The magician known as “Teller” is often quoted as saying that the secret to performing mind-blowing tricks and illusions is to practice and prepare to a ridiculous degree. “Sometimes,” Teller said, “magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone might reasonably expect.”
This is one of the main reasons stop-motion animation remains so… well, magical. In an age when computers can conjure up almost any picture an animator can conceive of, the very idea of a team spending days, weeks, months, and even years painstakingly moving small models of a fraction. centimeters at a time is impressive. And the resulting effect is just as astonishing: both marvelous and subtly unsettling, as if the real world around us is filled with objects just waiting to come to life.
Netflix’s New Anthology Movie The House features a screenplay by award-winning Irish playwright Enda Walsh, directed by a handful of contemporary animators who have preserved and advanced stop-motion techniques, through their award-winning shorts and commercials. An almost horrific image – more of a quietly arty creep-out than a full-fledged shock –The House Harnesses the otherworldly look and timelessness inherent in stop-motion to tell three linked, untitled stories about people and creatures trapped in an elegantly furnished link between realities.
The first chapter, titled “And Heard Inside, A Lie Is Spun”, is a sort of origin story for the house itself, directed by Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, a team known for the charming and perverse short film. “Oh Willy …. The Swaef / Roels style involves a lot of fuzzy little figurines, which look like oddly distorted versions of plush dolls. The softness and plumpness of the characters would almost be called ‘cute’ if they weren’t lost in nightmares. partly of their own manufacture.
In the Swef / Roels The House story, these lost souls are a family of four: a father named Raymond (voiced by Matthew Goode) who has been through tough economic times but who derives some solace from his thrifty wife, their smart young daughter, and their newcomer. -not. In an indeterminate past that resembles the end of the 19th century, this family is doing what seems like an incredibly sweet affair. A wealthy local architect will let them live in the well-appointed house he just built, with a caring assistant and an unlimited supply of ready meals. And in exchange…?
Ah, this is where things get tricky. Soon after their arrival, the family’s confidence is shaken a bit by strange developments. Pieces of the house disappear overnight. The architect is still prowling. The assistant makes strange requests. Yet throughout, even as the daughter begins to investigate what is going on, the father continues to insist that all is well … for why would a failure like him call into question a wealthy and brilliant benefactor? ?
The story ends with nothing really resolved, as is the case with most The House. The weird stories in the film are each meant to have a dreamlike quality; and dreams do not always follow a clear narrative logic.
That said, the second segment – titled “Then the Truth is Lost, Which Cannot Be Earned” – is relatively straightforward. Jarvis Cocker voices a modern house pinball machine (in the body of a mouse) that quickly puts the finishing touches on a cleaned up and updated version of the house from segment one, hoping to impress the dozens of buyers. potentials which should arrive soon for a screening. There are only two problems: in its haste, the pinball has saved up on several crucial details in both the renovation and the party; and also, the house is completely infested with beetles, top to bottom and side to side.
This story was directed by Niki Lindroth von Bahr, who produced several whimsical short films about the bizarre problems of humanoids with furry animal heads. (Four are available on the Criterion channel.) His share of The House is essentially a grim, torturing comedy, in which our half-silly hero is gradually overwhelmed by all of these little bugs that just don’t go away. There is also a musical number, which has to be seen to be believed. All The House worth watching, especially for animation enthusiasts, but for those who can handle a heavy dose of the grotesque, the von Bahr segment is the one to watch.
The final story, titled “Listen Again and Seek the Sun,” comes from director Paloma Baeza, a former actress who studied animation and went on to win a BAFTA for her graduation film, “Poles apart. “Set in the near future where climate change has devastated the landscape surrounding the house, the segment has Susan Wokoma voicing Rosa, a landlord doing her best to make the place nice for her bad paying tenants (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter and Will Sharpe) Then the house receives a visitor: Cosmos (Paul Kaye), a hippy-dippy kind who tries to make Rosa and the rest of the residents understand that their old way of life is untenable.
As with the second segment, Baeza’s short features humanoid animals: all cats, in this case. The overall style is more fantastic, like a puppet show set in a mystical land sliding into decadence. In the end, the story drifts into abstraction, as Rosa makes startling discoveries about the hidden features of her home.
The director of each segment also came up with their storylines, which were then shaped by Walsh – and also subtly chained by Gustavo Santaolalla’s haunting score. All pieces of The House combine to invent a mystery without any solution. What is this place really? What is that for? Anyone watching this film in search of clarity might be disappointed.
But there is more to The House than just watching a bunch of little guys sneak past a cool setting. There is a unifying theme here, involving characters who are captivated by this building, and who think they can do something with it: a safe shelter, a profit, a community, etc. Even when they are reckless – even when they refuse to see why their plans are impossible, given the state of the world – they continue to struggle to get there.
This is another reason why the format is suitable for this movie. It was made by the same kind of stubborn dreamers, devoted to something they can’t walk away from: an old way of doing things, requiring extraordinary patience.