ANI-MOVIES, *The House

Having no relation to the Hugh Laurie show, The House is a stop-motion animation production by Nexus Studios from Britain. Originally conceived as a mini-series(similar to Love, Death, And Robots), Netflix decided instead to release it as single 3-part anthology feature. Nexus Studios is more renown for creatin short commercial productions, so this dark comedy is a major step forward in the ascension with others in the field like Laika.

The first chapter takes place around Victorian England where a poor family has their second daughter, who are constantly snubbed by their upper class extended relatives. The father in a bit of drunk depression makes a Faustian bargain with a mysterious benefactor who offers them a newly created townhouse further up the road from their old place. Despite being given free room and board, the family are subject to the interior constantly under reconstruction. The parents eventually give into the madness of the house's creepiness, and are transformed into furniture, leaving to two daughters to escape as a fire eventually engulfs part of the structure.

The second chapter takes place supposedly in the same house, but now in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic rodents. A developer puts all of his focus into selling a house he has remodeled, to the point that he lives in its basement while periodically contacting someone he cares for. All but two possible buyers leave during his sales party. the unusual duo decline to leave as they keep claiming to want to purchase the house. After having enough of his deadbeat clients, the developer contacts the police to get rid of them, only for it to be revealed that the person he kept calling throughout the story was merely just his dentist, leaving the viewer to question his sanity. All this while the developer is in a constant struggle with the insects infesting the house, and leads him to joining the bizarre clients who are some kind of mouse/insect hybrids, leading the developer devolving into a common rat.

The finale is set further in the future where all the inhabitants are felines, and most of the known world has flooded. One of the last seen standing places on land is the same house, or at least some version of it. The building is now studio apartments, and the fickle owner Rosa keep insisting that if she can get the house remodeled for possible better tenants, aside from the two resident deadbeats still living with her, the lazy Elias and the airheaded hippie Jen. Jen gets a visit from her soulmate Cosmos, a wandering mystic who agrees to help Rosa with her construction. However, Cosmos instead helps liberate Rosa from the hold the crumbling house has on her by transforming it into a boat-house, allowing her to remove herself of the curse the house had on it.

The House is uniquely bizarre, seriously amping up the discomfort someone might experience giving into earthly materials like a place to live, despite the fact that humans(and cartoon animals)need those comforts in order to survive. Each chapter acts as its own separate mini-movie, with the "house" itself being the same structure in all three narratives. The stop-motion is groundbreaking, even though still slightly behind the quality of an average Tim Burton campaign. This is not a clean cut horror anthology, instead of mixed blend of sneaky discomfort and spiritual emancipation.