, who knows what it takes to clean up the streets of L.A. While investigating a series of murders, Steel encounters an old…
A boy goes on a quest for his father’s samurai armour in Kubo and the Two Strings. Kubo (Art Parkinson) is a boy who lives with his mother in a small village, where he tells stories to the villagers about his samurai father Hanzo, using magical origami controlled by Kubo’s shamisen. One day Kubo ignores…
Frankenweenie began life as a half hour short film made towards the beginning of Tim Burton’s career in 1984. 28 years later, Burton has expanded Frankenweenie into a feature length, black and white, stop-motion film, which is essentially Burton’s homage to classic horror films. The film, which is directly inspired by Frankenstein, sees a boy…
My favourite scene of the stop motion film ParaNorman happens within the first five minutes. The opening scene of the film is a full-on homage to grindhouse films of the 1970s, complete with an old-fashioned “Feature Presentation” title card, grainy and scratched images, and a synthesized score. I definitely have to say that I liked the zombie…
After directing two feature-length stop-motion films under the production of Tim Burton (those being The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), Henry Selick branches out on his own for Coraline. Of course, even though Burton is not involved with the film, you can feel a Burtonesque influence throughout. I thought the film…
