Robert Morgan

Animation - Winner 2012

“Stop animation is, in my opinion, the greatest artistic medium on Earth,” says Morgan. “No other art form can so immediately evoke the weird, dislocated surrealism of dreams…It has a Frankenstein-esque quality to it. It’s like a form of alchemy; a dark art.”
Morgan’s fascination with the form began at the age of five when his uncle showed him the 1958 movie Fiend Without a Face. He was transfixed by the otherworldly, jittery motions of the monsters. Later, he studied animation at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, where he made a multi award-winning film, The Man in the Lower Left Hand Corner of the Photograph.
“I use silicone rubber to make my puppets – it gives them a disturbingly lifelike, organic texture, which maximises their ‘ultra-aliveness’ when articulated. Each film I’ve made has, to a great or lesser extent, used this uncanny quality to explore themes of bodily decay, rebirth and transformation.”
It’s powerful stuff. His latest work, Bobby Yeah, was reviewed on Fangoria.com: “Robert Morgan’s intensely creepy stop-animation work…blew my mind, ensuring I’d never sleep again or dare look at stop-motion in the same light. Dark, dense and extremely well-made, this experimental work tells the story of the terrifying consequences of curiosity”.
So far Morgan has won 31 awards for his films, with retrospectives of his work hosted in both Brazil and the UK. He is now working on The Ash Man, a phantasmagorical psychodrama about love-gone-bad, dreams and the nature of stop animation itself.