Watch: 'Jonah', a New Stop-Motion Film by Manuel Cojocaru

Manuel Cojocaru, Romanian young author and philosopher, has found a new way to express his ideas and disquietudes – stop motion short-films. His first experiment in this area was quite a success. Idol, his first stop-motion video tells a metaphorical story about “absurd, primitive and archetypal realm”.

In the meantime, Jonah is a more abstract take on isolation, acceptance and redemption. The short-film is primary based on the mythical character of Jonah, who spent three days inside a whale’s belly. Secondary, Jonah is also the homonym drama of Romanian playwright Marin Sorescu, which focuses on the same character.

“I was inspired to paint a painting named Jonah a few years ago”, Manuel said, “now I tried to bring the image to life by doing a stop motion video”. Same as the previous film, the entire setting is handcrafted. The amateur filmmaker paid more attention to scoring the video.

‘Prelude to Death’, the piano soundtrack you hear in the background, belongs to Ștefan Bârzu, who also narrated the video using excerpts from the Bible, such as this one: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” – Ecclesiastes 1:9.

Suggesting both the inevitable end and the resurrection, Jonah is an interesting attempt to bring to our attention concepts and seemingly forgotten ideas through stop-motion film, an easy on the eye, user friendly channel. Although it’s a long shot, it would be nice if Manuel would turn his new hobby into an educative series – a probably better choice than whatever is on TV these days.

Photo: Screen from the video

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