I’ve Got the Willies Wednesday: Stop-Motion Animation

Stop-motion animation  and claymation give me the willies.  You know the Rudolph the Reindeer special that everyone loves to watch around Christmas time?  Well, instead of giving me a feeling of joy and happiness, it instead makes me want to cover my eyes with my hands, and run out of the room screaming in terror.  I of course hold this in, as I do not want the others around me to know how much this animation petrifies me.  I have endured this for far too long, and it is time to come clean- so here it is- stop-motion animation is freakin’ scary!!!!  I don’t find it cute, or endearing, instead it scares me more than most horror movies.  Why you ask?  Did I have some kind of traumatic experience in childhood that led to this irrational fear?  Not that I know of.  But maybe it stems from my early childhood viewings of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, especially the animated Santa Clause who I found to be more cruel than jolly.

I seem to have a weird emotional connection to cartoon animals (so in this case stop-motion animals), and in this case I even had an emotional connection to the poor elf, who just wants to be a dentist.  Santa Clause seems like such a miserly old curmudgeon, and is also quite prejudiced against red-nosed reindeers.  He is just extremely unpleasant, and he only accepts Rudolph when he sees that he can get something out of Rudolph’s deformity.  So I’m thinking my fear may stem from this cruel stop-motion Santa Clause, and it just branched out from there, growing into a full out stop-motion-phobia.  Now this fear seems to be confined to claymation and stop-motion animation such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Clause is Coming to Town, James and the Giant Peach and the like, and has not branched into  traditional animation.  It seems to be a more specialized fear.  So there you have it- stop-motion animation gives me the willies!!

I have a feeling this is going to come back to haunt me next Christmas where my brothers will decide to lock me in a room with a non-stop stop-motion-athon that they have set up to play on the television from which I will be unable to escape….

The Tell-Tale Heart (1953)

Animation can be incredibly creepy.  Especially when it’s surrealistic, or stop-motion animation.

Here’s a really creepy video of a short animated film from 1953, adapted from the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name.

Directed by Ted Parmalee

Narrated by James Mason

Selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2001.

Fun Fact: This was the first cartoon to be rated X!!