Joaquin Cociña - The esoterism of stop-motion
In this episode of HOBO, Joaquin Cociña reveals his sources of inspiration and discusses Los Huesos, which won Best Short Film at Venice Film Festival 2021.
Stop-motion animation is one of the key themes in the strange and magically surreal films by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña.
In this episode of HOBO, Joaquin Cociña reveals his sources of inspiration - including Ladislas Starevich, the Russian animator famous for his stop-motion movies with dead bugs - and discusses Los Huesos, a movie (co-directed with León) which tries to find an answer to the question: “What would have happened if Chile had been the birthplace of animated cinema?”.
Los Huesos, which won Best Short Film at Venice Film Festival 2021, is a fictitious account of the world’s first stop-motion animated film. Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León imagine their work as a myth of origin of animation, and at the same time as a ritual that channels and interprets the energy of the historical moment happening in Chile today.
They have been working together since 2007. Independent of each other, they make drawings, animations, installations as well as backdrops and they also write texts. Their work often finds direct or indirect inspiration in children’s literature, using and resituating their narratives and visual aesthetics. In 2018 they premiered their first feature fiction film: The Wolf House (La casa Lobo).
With inventive and striking stop-motion animation, La Casa Lobo follows the nightmarish story of a young woman who escapes from unseen danger into a fantastical shape-shifting house. Pictures dance across the walls, pieces of furniture appear and disappear, rooms expand and contract, lights flicker, figures sprout from the floor like trees. Interpreting German folktales and Latin American rituals, politics, and culture, this experimental feature plunges into a sinister and darkly mysterious realm.
The first episode of HOBO is out now.