Review: Handmade: A Tale of Stop-motion celebrates the human touch of a time-consuming process

One of the ways I seek out new animated movies is checking out various film festivals' lineups as they get announced, or as I find out they're happening. Currently, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (also known as PÖFF) is happening in the Estonian capital, and when I took a look at their program earlier this week, I was floored at how great their animation slate is. They're got a lot showing that I want to see, along with some wonderful movies I've already loved this year. Really good stuff.

A film that caught my eye is Nikalas Catlow's documentary Handmade: A Tale of Stop-motion. Originally broadcast on Swedish TV in 2023, I hope the film's appearance at PÖFF signals a bigger footprint for it going forward. Someone from Java Films, who made the doc, let me know that Kanopy has the educational rights for the US. So hopefully it'll pop up there at some point. (If you live in US and don't use Kanopy, you're missing out on one of the most robust streamers out there -- and it's free, and ad-free!)

Handmade: A Tale of Stop-motion tells the story of Estonia's Nukufilm, a studio that has produced dozens and dozens of incredible stop-motion films over its long history. The oldest surviving stop-motion studio in the world, the studio has undergone some incredible seismic shifts in its history. Originally founded in 1957 while Estonia was part of the Soviet Union, their films used to be subject to harsh Soviet censorship. Anything that could've been construed as criticism of the government or encouragement to citizens to engage in "bad behavior" would be quashed by the censors in Moscow. Of course, being in a country far-removed from Moscow, and behind the whimsical and playful mask of animation, the filmmakers were able to hide some of their political critiques in there anyways.

I really liked how this doc was structured. It shows the process of stop-motion from beginning to end, storyboards and puppet-building to post-production VFX and, finally, tearing down the sets and retiring the puppets, their hard work done. We get to watch this whole process unfold on the production of The Wings, the twenty-sixth film from director Riho Uht at the studio. It's a joy to behold. A lot of stop-motion movies include some BTS footage during their credits sequences. It's always fun (and mind-blowing) to see just how much work goes into every frame of film. One of the animators in this doc says he can animated 5-7 seconds a day. A day! I loved getting to spend time in this studio, getting into the nitty-gritty of the process, as dazzling artistically as technically.

These scenes alternate with flashbacks to various historical landmarks and turning points in the studio's history. We learn about how they originally made feature-length live-action and documentary films, until a camera-man named Elbert Tuganov bought an animation rig (I think that was the term) in order to more efficiently film credits sequences, which then led to him making the studio's first animated film, thereby setting its course for the decades to come.

It's pretty amazing how little stop-motion has changed in over 100 years of films being made that way. There's still something so magical in the process, the human touch, the soul that imbues in the images, the movements. There are imperfections, and those imperfections are what make the movies so special, so beautiful, so real. Obviously, the advance of technology has helped iron out some wrinkles and made it possible to animate increasingly sophisticated and fluid movements. But at the end of the day, this is still a pain-staking, human process that is so special to behold. (There's a scene in here of an animator meticulously animating a sock blowing in the wind that is such a perfect example of how awesome and special this style of animation is.)

I love animation so much (especially stop-motion animation), but I don't at all fancy myself an animation historian. I love learning, and I should know more than I do, but that just makes me all the more grateful for movies like this that expand my horizons and help fill in the gaps of my knowledge. I had no idea that the Estonian animation scene was so exciting and long-standing. Seeing footage from so many films made me eager to dive and and watch them, and more. It's also telling that there are so many histories of animation. You might know everything there is to know about American animation, but that's just a slice of what there is out there. In every corner of the world, there's more to find, to watch, to treasure, to be challenged by. I'm grateful that there's such an abundance of creative voices and unique perspectives in the world of animation, and it's my hope to help bring more attention to them, and to encourage people to seek them out.

For information on showings of Handmade: A Tale of Stop-motion at PÖFF, click here.