In the world of animation, there are few approaches that can match the stop-motion method for creating a human touch. It isn’t that the slightly herky-jerky results are themselves particularly life-like—should you see someone moving that way while you’re walking the dog, crossing the street might be your first response—but that the imperfection inherent to this particular cinematic dodge is undeniably our own.
The slow, painstaking process of stop-motion involves making tiny alterations to posed figurines and model sets, with each change accompanied by the taking of a still photo. String thousands of those photos together, flip-book style, and you have a rough illusion of life. It will never be a perfect double—with our clumsy fingers, we can’t make accurate changes on that small a scale, and the resulting “off” quality is what gives the method its human warmth (see last year’s Fantastic Mr. Fox), and elevates it above the plastic sheen of its computer-generated cousins.
Of course, you still need a story. Luckily, stop-motion seems to attract great and original storytellers like Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar, whose A Town Called Panic comes to Amherst Cinema this Friday. Based on a Belgian TV series released by Aardman Studios (Wallace & Gromit), the film revolves around the lives of Cowboy, Indian, and Horse, three plastic toys who share a home in a small country town. As in the Wallace & Gromit series, mundane events (a botched barbeque) can lead to full-blown adventure (robot penguins, an undersea universe). Already a cult hit as a TV series—one wonders, doubtfully and even with a bit of shame, if any of our American cartoons have achieved cult status abroad—the film is sure to follow in those footsteps.
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Also this week: Not being a balletomane, I for a long time ignored The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s iconic 1948 film/fetish object for dance junkies. A lush, romantic take on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, the gleaming lipstick of its Technicolor surface masks a dark and bloody richness.
In a story reminiscent of our own Robert Johnson at the crossroads tales, a young woman consumed by her impulse to dance falls under the spell of a willful promoter, until her obsession and his leaves her with nothing else.
It comes to Amherst Cinema this Sunday and Wednesday as part of the theater’s Essential Cinema series; Moira Shearer stars as the ballerina who gives up her life in pursuit of her art.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
