Another stand-out animation was director Nina Gantz's stop motion film Edmond, which explores a man's desire to return to the womb after the guilt of eating his twin brother in the womb leads him to develop problems in later life. The animation is as strange as it sounds, but almost poetic in it's presentation. Presented in reverse chronological order and making use of negative space for surreal scene transitions, the film really has a directorial flair to it, with a reoccurring motif of 'travelling back' or hiding from one's problems.
The animation is stop-motion using puppets and models made out of yarn, which lends them a level of innocence. Features are soft and threatening which really allows for us to empathise and feel sorry for the main character. More subtle facial details such as the character's eyelids and mouth are animated using traditional 2D animation, but the effect is so subtle I didn't notice on my first watch as I was so absorbed by the aesthetic.
There is also some symbolism at play, as we open the animation with a scene of Edmond typing a rope round his neck with a rock attached to the end of it before throwing it into the water of a lake, the rope we come to learn being symbolic of an umbilical cord and the rock, his deceased brother. There is also a reoccurring motif of passage through portals, representative of Edmond's desire to return to the safety of his mother's womb.
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