Stop-Motion-Ani-May-Tion!: The House (Dir Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr & Paloma Baeza, 1h37m, 2022)

Streaming now dominates the release of animated films, and stop-motion is no exception. Guillermo del Toro's Pinnochio, Henry Sellick's Wendell and Weird, the cult Marcel the Shell with Shoes on, and even Aardmann's latest shorts and features, have been released exclusively on Netflix, alongside a veritable mountain of traditional, CGI, and anime films and shorts. For better or worse, Netflix has become a bastion of stop motion animation in a way that only occasional theatrical features from Studio Laika (bankrolled, of course, by the fact it's owned by Nike co-founder Phil Knight and run by his son Travis) can be said to be a rival of the studio system. What streaming services  undoutedly provide, is room for the mid-budget film, the oddity. Such a film is The House, a trio of short films connected only by their location, each showcasing a differing style of animation, in a collection of odd, and occasionally unsettling tales of a house through time.

The House takes the form of an anthology film, an unusual form for stop motion that often releases short films solo. This is a format largely restricted to the earlier Disney shorts (like Fantasia, The Three Caballeros and their other "package" films), to studios testing out younger animators like Japan's Studio 4°C's Genius Party and the scattergun, multi-studio Ani*Kuri15 project. Otherwise, shorts are thematically linked and helmed by a single director overseeing different studios, like the cult Heavy Metal (1981), or several directors working with one studio, as in the case of Neo Tokyo and Robot Carnival (both 1987).

The charming puppets of The House's first segment belie an unsettling ghost story

The House comprises three shorts.  The first, set in Georgian England is "And Heard Within, A Lie Is Spun" directed by Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels; this is, in essence, a ghost story. Here, the animation is typical of the duo's work: the puppets have a felted look, features pushed together in the middle of soft, rounded faces, beedy eyes staring out at the world. Like their 2018 short feature This Magnificent Cake! which critiques Belgium's role in colonialism, via five characters, "And Heard Within, A Lie Is Spun" considers greed, and the class system through these fuzzy, oddly endearing puppets. Thus, we are introduced to the first, and only family to occupy the House; this consists of Mabel (voiced by Mia Goth), her younger sister, and her parents. They are, clearly, poor, her father (voiced by Matthew Goode) looked down upon by wealthy relatives.

Following her father encountering the otherworldly architect Mr. Van Schoonbeek, whose demeanour become stranger and more inhuman as the story continues: the single most unnerving shot of the entire anthology is the eyes of the diminutive puppet superimposed over the house, owl-like and unblinking. Van Schoonbeek soon has them move into a house that he has had built-at the cost of their previous dwelling, which is torn down to fuel its creation and from here, the parents soon regress into obsessions, all the while the increasingly outlandish rules of Van Schoonbeek becoming more bizarre as the house changes layout, and the discoveries of Mabel as to who-or what-is behind this become more eldritch and disturbing. The house here becomes a great homage to the tottering mansions of horror, obsession in brick and mortar, with the added pressure of class and prestige that slowly drives Mabel's parents into stranger obsessions, with disturbing results.

The unsettling guests of The House's second segment

The House endures. The second short, "Then Lost Is Truth That Can't Be Won", with the voice of Jarvis Cocker, who also appears on the soundtrack, is far more a dark comedy of manners, set against the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Here, the director is Niki Lindroth von Bahr, the puppets, characteristic of the Swede's work, especially the dystopian musical The Burden (2017), are mice and rats, although the puppets' designs feel more like the work of Wes Anderson's two animated films. Much of the quality of this short is undeniably on the shoulders of Cocker. There is a growing obsession, perfectly echoed in his puppet-self, to doing up this house, the details of his sketches, his laptop, as meticulous as stop-motion can get. Yet, all these plans are beginning to fall apart, the anxiety ratcheting up before a disastrous open house in which everything goes wrong. 

Into this increasingly tense atmosphere enter another unsettling duo (Swedish actress Yvonne Lombard and actor, Sven Wollter), who, in faltering English, announce that they are "very interested in the House". So begins an unsettling, if still bleakly funny take on the unwelcome visitor horror genre, seen in films like Funny Games (1997), with Cocker's increasingly put-upon and frustrated developer becoming ever more hostile, as his new guests make no attempt to leave, and indeed, begin to intrude further, making greater and stranger demands of the developer. All of this builds to a sudden, unexpected, twist in the tale, before, in the most unsettling and visceral of the three shorts' plots, the story twists, to reveal the horror behind the visitors, and the frequent phone calls that the agent's day is punctuated with, leading to an enjoyably creepy dénouement, in which the puppets are as unsettling as they come, as the veneer of civilisation peels away.

Behind the scenes on the final story set in The House

The final short, "Listen Again And Seek The Sun", directed by actress Paloma Baeza, also director of the eco-fable, Poles Apart (2018), has more in common with its director's other work than the rest of the anthology. The landscape around the House, now placed in a world of humanoid cats, has become unrecognisable, apocalyptic floods having transformed the landscape. These floods have left the house, now pyrrically owned by Rosa, as she attempts to attract tenants and redecorate the house, whilst her remaining lodgers, (played by Helena Bonham-Carter and Will Sharpe), attempt to eke out a living in a collapsed society. All of this is thrown into chaos by the arrival of a visitor.

Of these three films it is the most thought-provoking in concept, its ambition, its sense of encapsulating the ruinous pull of the house, and how to escape it, how to be content with possessions and how to let go of our obsessions, palpable. In execution, despite its impressive animation, it falls somewhat short, never quite able to produce a sense of its personal horror, its heroine never effectively forced to confront her inner fears.

Despite this, The House is a charming trio of shorts, three windows into the work of stop motion's up and coming talent. Perhaps the central conceit of the House, underutilised except as a setting in the second short, and reduced to visual metaphor in the third, does hold a couple of these shorts back from their true potential. Yet, The House is well worth seeing, three short-and often creepy-visits to stop motion's cutting edge

Rating: Recommended

The House is available for streaming via Netflix

Next week, our final stop (motion) for the month, as a feathered fiend has it in for stop-motion's greatest duo, as Wallace and Gromit must stop a Vengeance Most Fowl