From the tired genre of movies about movie-making, comes this intriguing twist. Eric Leven’s “Stop/Motion” tells the story of an old-school stop-motion animation disciple gone bad; a cinematic purist and terrorist out to destroy the very idea of computer animation.
It’s an interesting premise, although it runs the serious risk of falling victim to the one-joke-pony syndrome. This trailer doesn’t really do much to dispel these fears. If anything, it raises the further possibility that “Stop/Motion” may be jammed with all sorts of filmmaking in-jokes, with a special emphasis on animation humor. If the feature version ever does happen, hopefully Leven will employ an editor with a stronger sense of pacing and comic timing, as both seemed just a little off here.
Still, I’d give “Stop/Motion” the benefit of the doubt, if for no other reason than there seems to be some shred of originality here. That, and the fact that this seems to be the rare film about filmmaking that doesn’t whine about how hard it is to be a filmmaker.
