Stitch Head: A Franken-Toon about loving your inner monster
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
A kid-friendly animated movie for Halloween, Stitch Head is a Frankenstein inspired story that is itself something of a Franken-toon, a feature film bolted together willy-nilly and higgedly-piggedly from elements of previous movies.
There’s a lot of Tim Burton, some Monsters Inc., bits of Toy Story, even the musical The Greatest Showman in the form of a singing and dancing circus ringmaster. Though predictable in its messaging — don’t be afraid to be your wild eccentric self! — the film is visually stylish and clever enough to engage sugar-jagged children and even adults for its merciful 90-minute running time.
Adapted by director-writer, Steve Hudson, from a series of children’s graphic novels written by London-based Guy Bass and illustrated by Pete Williamson, Stitch Head is a thoroughly British affair, with a voice cast led by Asa Butterfield (Hugo) as the titular hero, a mutant boy creature with what appears to be a baseball for a head, with one blue eye and one brown eye and a leather patch over the right side of his face.
Stitch Head, we learn is the first creation and unappreciated servant of manic, mad scientist, Dr. Erasmus (Rob Brydon), The good doctor compulsively designs misfit monsters in a laboratory in his Castle Groteskew, a many turreted fortress which looms in the soft grey sky above the steam-punk Victorian hamlet of Grubbers Nubbin, a town of monochrome-clad villagers, with bristling whiskers, tall hats and puffy dresses.
Among Stitch Head’s duties are tending to Dr. Erasmus’s many defective creations, a collection of colourful bio-mechanical creatures with an assortment of mammal and reptile heads, horns, tails, springs, glass bulbs and wheels.
After each new creature is zapped to life on the doctor’s table, Stitch Head exposes them to an industrial-style black-and-white film introducing them to their new “Almost Life,” which emphasizes the importance of repressing their monstrous instincts to avoid the ever-present threat of a mob of pitchfork and torch-carrying villagers swarming the castle.
Dr. Erasmus’s latest creation called Creature, a large brown oven mitt with floppy ears, one green eye, three arms and a crocodile tail. Creature promptly imprints on Stitch Head as his “bestest friend.” But a chance for even greater approval comes when circus owner, Frank Freakfinder (Seth Usdenov) the manager of the Traveling Carnival of Unnatural Wonders, makes his way to the door of the castle, seeking recruits for his circus.
Stitch Head is lured down to the village, where he appears in a cage to scare ticket-buying customers. Starved for attention, he mistakes the audience’s horrified fascination for “love.” After all, his fans are buying those kitschy Stitch Head souvenirs, including a replica of his head on a bottle opener.
But the Freakfinder’s demands grow progressively more violently sadistic, and eventually Stitch Head needs to be rescued, by Creature and the village’s most sensible human, an intellectually curious child in spectacles and pigtails named Arabella (Tia Bannon) who sees Stitch Head as more than just a celebrity monster.
This leads to the forewarned showdown between a torch-carrying village mob and the encastled monsters, with each side mortally terrified of the other. Stitch Head, finally recognizing his familial kinship to the misfits, gives them a pep talk: “Just be whoever you’d be if you weren’t afraid.”
Parents will easily recognize this from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are as a therapeutic maxim aimed at helping children acknowledge their wild emotional selves without feeling bad, though I suspect many parents might be tempted to a qualification, “but first, nap time.”
Stitch Head. Written and directed by Steve Hudson. Based on the graphic novels by Guy Bass and Pete Williamson. With Asa Butterfield, Joel Fry, Seth Usdenov, Rob Brydon, Tia Bannon, Jamali Maddix, Ryan Sampson, Alison Steadman. In theatres on Oct. 31.