https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgHbRrnjhU&ab_channel=dubiella
My director was Paul Berry, and his stop motion animated piece, The Sandman. while watching the film, I had a sudden flood of memories about my own childhood fears. That is what makes the film successful; everyone has had the feeling of anxiety about the dark. The things that go bump in the night. Paul does an amazing job framing it as a child would see it. An impossibly long winding staircase and a door that is just so out of reach. it frames the story perfectly
The story here is of an old European folk tale. this particularly is derived from the Sandman in E.T.A Hoffmanns story. what the book and the film share is a childhood fear of the dark, the presence of something you can’t see or that is always out of view.
“Eh, Natty,” said she, “don’t you know that yet? He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.
-E.T.A Hoffmann
another example of Paul Berry’s work can be found in other classic creepy stop-motion films such as James and the Giant Peach and the Nightmare Before Christmas. His beautiful animation on the sandman brought him to work as an animator for those two films as well as others.
My favorite horror-tinged animation is a popular web series called lamas with Hats. In which two lamas grapple with one’s extreme homicidal tendencies.
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