The Maker--Christopher Kezelos

The Maker--Christopher Kezelos (courtesy of themakerfilm.com

I am a huge fan of creepy stop motion animation, from the benign Tim Burton to the not so benign Quay Brothers.  I'm especially fond of films that make art out of the detritus of the world--the broken junk and grimy leftovers unloved by a materialistic culture addicted to novelty.  Since I teach young filmmakers and film scholars, I try to emphasize that the director's intentions for a film are only a layer of information toward interpreting a film's meaning.  Even if the director suggests that the film is about "A strange creature [who] races against time to make the most important and beautiful creation of his life," one can read Kezelos's film in an entirely different way.  A much darker way.

The film has a Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935) air about it.  With all the brightly colored vials and secret grimoire, the mad scientist seems fast at work (and under serious time constraints) constructing his dream girl.  I'm not super-thrilled with the heteronormative nature of the creation, as our Bunny Pygmalion creates a "pink" bejeweled companion/doppelganger.  Still, if you watch Kezelos's earlier stop-motion work Zero (2010), you'll see some of these earlier ideological issues already in place.

The threadbare nature of our "hero" with the musical clefs on his head contributes not only to the film's worn aesthetic, but to a tactile experience much like The Quay Brother's Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1987).  I've posted what I could find from YouTube below:

Could the film be a meta-commentary on the process and experience of being an animator and making animated films?  Certainly the film could be about "beauty"--misshapen teeth and all--and the beholder's gaze.  Small scale filmmakers (like many large-scale ones) frequently create personal films that star a version of themselves.  And the process of artistic creation can be simultaneously fruitful and fruitless.  Artists of all stripes are often driven to create, as if by necessity.  One puts their heart and soul into a work, but the process is never-ending and endlessly repeats itself.  Stop-motion animation is so elaborately detailed, so painstaking, that it is the ultimate DIY project for an artisanal filmmaker.  Perhaps that frantic race against time can seem defeating, like a treadmill one can never get off.  I bet Kezelos is hard at work on his next project, even as he just won the audience prize at The Wrap's Short Film Festival mere days ago.

The music that our Maker plays to imbue his creation with life force seems to come directly from the soul, and the piece played is truly magical.  Yet I found the film remarkably downbeat and a little bleak--just the way I like it!  To experience the film as it should be experienced, I recommend that you download the film in high-definition from themakerfilm.com.  It's available for the price of a couple songs on Itunes, and well worth every penny.  You can watch a less gorgeous version here: