movie magic to me’

By JONAH NINK

Stop-motion animation is hypnotic. Frame by frame, movement by movement, and adjustment by painstaking adjustment, animators turn clay and plastic puppets into living, breathing characters. Some set pieces in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), for example, can leave you asking, “How in the hell did they pull that o ?” Talented stop-motion animators can conjure animation magic with nothing but a camera, some puppets, and a pair of precise hands.

The last ten years have been a renaissance for the medium, made evident by the recent deluge of great films. Gone are the days when public perception of stop-motion began and ended with The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tool music videos. Last year alone gave audiences Pinocchio, Henry Selick’s Wendell & Wild , and Phil Tippett’s Mad God , which all received heaps of critical and audience praise. With more projects on the way this year—including a Chicken Run sequel, of all things— the venerable medium shows no sign of losing its bite.

With all this in mind, one can’t help but wonder: How is Chicago contributing to the animated action?

“We haven’t really seen anything, frankly,” says Neal O’Bryan.

O’Bryan founded Workshed Animation, which specializes in stop-motion horror shorts and features, with longtime collaborator and childhood friend Chad Thurman in 2019. He says that beyond individual animators and programs at Columbia and DePaul, the studio is an island.

“It’d be awesome if Chicago had more proper studios with full sta s that are able to do feature films like Pinocchio,” O’Bryan says. “I would love that.”

Both originally from Kentucky, O’Bryan, a working photographer, and Thurman, a comedy writer, author, and Onion contributor, initially collaborated on comedy shorts, but they struggled to find a niche.

“You put it out there and sometimes you don’t get any traction whatsoever. It’d be like our parents on Facebook, [saying,] ‘This is lovely,’” O’Bryan says.

As they deliberated on what kinds of projects would set them apart, O’Bryan and Thurman took interest in independent stop-motion shorts. Neither had any experience with the medium, but that wasn’t enough to keep them from taking a crack at it.

“We really just dove in,” says Thurman. “We took a Stan Winston course on stop-motion, and that was run by the Chiodo brothers, who did Team America [and] Killer Klowns From Outer Space.”

He continues, “We took that course. We watched a ton of YouTube videos and tutorials and bought a few books. We really just immersed ourselves in anything we could get our hands on.”

After 18 months of grueling trial-and-error animation work, most of which was done on their north-side apartment’s dining room table late at night, O’Bryan and Thurman released the animated short Toe in 2019. The film adapted “The Big Toe,” a short story from Alvin Schwartz’s 1981 classic children’s horror collection Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

“We picked a very simple story where we could just focus on atmosphere, set building, and just figuring out how to move a puppet on the stage,” O’Bryan says.

The moody black-and-white short only included two puppets: a hungry, bug-eyed boy and a ghastly, decaying ghost. Both puppets were manufactured by Demi Kay Schlehofer, one of O’Bryan and Thurman’s many collaborators. The overall design aesthetic of the short takes cues from Thurman and O’Bryan’s love of 50s and 80s creature features, with influences including the original King Kong and Eraserhead.

With the short completed, Thurman and O’Bryan set their eyes on the festival circuit.

“There were plenty [of festivals] that we didn’t get into, but we certainly got into some we were surprised about,” O’Bryan says.

“We won a handful of awards,” Thurman says. “I think one really interesting element about doing stop-motion and submitting it to fi lm festivals is when you’re in a shortfilm block at a fest, you’re seeing live-action after live-action [fi lm], and the second that a stop-motion or an animated world starts to come into frame, you immediately notice that people perk up. They’re a little more engaged.”

The short also gained attention online, where it currently sits at around 270,000 views. Most importantly, though, the metal band Shadowspawn requested permission to use parts of Toe in a music video, which is uno cially the highest honor a stop-motion short can achieve. The acclaim proved to O’Bryan and Thurman that their stop-motion studio was worth expanding beyond the DIY level.

“We get people who are sending us résumés and wanting an internship with us. We’ll hopefully get there one day!” O’Bryan says, joking that interns would be let down by the studio’s rugged operation. (“Here’s my bedroom, here’s our bathroom. Here’s where we eat our cereal.”)

Instead of another short, Workshed’s next project is a feature-length film titled The Iron Leech. An original story set on a turn-of-thecentury whaling ship, The Iron Leech is in the early stages of production. O’Bryan and Thurman say that they are currently in the process of developing a trailer and pitch deck to secure funding and distribution.

“There’s certainly an element of naivete of jumping from a stop-motion short that took 18 months to do six and half minutes to trying to take a bite of a feature-length film, but [The Iron Leech] is a story that kind of gripped us these past three years,” Thurman says. “It’s ambitious, but part of me doesn’t want to spend another two years just to do another short film.”

Workshed’s website is adorned with early behind-the-scenes photos and video of me- ticulously designed sets, elaborate water simulation rigs, and portraits of puppets that straddle the uncanny sweet spot.

“We’ve been itching to do a feature film for a long time,” Thurman says. “We’ve also caught the stop-motion bug.”

Thanks to the Internet, O’Bryan and Thurman are assisted on the project by collaborators from Toe and new ones, including Pennsylvania puppet fabricators Morezmore Studio and VFX artist Jason Walker, who worked on the 2007 Oscar-nominated animated short Madame Tutli-Putli.

Another notable collaborator on the film is Chicago-based engineer Tait Leswing, who constructed a customized “wave rig” for more detailed water e ects.

“Any of the stuff we knew we couldn’t do ourselves or couldn’t do well, we reached out and looked to the Internet to find people who specialized,” O’Bryan says.

O’Bryan and Thurman both hope that Workshed can grow into a studio capable of building on the legacy of a beloved art form.

“That’s movie magic to me,” says Thurman. “There’s an uncanny valley element to [stop motion]. People are immediately drawn to something that’s in a 3D space [and] an inanimate object that you breathe life into. It’s very cool, and it appeals to people instinctively.”

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In fact, very few people can truly write, star in, or direct great rom-coms—something that’s abundantly clear when watching Love Again. An English-language remake of a film first released in Germany in 2016, Love Again stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Mira, a boring but beautiful children’s book author whose lovey-dovey boyfriend is struck down by a drunk driver while she watches. She spends the next two years holed up at her parents’ house, and when she eventually decides to return to the city they shared—which is supposed to be New York but very much isn’t, even in skyline shots— she’s persuaded to keep in touch with the spirit of John through conversation.

She takes this to mean that she should text her deepest personal thoughts and sadness to his old phone number, a move that shows wild disregard for how phone systems and time work. As this is a movie, there is of course a handsome and similarly heartbroken man, Rob (Outlander’s Sam Heughan), on the receiving end of those texts, and he attempts to suss out who is sending him the weirdly personal material on his work phone. The pair eventually meet and bond over their shared love of Air Jordans (ugh), and Rob of course withholds how he knew to go looking for her. That turns out to bite him in the ass, but not until the pair fall in love thanks to an ongoing work assignment for Heughan’s character involving Celine Dion, who plays herself—weirdo quirks and all—and is the best part of the movie by far.

Love Again could work, in theory. It’s got a Hallmark-level plot, and in other hands, perhaps the movie could be a little charming. Instead, with Chopra Jonas and Heughan on board, it feels wooden and clunky. Supposedly loving lines have as much upli as a lead balloon, with each of the movie’s attempts at a rom-com trope—dancing in the park, kissing in the snow, a sexy bet on a game of one-on-one basketball—eliciting more groans than actual sentiment. It’s a wild bummer of a movie, one that audiences aren’t apt to fall in love with any time soon. —MARAH EAKIN PG-13, 104 min. Wide release in theaters

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Donna Summer became one of the most iconic recording artists of the 70s and 80s while breaking racial barriers and subverting gender expectations and social norms. But what do we really know about her? What do we really know about anyone in the public eye versus what they want us to believe we know? As Summer (born LaDonna Adrian Gaines) asks in the audio clip that opens Love to Love You, Donna Summer: “I have a secret life. You’re looking at me, but what you see is not what I am. How many roles do I play in my own life?

‘Who is she?’”

In search of the answer, directors Brooklyn Sudano (one of Summer’s daughters) and Roger Ross Williams plumb press snippets, home videos, and archival footage, and conduct intimate conversations with the singer’s family, friends, and colleagues. While some have critiqued the film for skimming much of Summer’s development as a musician and songwriter, including her work with electronic music master Giorgio Moroder (among other chapters), that misses the point; this is a daughter’s exploration of who her mother was at her core, and why she lived her life and made her choices the way she did.

To that extent, Love to Love You paints a vivid picture of a remarkably talented, creative woman on the run from racism, sexism, and an oppressive religious environment. From her singing debut at her family’s church, Summer knew she was destined to be a star, and that knowledge powered her career trajectory from Boston to New York to Europe, returning stateside only a er she helped change the shape of modern music. But fame isn’t depicted as a reward as much as a cross to bear. And all the while, as the film suggests, she struggled with questions of personal identity to the extent that she was o en most comfortable imagining herself in theatrical roles, on and offstage.

Though the chronology is sometimes rocky and some of the performance clips are long enough (or hypnotic enough?) to distract from the narrative, the directors create a touching, thought-provoking, and overwhelmingly human portrait of a fascinating artist.

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