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We don’t quite know why Rosa wants to desperately hold onto the mansion despite the entire city being underwater, but at least there’s an arc there where she finally learns to let that go, and she’s rewarded for it. The sheer labor alone involved — meticulously assembling and then moving puppetry ligatures frame-by-frame to replicate movement more easily achieved on paper or inside a computer — is mind-boggling. It’s a niche art embraced by the very few, so when Netflix invests in its ongoing existence with a worthy project like The House, that’s something to celebrate. "Well, it's fun. We had a road map that thought, 'You know, if the world will embrace what we're making here, then we'll keep it going,'" Green previously told ComicBook.com of the prospect of a sequel.
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It’s an easy detail to forget, because it’s easy to get lost in the compelling narrative of the three short animated films that make up The House. Each tale—which, while animated, are dark and creepy and morbid and decidedly not for young children—centers on a different house. The houses are beacons of corruption, objects of scams, and symbols of thwarted dreams. The protagonists move into them, out of them, fix them up, tear them down, and ride them off into the sunset.
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It’s moments like these where you’ll marvel at the sheer creation of it all, a story created not just with words but physical objects. Lindroth von Bahr has frequently used anthropomorphic animals as the main characters in her work. Her short film “The Burden,” a festival darling released in 2017, is a musical starring a variety of mice, monkeys, and fish venting about their existential woes. For the filmmaking couple’s chapter of “The House,” one where the setting is perpetually under construction and often shrouded in darkness, they were keen on approximating the moody look of Gothic films that use their settings to achieve an uncanny atmosphere.
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Although there wasn’t any physical evidence linking Porto to the crime, police found CCTV camera footage of Porto. The video showed the mother driving the family car on a route toward their country house with “a long-haired girl” sitting beside her. The timecode on the footage was taken when Porto claimed that Asunta was at home. At the time, Porto was struggling with the deaths of her mother and father, who both died within the two years prior. She and Basterra also suddenly divorced in early 2013; Porto had an affair with a successful businessman named Manuel García, and when Basterra found out, their marriage fell apart, The Guardian reported. Yes, The Asunta Case is based on the real-life murder of 12-year-old Asunta Fong Yang.
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The segment’s messaging about what makes a house into a home is simple enough, and so is the obvious horror-story progression of the plot. But Belgian directors Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels tell their story with eerie, effective touches. Unlike the characters in the other two segments, Mabel and her family are human — but they’re an unusually soft and shapeless form of human, with bulging felted faces and beady little features, all set close together. They look like blurry Aardman Animation characters — Wallace and Gromit, but out of focus, or as if they’d melted a bit after being left out in the rain. The house around them is more concrete and looming, and it dwarfs them and makes them feel less real as the story progresses. The audience for that message may be a little limited, much like the audience for a collection of stories this dark and (in two cases) cynical.
It could be a recession or a scary creature — but when you put it together the result is an anthology with a trio of distinct, yet clearly connected stories. Horror stories certainly don’t have to be morality tales, but it’s never fully satisfying to watch a character endure terrible tortures for no clear reason. The Developer’s war against the beetles is laced with irony and inevitability, but there’s no particular sense that he invited it. The things that happen to him aren’t rectifying some cosmic wrong, or laying out some important theme for the viewer.
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Produced by Nexus Studios and currently vying to be the first animated film ever nominated for Outstanding Television Movie at the Primetime Emmy Awards, “The House” brings together some of the finest artists working in stop-motion today. In “And Heard Again Within a Lie is Spun,” De Swaef and Roels tell the tale of a family who move into a lavish mansion with seemingly ever-shifting interiors. Lindroth von Bahr’s “Then Lost is Truth That Can’t Be Won” finds a real-estate developing rat struggling with a vexing listing (and perplexing prospective buyers). Baeza concludes the anthology with “Listen Again and Seek the Sun,” in which more anthropomorphized animals — cats this time — try to save the house from encroaching flood waters.
The third segment, from British actor-director Paloma Baeza, eases away from the oppression of the first two stories. This time, the residents of the house — now surrounded by floodwaters in a softly post-apocalyptic setting — are anthropomorphic cats. Like the Developer, the house’s owner, a calico named Rosa (Susan Wokoma), is obsessed with renovation and profit. She’s been running the place as a boarding house, but after “the floods,” most of her residents abandoned her, and she’s left with only two tenants, neither of whom can pay rent. Elias (Will Sharpe), a shy black cat with a clear crush on Rosa, and the easygoing hippie-cat Jen (Helena Bonham Carter) gently dodge her hints about payment, and when Jen’s guru friend Cosmos (Paul Kaye) arrives, he further complicates the situation.
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Like so much stop-motion, this movie lives in its details — the rich textures of the characters, their clothes, and the objects around them, the elaborate dollhouse qualities of their worlds, the clear sense of care and time that went into building these sets. Viewers may be put off by that nauseating parasite musical routine, with its singing, dancing creepy-crawlies and their grotesque enthusiasm. But it’s hard not to appreciate the sheer amount of work that went into crafting this threefold fever dream, and the directors’ effectiveness at creating such instantly believable fantasy worlds. They set out to make these stories vividly oppressive and claustrophobic, and they certainly succeeded. “Sometimes I just use animals as in a modern fable style because it helps create a lack of identification,” she said. “It means that this could be anyone being put in a very strange situation, but I also like using this tiny bit of silliness in the dark framing.
Though lacking the dark and gruesome imagery of the first two stories, it was this one that hit me the hardest, as I and so many of my friends have put our lives on hold indefinitely for the pandemic, again. I can only hope that, like Rosa and her beautiful home, we can find a way to sail into the flood. In the one directed by Niki Lindroth von Bahr, the house is being renovated in the present by an embattled developer (voiced by Jarvis Cocker). We first meet him while he is trying to attract further investment and to repel an invasion of “fur beetles” (this time the characters are anthropomorphised animals – the Developer, who is given no other name, is a rat). His troubles multiply when a pair of supposed potential buyers who come to the open house event refuse to leave. But the story is too underbaked to deliver any real horrors or work as a fable about violation, or capitalism or any of the other themes it seems at various moments to be nodding vaguely at.
Porto’s father served as honorary consul for France, and her mother was an art historian at the University of Santiago, according to The Guardian. A model-making company, Clockwork Frog Films, created the run-down look of this version of the house. One focus was the layers of paint, texture, and gloss that not only reaffirm the age of the house in “Listen Again and Seek the Sun,” but also catch the light in a pleasing manner. Similarly, for Lindroth von Bahr, departing from the location as thematic basis for the piece felt natural since she usually starts her short film ideas thinking about where they’ll unfold.
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