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.
