Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this middling Brit-populated, European-financed, Indian-manufactured animation is the radical change of career trajectory it represents for its pinballing director, Steve Hudson. Hudson broke through with 2006’s Loachian social drama True North, a migrant movie starring Peter Mullan – now, having witnessed how the other half lives while directing episodes of primetime TV’s Cranford, he pivots to pixels with a big-screen adaptation of Guy Bass’s kid-lit books. Stitch Head feels like a tentative first step into a heavily crowded field, sutured together from ideas and images previously encountered in far more confident and accomplished entertainments.
Bass’s eponymous hero is rendered here as a boy with Bowie-esque heterochromatic eyes, a baseball-like head and the voice of Asa Butterfield; his home is a castle overlooking small town Grubbers Nubbin, where a mad professor (Rob Brydon) carries out Frankenstinian experiments. If the lead character design is solid – accompanying adults may wind up knitting replicas of Stitch Head’s onesie – the surrounding menagerie seems a bit too Pixar for comfort; Stitch’s furry cyclops pal Creature (Joel Fry) is conspicuously a hybrid of Monsters, Inc’s Mike and Sully. Once this pair abscond to join a travelling freak show, Stitch Head ventures a rather melancholy and misshapen showbiz story – that of a boy who, much like the film, just wants to be loved.
Compared to Pixar and Sony’s whizzbang endeavours, armed with the full box of audiovisual fireworks, dead air swirls around Hudson’s minor-celebrity voice cast, and his backgrounds are more detailed and persuasive than his script. With its free-floating, slightly macabre imagery, the whole suggests a watered-down Saturday morning variant of 1993’s The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, as undertaken by bolexbrothers, Aardman’s dark-side splinter group. Stitch Head is one to test on your children rather than treat them to; sensitive youngsters may run screaming, while their elders may develop that glazed look that indicates they’ve sat through much of this before.
• Stitch Head is in UK and Irish cinemas from 13 February.
