by Francis Friel

Ladislas Starevich is my favorite animator. The Mascot is my earliest stop-motion memory along with that goof Gumby, both of which used to run as part of the Saturday morning lineup when I was a little kid. It was one of a bunch of shorts that used to run as part of the lead-in to Star Stuff, a locally-produced (in early-80s Philly) sci-fi series about a little boy on Earth whose best friend is a little girl living in outer space (and, somehow, in the future). They’d watch Laurel & Hardy movies together and sometimes cartoons, so I’d always lump Laurel & Hardy and Gumby and The Mascot together in my head, along with another cartoon called Prest-O Change-O (featuring an early appearance of the character that would later evolve into Bugs Bunny). Weird, surreal stuff to be playing at 6am for children. I’d had such fond memories of these bizarre little cartoons and it was shocking when, in my early 20s, I re-discovered them and found that they were actually well known films by important directors. So I looked up more work by Starevich and his stop-motion descendants Jan Svankmajer and The Brothers Quay.

Starevich was my first exposure to how weird and cool stop-motion could be, and in the early 90s Mark Romanek was all over MTV talking about how great the Quays were, but it was seeing Svankmajer’s Little Otik at the General Cinema in Allentown (where I worked at the time) that made me take a stronger interest in animation in general and stop-motion in particular.

I mostly stay away from 2D cell-animated films because more often than not I find them fucking hideous, though there are obviously exceptions. The dreamy rotoscoping work in American Pop and Waking Life, or the fine details of Rankin/Bass (themselves stop-motion masters) and Don Bluth’s mid-80s children’s films. I like almost everything from Studio Ghibli, and all of them are, if nothing else, beautiful.

But I’ll always check out stop-motion work, specifically anything miniature- or puppet-based. The style seems to be a dying art, though, at least as far as mainstream cinema is concerned, to the point where it’s considered a novelty whenever a new one comes along. There have been a couple of mid-sized kids movies in the past few years that have used some form or another of stop-motion (or the cgi-enhanced appearance of stop-motion), but outside of those few, we have Robot Chicken, Nick Park, and Henry Selick essentially cornering the market. But the heavy-hitters of the 20th century are still at work, creating films completely under the radar of contemporary American audiences. Part of that, I think, is that their films haven’t really changed in tone or visual style at all and that modern audiences might think they look dated. The grubby, grimy and vaguely Victorian (in the case of the Quays) or medieval look (Svankmajer) of the films seems timeless and strangely comforting to me, but I can see where others could disagree.

In the case of the two biggest names we’re talking about here, I think the Quays’ films have always seemed more purely cinematic, and they’ve seemed more emotionally invested in their “characters,” giving them all specific personalities, mostly through the use of the puppets’ body language. Svankmajer has had more intellectual things he’s worked out onscreen and has produced a lot of abstract, experimental work. Mostly, though, I just like the Quays more.

The Brothers’ style has always appealed to me. Their little doll figures, tiny puppets with books for heads, and the dirty panes of glass that seem to fill their miniature universe, all of it just works for me. I love every frame of theirs.

Svankmajer’s stuff always felt heavier, bulkier somehow. He often employed life-sized puppets and characters into his films, which always seemed a little creepier to me than the tiny creations of Starevich and the Quays. Faust, for example, was terrifying the first time I saw it, I think because those clay models and religious icon puppets look just a bit more threatening than if they were obviously miniatures. The nightmarish color schemes and harsh, crude camera work of a good portion of his filmography always seemed so much darker than other filmmakers working in the medium. His use of makeup effects and especially his technique of shooting actors on sets that were just slightly smaller than life-sized just always seemed scarier than maybe he even intended. And while it’s clearly all done to a specific effect, and I can imagine that it probably very closely matches the shot in his head, something about his work was just a little too off for me. So for all these reasons (are these all the same reason?) I never really locked into his stuff like I have with some other directors’.

All of this is to say that there’s a whole world out there of this painstaking work being done by masters of their crafts, and I wish more people were talking about them. Up to this point they’ve been known mostly in the niche art-house circuit and have survived on DVD. Again, Little Otik did play at the mainstream theatre I worked at in the late 90s and early 00’s, and to this day I have no idea how that even happened other than to guess that we probably had a really hip film-buyer back then. But that’s a rare exception, for sure.

Recently, though, it’s started to seem like that’s about to change, and that change has come from a pretty unexpected place. I’m writing this the day after it was announced that Christopher Nolan’s next film, after so much speculation about what he would do next after the gigantic Interstellar, is in fact already finished. Turns out he’s completed a thirty-minute documentary on the Brothers Quay that’ll premiere at the end of this month as part of Film Forum’s showcase of the Brothers’ work. Three of their films, In Absentia, The Comb, and Street of Crocodiles will be shown in brand new 35mm prints and will be released as part of a special edition blu ray that will also include Nolan’s doc. Nolan, who’s apparently a huge fan and names the Quays as two of his favorite filmmakers of the 20th century, is curating the mini-festival and blu ray release through Syncopy.

This is a huge deal! Someone like Nolan coming out and putting his name on something like this is not only good for the Quays but also good for audiences who will be more likely to check something out now that he’s put his stamp of approval on it. Outside of that, though, it’s great for Nolan, for some very specific reasons.

“The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything.” – The Prestige

Nolan’s filmography has taken some hits of backlash recently. Once revered for his so-called Kubrickian formalism and large scope storytelling (even in his smaller films), critical response to his work seems to have darkened these past few years and honestly, minus the last thirty minutes or so of The Dark Knight Rises, I agree that he seems to simply plop his camera down in the middle of the room while his actors read the script to us. It’s real weird. At one time this was seen as a cold and clever visual style but more recently I’ve heard it described as simply lazy. This technique wasn’t always so obvious, as his earlier work was more intimate and life-sized. Following, Memento, and Insomnia are all mystery thrillers without a whole lot of action scenes more complex than foot chases through city streets and trailer parks and the Alaskan wilderness.

So it was strange to me, and I’m sure to a lot of people at the time, when it was announced that Warner Bros. and DC Comics were handing over the reigns of the Batman reboot to this guy. And while it was exciting to think about what the director of Memento would do with the Batman story, it was as random then as it was when they gave Iron Man to Jon Favreau. They’re simply not the obvious choices for the job (whatever you may think of Bay, I don’t think anyone was surprised when he took on the Transformers franchise, for example). But I think Nolan’s static shots are telling of a very specific influence that he simply hasn’t been very forthcoming about until now. Kubrick, Mann, and Frankenheimer are all in there, absolutely, but maybe he’s been going for something smaller all along. Maybe dude just wants to make Gumby movies.

I’ve always wanted these superhero franchises to have a more handmade, homemade feel. My friends and I have talked about how the James Bond model would be a great template for how to tell these huge, larger-than-life tales, with new directors and stand-alone adventures taking the place of shared universes and what inevitably becomes a sometimes shaky continuity.

Marvel has somewhat answered this call with even more unexpected choices in directors (the Russos, for example, who were television directors who moved on to small goofy comedies before being called up to the big leagues and are now primed to take the largest controlling aesthetic hand in the MCU since Favreau himself by directing The Winter Soldier, Civil War, and both parts of the upcoming Infinity War storyline). But while it’s great to see studios paying attention to talent and rewarding the work of guys like the Russos, it’s also the case that they’re now locked in to multi-year contracts and will be living the Marvel life for the next five or so years (at least). Hollywood used to give directors the “one for us, one for you” deal, wherein the filmmakers would show up to shoot a big tentpole action movie and be rewarded by getting to make their own projects relatively painlessly. This is still sometimes the case, as Nolan himself has proven by breaking box office records with the Dark Knight trilogy while at the same time producing his own personal projects, which still made a ton of money for his backers every time. But it seems to happen less and less often.

“I thought aspects of it seemed slightly fake.” – The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

In the 80s and 90s this was way more pronounced, with directors like David Lynch and Tim Burton making big-budget studio deals just so they could make whatever weird-ass thing they had in their heads at the time. Lynch was smart and had the Blue Velvet project written directly into his Dune contract, which came in pretty handy when Dune absolutely fucking tanked and became legendary for how not to make a big movie (he was so uninterested in doing these in the first place that he turned down Return of the Jedi, which would have been a guaranteed box office hit and payday no matter what the final product ended up looking like). Burton took on Batman with the deal being that he could make something smaller and more personal his next time out, which ended up being Edward Scissorhands (which is a Frankenstein remake, just like all his films). Lynch and Burton are exceptional in that they’ve always pretty much worn their influences on their sleeves. Both directors worked in dark cinematic corners early in their careers before coming to Hollywood and hitting it big. And both worked extensively in animation in their debut films, and would come back to stop-motion and similar techniques throughout their careers. It was a big deal when Wes Anderson produced the full-length stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox, since it wasn’t a technique that is really the go-to for mainstream Hollywood animation anymore (he’d also incorporated Henry Selick’s creations into his Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou a few years earlier). But Anderson had shown shades of this influence throughout his filmography, with his shots all owing at least a small debt to the stop-motion aesthetic and “trick film” look, which I think is what people mean when they describe his films as having a diorama feel. His frames are all boxes holding his characters and sets in place, yes, but that look more specifically (in some cases, very specifically) owes itself to the absolute lunacy of the worlds of Starevich, Svankmajer, and the Brothers Quay.

Are all these directors trying to tell me that their biggest influence isn’t early twentieth-century Russian puppet shit? Is that their game? Guardians of the Galaxy had a fucking raccoon and a goddam tree in it. Those characters are a lot closer Starevich’s Frogland than they are to The Avengers. I don’t get it.

The way we save these big action franchises is honestly to go the Cruise/Wagner route and simply let these directors do whatever the hell they want. The Mission Impossible films had everybody from Brian de Palma to Brad Bird running around trying to top each other and see who could get away with finally killing Tom Cruise by dropping him from the highest weirdest stuff, but the reason they’re able to do it is because the producers of these things are letting them run their own shows. It’s telling. And what does Nolan do, one of the biggest most successful directors on the planet, what does he do the first chance he gets once he’s done pretending to give a shit about Batman and once he’s finished shooting Matthew McConaughey through freaking wormholes or whatever? Thirty-minute documentary on the Brothers Quay. I swear to god, guys, this is what I want from Hollywood more than anything.

And no one saw it coming, which is incredible. He’s had this influence the whole time and never talked about it until now.

                                    Above: some serious Quay shit.

The direct lineage of most directors and their influences is so convoluted that I wouldn’t be surprised if you said anybody was the founding father of the MCU, the biggest movie studio/annoying trend in the world right now. My argument is going like this:

Marvel Cinematic Universe > Nolan > Quay>  Starevich

BOOM!

Alright well maybe it’s not airtight but it’s there. Nolan’s Batman films showed the studios that it was okay to make “real” superhero movies, Marvel came along and revolutionized what those movies could be and how they could be made, Nolan’s new Quay film shows what an influence they’ve been on, if not his larger output, at least his deeper cinematic mind, and those Quays were directly influenced by Starevich. One two three four.

You feel me? Let’s go deeper into this thing. The Quay influences are actually all over Nolan’s stuff. The Scarecrow’s mask looks just like something out of Rehearsals For Extinct Anatomies, and when the bats fly out of his face they look exactly like the little paper birds that fly out of the filing cabinets in The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer. The weird jangly Victorian feel of The Prestige (including all the Tesla stuff) looks just like Street of Crocodiles and the hospital scene from Frida, and the final shot of The Prestige would be right at home in some of their darker work. Leonard’s obsession with objects and his habit of displaying them in front of himself in Memento is also a common theme in the Quay films, where their characters are constantly just picking shit up and putting it back down. Again, this is purely on a cinematic level, the narrative and story-level stuff going on in these directors’ worlds couldn’t be further apart. But it’s all there on the screen. The weird ugly cabin where Robin Williams attacks Hilary Swank in Insomnia looks just like a Quay set with its dirty windows and hidden trap doors and creaky old dark set decoration. Inception continues the obsession with tiny objects and impossible set design. But the weirdest example is probably the “bookshelf dimension” scene in Interstellar. McConaughey is dangled in front of a surrealist landscape that is continually moving and changing in front of him while his hands are outstretched in front of him just like pretty much every Quay puppet ever.

Above: Nolan is a freaking nutburger. Below: So are the Quays.

Moral of the story: Nolan’s a lot goofier than we thought. But let’s keep going…

“We're still pioneers. We’ve barely begun.” – Interstellar

Nolan’s use of the Quay imagery is relatively subtle, and based on a more internalized use of their cinematic language. But the Quays’ love of Starevich is right out in the open. They take directly from the ornately decorated sets and meticulous character designs and use those influences to tell darker versions of Starevich-style fairytales.

The giants of stop-motion all owe their own debts to Starevich but the Quays took it to the next level. They are probably among the few stop-motion artists that audiences know by name, along with Art Clokey, Ray Harryhausen, Henry Selick, and Rankin/Bass.

Above: the shot that gave me nightmares from ages 4-12. Thanks, Ray!

These guys worshipped Starevich. Let’s talk about why.

Dead Bugs and Angry Gods

Starevich got his start in filmmaking by taking on a job from the Kaunas Museum of Natural History. He shot a few educational documentaries for the museum using traditional live-action before trying his hand at his first creature-related projects. He started making a film featuring live beetles, but they kept dying during the shoots. So he did what any completely bonkers person would do: he killed the bugs himself and replaced all their moving parts with wire so he could just animate them and make them do what he wanted. The finished product was The Battle of the Stag Beetles and, allegedly, it fooled people into thinking he had actually trained the beetles to perform for the camera.

These films were very successful with audiences in Lithuania, especially the final project he completed before leaving for Russia. The Beautiful Lukanida was the first puppet-animated film and told the story of a Queen who was secretly in love with one of her subjects. The King eventually finds out and… actually I have no idea what happens after that. Lukanida is, unfortunately, a lost film, with no known prints existing anywhere in the world. Maybe Nolan can put his feelers out and track this thing down for us. The story is that Starevich himself wasn’t particularly happy with the film, though, which may have played a part in its being kicked to the curb of history. It was also never intended to be a “movie” and was more of an experiment just to see what could be done with these techniques.

The Cameraman’s Revenge is a completely different story, though. I can’t even imagine what must have been going through Ladi’s head when he decided to go back to hooking wires up to all these beetle and grasshopper carcasses and make them the actors in his tiny melodramas, but this 12 minute film is one of the most impressive things you’ll ever see, especially for being his first real attempt at this sort of movie. Beetles in love with dragonfly cabaret dancers, grasshoppers who ride bicycles and work as projectionists in tiny movie theatres, and little painting studios filled with little paintings, this movie has it all. What else, honestly, would you ask for from a film?

Watching this stuff, all I can think of is the immense pride Ladi must have felt at the end of each project. Having attempted stop-motion myself to varying degrees of success, it is absolutely exhausting -- jumping back and forth from behind the camera to the set and back again, keeping track of all the moving pieces in your head (or a series of polaroids and motion charts), knowing that anyone watching you won’t be able to tell that anything’s going on at all… it’s one of those things where you know the end result will be worth it but it seems like there’s no end in sight. But to sit back and let the projector roll at the end of it all and have that pure artist’s experience of doing no work is one of the most freeing feelings, I think, a person can experience. To experience your own creation purely as an audience member and know that, not only is your work complete, you no longer have to “do” “anything.” The work becomes a thing that exists on its own momentum. Anyone who’s made anything will have had this experience to one degree or another. But how many of those people (artists, musicians, filmmakers or otherwise) have created something to such striking effect as the fight between the beetles in the movie theatre that concludes this film, with one jumping through the screen and popping back out again?

It’s also pretty bonkers that the comedy works as well as it does. The characters have real personalities, which, again, is all Ladi. It seems almost impossible that a bunch of dead bugs could have such distinct “looks” but, to me, Mr. Beetle seems dopey and full of himself, Mrs. Beetle seems put-upon but happy (until the end), and the Cameraman has an almost sardonic feel to him. And all this is accomplished through the animation innovations of 1911. While live-action comedies of the era were mostly concerned with slapstick or quick gags, Starevich was almost obsessively trying to push the envelope of what cinema could do, even while working in the genre of the “trick film”.

In the same year in America, the great Winsor McCay was blowing everybody’s freaking minds with his Little Nemo movie, which features one of the most stunning shots in film history, even to this day, as his camera slowly moves in on the animation stand and into the drawing as it comes to life (in full color) before dominating the remaining runtime of the short. But even a genius like McCay used the majority of his piece to set up a live-action scenario to give the animated sequence a reason for existing within the narrative. This is by no means meant to take away even a little bit from the almost supernatural accomplishment of Little Nemo. Not only is the finale a full four-minute sustained full-color animated scene of characters fighting, tumbling over each other, getting stretched out and flattened and all other manner of goofball business, but it all flows so beautifully and naturally that you can forget it all came from one man’s pen and did in fact take the “four thousand drawings” the boastful “Winsor McCay” character claims he will draw in the first scene of the film. Starevich never bothered with trying to qualify his weird projects, instead just going for it and saying “here’s a bunch of insects doing a bunch of insect shit. Enjoy.”

Starevich’s techniques made a significant leap forward in 1913 with The Insects’ Christmas. This time incorporating life-size locations (a living room, a Christmas tree) with the miniature aesthetic he’d already established, this new film is already much more ambitious in scope while being almost slight in its narrative.

After the complex love triangles and intrigues of Cameraman’s Revenge, this time out the director seems purely interested in style and charm. A tiny Father Christmas climbs down out of a Christmas tree and makes a trek out to the frozen forest to invite the ladybugs, frogs and dragonflies to celebrate the holiday with him. The blue-tinted scenes are beautifully rendered with intricately detailed background sets. The puppet work has the same handmade quality as the earlier films, with the graceful at times but still playfully jerky animation giving each shot the feeling of a beautifully ornamented diorama box.

1922’s Aesop adaptation Frogland (aka The Frogs Who Wanted a King) opens with a title card that reads “Once upon a time the Frogland Commonwealth waxed so prosperous that its heavy thinkers acquired the human trait of sitting around and making wise-croaks against the government.” Right off the bat this movie is out of its mind. A bunch of frogs are in session to overhaul their government and “beseech Jupiter” to send them a king to rule them since their current overlords are a bunch of lazy drunks. These frogs are some ugly little things, too. Fat but lanky, with huge mouths and rolling eyes, these are the first of Starevich’s company of feral-looking animal friends.

Jupiter, sitting up on a cloud surrounded by his sentinels (one of them looks like the weird robot alien thing from Communion that flies into the room and hovers over Christopher Walken’s bed), hears their calls and sends them their King. The frogs set out on a mission to bring him back, floating off in a little boat made out of a shoe. Starevich’s sets are so detailed that, especially watching this now-93-year-old footage, it’s hard to tell if he shot some of this in his studio or actually out in the woods. Obviously, this being stop-motion, it was all done indoors, but the attention to detail in every frame is astounding. Every little thing in these films is accounted for, from the little mushrooms sprouting up everywhere to the lily pads that float by as their boat sails off. We also see the first instance of Starevich’s “bubble” effect. The frogs blow bubbles with their mouths and spit them out at their new King to try to get his attention. The bubbles form above the frogs’s mouths and are carried away on the breeze, all while the rest of the scene is playing out. This is what was going on in stop-motion in 1922!!

By the way, have I mentioned that the King is a moldy old tree with giant rolling eyes and a sad little mouth? This movie is weird as fuck.

So the frogs are all pissed and tell Jupiter he screwed up and sent them “Presidential timber” instead of the great ruler they’d asked for. Jupiter, busy reading the newspaper, has no time for their complaints and just acts annoyed at them. So he just sends his friend the stork to go down to earth and pose as their King. This movie!

Obviously these frogs are happy as can be and immediately start worshipping this giant stork. Every frog in Frogland comes out to greet the new King, and one of them even seems to have the movie camera from The Cameraman’s Revenge rolling to film the whole scene. But here’s the thing: THE STORK JUST STARTS EATING ALL THE FROGS. This is some weird dark stuff, guys! The frogs start freaking the hell out and scattering.

So the frogs start hiding out underwater and we get a really cool shot of the frogs standing at the bottom of the lake while actual live fish swim around them. So Starevich was constantly figuring all this out all on his own. It would’ve been enough if he’d simply invented this technique, but he was constantly challenging himself to come up with new and more creative shots and ideas. It’s like if the Lumiere brothers fourth film was Goodfellas or something. If I had a time machine I’d do nothing but go attend all these films with their own contemporary audiences just to see the reaction to this stuff. It must’ve been mind-blowing to people.

The story ends with Jupiter just giving up and firebombing all of Frogland and basically saying “they got what they deserved.” The final frog, about to be swallowed by the King, tells us the moral of the story: “Let well enough alone.”

This movie is absolutely horrifying.

The Voice of the Nightingale from 1923 is his first film to incorporate live action footage to supplement the animated sequences. In this case, as in The Mascot, the story involves a little girl (Irene Starevich, the director’s daughter who would grow up to be his closest collaborator on later films). It’s also his first film to be hand-tinted to achieve the look of color photography. This film is one of my absolute favorite movies in the world simply to look at. The shots of the bird sitting and singing in front of the religious icon against the dark and cloudy sky are just stunning. It’s shots like these, in little short films like this one, that make me think about how lucky we are to even be alive for all of this. Most of human history has existed outside the age of art, let alone cinema. I really can’t get over how lucky we all are to be here for this, in the age where we can simply take for granted that brilliant artists have provided us, and will continue to provide for us, a steady flow of movies to consume every day of our lives. In 2015, we have so many movies under our belts that it’s actually impossible that a person can see them all while also leading a “normal” life. It’s a constant game of catch-up when it comes to trying to see everything out there, but there was a time when the art form was brand new and the great early artists were inventing and building and laying the foundation for future generations of filmmakers. The odds of being born into this age of cinematic history are just astounding to me and I consider myself, and all of us, extremely lucky and grateful to just get to see this shot of this bird against this cloudy sky. It’s everything to me.

But I’ll get back to that thought another time….

We have a lot of firsts for the director in this movie: the full-color, the live action, and my favorite of his techniques and one that would be the biggest influence on the Quays, his motion-blur imagery. This was achieved by actually creating an effect that is the opposite of a normal stop-motion movement. Moving the puppet between frames creates most normal shots/movements that we are used to in stop-motion. These motion-blur effects are done by moving the puppets during the exposure. This can be achieved by using a motorized puppet onscreen, but the way Starevich has done it here, it’s hard to tell how exactly he’s getting his shots because he’s also incorporating normal stop-motion in the backgrounds of his shots and also because THE BIRD IS FLYING THROUGH THE FRAME in some of these shots! I can’t stress enough how impressive this is because he had to figure all of this out all by himself. No one else was doing work like this back then. This is 1923! This effect was later “invented” in the late 1970s by ILM for use in The Empire Strikes Back. 1923, guys!

Something to always remember: George Lucas never invented anything.

He later incorporates this effect more thoroughly in The Tale of the Fox, during elaborate dance and chase sequences involving multiple characters moving through constantly changing sets. But we’ll get there in a bit.

The little girl captures the nightingale and they become pals, the little bird telling the girl fairy tales from the Flower Kingdom, and we are treated to a beautiful sequence of the fairies waking up in the flowers and being carried off by butterflies, others of them just going about their morning routines (we also get a few shots of some cool animated water). At one point a fairy gets captured by a spider and must be rescued by another fairy riding a grasshopper. So much business in these movies. The bird tells of how he met his mate, had some little chicks, and learned the politics of the garden creatures (where we see the return of the grasshopper characters that are some of Starevich’s favorite puppets, it would seem).

The little girl, hearing the bird’s story, becomes enlightened and sets him free. In gratitude, the nightingale gives the little girl his voice so she can sing beautiful songs all by herself.

“And that is why the nightingale is silent during the day. Only at night, when little children are asleep, does he regain his beautiful voice.”

These short fable films were very successful with audiences and began the cycle of influence that would extend all the way into the 21st century (a new stop-motion film from the BBC’s Aardman Animations Studios, Shaun the Sheep, just came out this week in theaters). Starevich was perfecting his current techniques and was about to move on to the masterpiece level of his career with the release of The Mascot and The Tale of the Fox.