Of Monsters and Men’s melancholy house mouse

Fresh from her BAFTA win, Partizan director Honor Price brings her whimsical vision to a contemplative, hand-crafted two-part album sequence for Icelandic folk band Of Monsters And Men, set to tracks The Block and Mouse Parade. 

Realised through richly textured, eccentric stop-motion animation, the surreal tale unfolds across two parallel worlds: above ground, we see emotionless humans with rodent-like features while below, sentient, humanlike mice inhabit an intricate subterranean society. 

Neither species is entirely human nor wholly rodent, yet each is rendered in exquisite and uncanny detail, creating a sense of narrative ambiguity and shrouding the characters in an eerie, reflective atmosphere.  

Price was drawn to the emotional duality in the songs: “I was thrilled to create this two-part film for Of Monsters and Men - building two parallel worlds through stop motion, puppetry, and layered multiplane sets.”

“We were excited to make the bulk of the entire video by hand using traditional handcrafted animation methods - specifically stop-motion, puppetry, and multiplane. By layering real sets on glass and compositing rod puppets into them, we created a fully tactile, dimensional world that we think evokes the themes and emotion of the tracks.”