‘Stitch Head’ Directors Welcome Us to Their Friendly Animated Freak Show

This article was written for the November ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 353).

“To really earn a feel-good movie, you have to have a certain feel-bad element. You’ve got to really identify and go on a journey with these characters, and the book and the film go to somewhere dark and difficult.”

— Director Steve Hudson

Animation has a great history of light horror. Films like Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio are shining examples of how to make a scary movie that plays to all audiences. Looking to follow that legacy is Stitch Head, an adaptation of Guy Bass’s Gothic-inspired series of chapter books, first published in 2011. Produced by the Cologne, Germany-based Gringo Films and the U.K.’s GFM Animation, the film follows a group of monsters created by a Victor Frankenstein-esque mad scientist as they fight off being kidnapped by the owner of a freak show.

Stitch Head’s director, Steve Hudson, was struck by one particular thing when he first encountered the books, which he listened to as an audiobook on a car ride with his wife and children. “It’s all about the genre fun,” Hudson tells Animation Magazine. “A lot of animated movies have their own rules and physics and logic of that world, and you’ve got to spend a lot of time explaining that world. But for movies that can hook into an existing genre, there’s a lot you don’t need to explain. Our kids were pretty young when we were listening to the books, but as soon as you hear about a mad laboratory in a castle, everybody gets it.”

Human Monsters

Animation director David Nasser was also enthralled by the idea early on and took an unconventional path to working on the film. He says, “I saw the presentation at [the European financing event] Cartoon Movie 2018 and waited for them to say, ‘Great presentation, great movie. If you happen to look for an animation director, I would be very happy to collaborate.’ But another project came in the way that I jumped on, and then Stitch Head kicked off without me. It was a bit sad at first, but after I finished my project, Stitch Head had paused production, and I came back to Cologne for a weekend, had a drink with Steven, who was ready to pick back up, and I rejoined them. I feel super lucky.”

Helming an animated movie was a new experience for Hudson, whose directing work was previously limited to live-action television, alongside his credits as a voice-over artist. Hudson had a steep learning curve but believes that his background in audio offered something valuable to Stitch Head. “It’s very difficult to tell a joke visually, entirely without sound. It’s possible, but 90% of comedic timing is sound. So I thought I’d have something to offer here,” Hudson says. “I’ve been on other productions working with people who’ve got amazing visual talent and can draw beautifully but [are] not necessarily very good at the stuff that’s interacting with performance. With animation, you start with a radio play. The editing, the sound, getting that together. A couple of times I was on other shows where people say, ‘We’ll make it funny in the animation.’ I’d look at it in the end like, ‘I don’t know if it really quite worked out.’ The sound timing, laughs, thoughts, emotions, that sort of stuff has to be right in the radio play.”

Along with making an entertaining comedy, Hudson was also keen to preserve the message of the original Frankenstein story. “The scary characters in the film are the humans. When the humans form an angry mob, that’s what we’re scared of these days. The actual monsters are slightly grotesque, but they’re super cool and we identify with the monsters, and that’s the origin of the whole Frankenstein myth. These days the monsters are outsiders, and we identify with the outsiders much more than the proper people.” Nasser sees the horror aspects of the film more as a means to get to that core message. “It’s not scary at all. It’s like a comedy about the characterization of monsters. And the monsters themselves are simply too cute.”

Aiming for Emotions

Stitch Head’s animation has a healthy mix of realism and stylization, something Nasser worked hard to find. “It’s always the design that determines the style. You can play within the margins of making it more cartoony, while remembering that the characters are very realistic, so they could end up looking weird,” Nasser says. “So the character design already determines 80% of where you can go. It was clear that Stitch Head is a more emotional character, so he needs to be a bit more naturally animated. And then we had the monsters that we would usually have in group shots. We thought they should move more snappily, otherwise the scenes get too heavy and animators work too long on the shots. You have all these factors, as well as new ideas, all the time from this soup of different people working on the film, and in the end, I’m just keeping all the pieces together. With a director, with production, with the artists, I have to be a link between them and make sure that the film gets finished with the style we chose.”

Hudson was very specific about how he wanted scenes to be framed in Stitch Head. “When we were initially doing the designs, we were thinking very much about this being a handmade world, a hipster universe, so we wanted everything to be non-replica. Everything is unique and jerry-rigged together,” he says.

“There’s a word in German called Wimmelbild,” explains Hudson. “It’s like watching those cartoons where you’ve got 1,000 tiny little pirates fighting on big ships or something, and you can look at it and say, ‘Oh, look, did you see that?’ And that, for me, is cinema, because you can look at the big screen and notice something small. The audience feels empowered and clever. There’s a lot of humor you can do too, especially if you’ve got a fixed frame and you’re not directly leading them with the camera, but the audience’s eyes are moving around the screen. We were doing a lot of ‘flat is funny’ for the gag shots, but in these more emotional bits, you need to come to much more naturalistic and sophisticated animation. We had slightly more naturalistic camera angles, much less of the very static Buster Keaton-style flat frames.”

It’s not always easy to find the balance between emotional and entertaining, especially for a film aimed at families, but Hudson believes that the peril in the story is essential for a satisfying emotional experience: “To really earn a feel-good movie, you have to have a certain feel-bad element,” he believes. “You’ve got to really identify and go on a journey with these characters, and the book and the film go to somewhere dark and difficult. Sometimes people don’t want to do that too much, but I think kids deserve it. There’s the ‘make them laugh, make them cry’ thing, but to make them cry you need an emotional hook and an emotional journey, you need to walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes. If you can do that in the cinema, and especially when you’re a kid, it’s a big, overwhelming experience that just seemed super important to me.”

Briarcliff Entertainment will release Stitch Head in select U.S. theaters on October 29, just in time for Halloween.