Marjut Rimminen

Short films

The Stain

1991 · Short film · 16mm · 11 minutes

A film by Marjut Rimminen and Christine Roche

Still from The Stain, pale puppet figures seated around a white-clothed dining table under a hanging lamp, tall curtained windows behind

Triggered by an actual news item about suicidal octogenarian twins, The Stain is a dark, domestic thriller which uses drawn, puppet, pixilation and live-action animation styles to spin a claustrophobic web of incest and intrigue.

Still from The Stain, a drawn woman in a long red dress pushes a black pram past the legs of two boys and a man in dark trousers

An examination of incest and sex abuse within the nuclear family. … The Freudian ability of animators deftly to display the motives behind the mask is one of the great strengths of the form. Animation can handle difficult delicate topics with extraordinary lightness and perception.

Jeanette Winterson, Sight and Sound, October 1992

An imaginative animated fable about the benefits of family life: envy, incest, murder. With all the sinister simplicity of a tale by Edward Gorey, it is exactly the sort of thing that distributors should be picking up as support for their new features.

Waldo Lydecker, Time Out, 31 July 1991

This is a kind of crusade for me. From the very moment I discovered animation, I sensed that it could deal with life's complex issues and be more powerful in it than live action. We receive animation differently. By not being real, animation can seduce the viewer to look at something he rather does not, and reach beyond the eyes, directly to the emotions of the viewer.

Marjut Rimminen, Edwin Carels interview, Annecy 1993
A drawn woman in a long red dress stands against a dark mass of roses, holding a rake-like tool. A red-haired puppet in round glasses sits in a wheelchair with a radio on its lap. A red-haired puppet, its glasses catching the light, leans over a table set with food. A red-haired puppet in black sits in a wicker chair on wheels beside a doorway. A drawn child peers through stair banisters, an adult in dark trousers above, two boys below. A figure in a red dress flings one arm up as plates, pears and bottles fly around her. A crowned figure in a pink dress holds a spoon with a green ball of food. Two bald figures with blank faces, in white shirts and pink ties, at a table by a window. Close view of a black-haired puppet woman with a white face, in maroon, holding a blade. A red-haired puppet in round glasses leans on the tablecloth holding a personal cassette player and headphones. A man in a dark suit walks down a corridor past pale limbs towards a small figure. Three drawn figures with outstretched arms rush down a narrow passage between pink and green walls. A drawn baby cries in a black pram on a rug in a bare wooden room, a teddy bear lying on the floor beside it.

The photographs below are from the making of the film: the sets and puppets being built, lit and shot.

A hand aims a camera at a miniature wallpapered room with a pram and a brown stain.
One woman holds a wisp of cotton wool cloud above a model house; another watches.
Two women work over a model island set in a sea of crumpled foil, under a lamp.
A woman holds up a puppet with two identical bald heads in white shirts and red ties.
Studio lamps and a monitor surround a lit miniature room where a pram stands by the wall.
Two women stand behind a model house on a white cliff, blue paper sea and painted sky.
A puppet woman in a dark red high-collared dress eats alone at a white-clothed table.
One woman raises a thread overhead while another steadies a model house on a white cliff.
A red-haired puppet clutches its head beside a spreading red stain on the white tablecloth.
A red stain, a fallen goblet and a knife on the tablecloth between two seated figures.
A woman on a stepladder reaches towards model seagulls on wires while another laughs below.
Two women laugh in front of a board of pinned storyboards; one holds a small lamp.
Two identical bald figures with blank faces, in white shirts and red ties, at a laid table.
A puppet woman in a maroon dress reaches across the table with a yellow fruit on a plate.
A tall puppet woman in black stands behind two bald figures seated at a dining table.
Through a half-open door, puppets sit at a dining table under a red hanging lamp.
A puppet in a dark red dress reaches towards a domed silver cover on a laid table.

Awards

Credits

Narration
Chrissie Roberts
Words
Harriett Gilbert
Research consultant
Julia Vellacott
Design
Christine Roche
Animation
Marjut Rimminen
Additional animation
Jeff Goldner, Heini Kauppinen
Assistant animators
Gail Walton, Shelley McIntosh, Isabel Radage
Painting
Sarah Strickett, Sam Padget
Checking
Debra Thaine
Set construction and electrician
Dick Arnall
Silversmith
Pierre Marchand
Rostrum camera
Heather Reader at Bob Godfrey Films
Lighting and camera
Cathy Greenhalgh, Three Peach
Editing and sound
Tony Fish, Peter Hearn at Picturehead Productions
Dubbing mixer
Ian Selwyn at Studio Sound
Music
Dick Heckstall-Smith, Dave Moore, Verdi, Schumann
Producer
Orly Yadin
Production
A Smoothcloud Production for Channel Four Television
Distribution
Channel Four International

Screenings and broadcasts

  • At the Tampere Film Festival, March 1992
  • In the exhibition Animation at the Cutting Edge, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1992, which showed artwork and screenings of the film and of Some Protection
  • In Arrows of Desire, the second ICA Biennial showcase of British short films, London, 1992; the programme toured for two years in eleven countries
  • Broadcast on Channel 4, 1992
  • In A Salute to British Animation at the 10th Jerusalem Film Festival, Israel, 1993
  • At the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, 1993
  • Broadcast on television on 17 August 1993, with Some Protection
  • In Best of Hiroshima 92, Cinémathèque québécoise, Montreal, January 1993
  • In Best of Hiroshima 92, Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 1993
  • In Best of Hiroshima 92, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, February 1993
  • In Best of Hiroshima 92, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 1993
  • In The International Tournée of Animation, Volume 6 (Expanded Entertainment), which toured cinemas, campuses and museums in the United States and was released on video
  • Original artwork and sets in Animation Plus, a thirteen-venue tour from Glasgow in February 1994 to London in January 1996, with Some Protection
  • In the programme British Women Animate at the Tampere International Short Film Festival, 1995, with Some Protection and I'm not a Feminist, but…, where Marjut gave an interview to YLE
  • In the retrospective of 100 years of British animation at the Zagreb International Animation Festival, 1996
  • At the Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares, Spain, 2000
  • In the British Animation Retrospective at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, 2001
  • In Klassigerinnen, a programme curated by Jayne Pilling at the first Tricky Women festival, Vienna, 2001, with Many Happy Returns
  • In a programme of animated films made by women at the AniMadrid Festival, 2004, with Some Protection
  • In Sexuality and Desire, a programme curated by Jayne Pilling for the Animex International Festival of Animation, Middlesbrough, 2005
  • In the Interior Worlds panel at the Aurora Festival, Norwich, 2007
  • In the Joanna Quinn selection at Animafest Zagreb, 2008
  • In the Tony Fish Lifetime Achievement Award retrospective at the Bradford Animation Festival, 2009
  • Shown as the short before Queen Margot in the Film Season at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 20 February 2010
  • In Serious Animation: The Films of Orly Yadin, Shelburne Museum, Vermont, 1 March 2020, with Some Protection
  • Close-Up Film Centre 11 December 2022, London: four of her films in the programme Finnish/Female/Feminist Filmmakers, among them The Bridge, The Stain and Many Happy Returns, with a Q&A with Marjut; curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, introduced by Milja Mikkola, with the Finnish Institute

Retrospectives

Writing about the work

  • Paul Wells, Understanding Animation, Routledge, 1998. The Stain appears in the chapter on the feminine aesthetic (page 199).
  • "It's rare to meet someone who's seen The Stain who hasn't been, quite simply, knocked out by it." Jayne Pilling (ed.), Women and Animation: A Compendium, British Film Institute, 1992. From a three-page profile of Marjut (pages 37 to 40), which also covers I'm not a Feminist, but… and Some Protection.
  • "Rimminen and Roche draw on animation's capacity to exceed live-action's depiction of the world as it is to depict the possibility that deformation might mutate into transformation." Karen Beckman, Mixing Memory and Desire, in Jayne Pilling (ed.), Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality and Animation, Wallflower Press, 2012. The book gives the film three pieces: Beckman's essay (pages 187 to 192), interviews with Marjut and Christine Roche (193 to 198), and Roche's sketchbooks (199 to 207). Ruth Hayes returns to the film on page 216. Ben Mitchell reviewed the book in Skwigly.
  • "Created by Marjut Rimminen and Christine Roche, The Stain tells a troubled family history from the dual perspective of identical twins. Its characters and images, although inventive, lack the psychological resonance to bring to life a fable that has an abrupt and shocking ending." Stephen Holden, Animated Inventiveness, The New York Times, 21 January 1994. A review of The 24th International Tournée of Animation at the Angelika Film Center, where The Stain was the longest film. Reprinted in The New York Times Film Reviews, 1993–1994.
  • Giannalberto Bendazzi, Animation: A World History, Volume III: Contemporary Times, CRC Press, 2016. The Stain is among the films in the book's paragraph on Marjut, in the chapter on Great Britain (pages 71 to 72), which follows her from her graduation in 1968 to Learned by Heart.
  • The Stain was "brought to the channel by two of the Blind Justice team". Clare Kitson, British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, Parliament Hill Books, 2008. From the history of Channel 4's animation commissioning, which also covers Some Protection and Mixed Feelings.
  • Hannah Hamad, Feminist narratives, in The Encyclopaedia of Animation Studies, volume 4, Bloomsbury, 2025. Reads The Stain as a dark narrative of patriarchal domestic violence and family trauma, told in the mode of the fairytale.
  • Richard Taylor, The Encyclopedia of Animation Techniques, 1996. A captioned still from The Stain, one of three of Marjut's films the book shows as "excellent examples" of their techniques, with Some Protection and The Frog King.
  • Olivier Cotte, Il était une fois le dessin animé… et le cinéma d'animation, 2001. On the invitation to Halas and Batchelor, Marjut's independent career in England, and The Stain.
  • Meghan Annette Gilbride, Memory Migrations: Bringing the Past to Life in Contemporary Animated Film, PhD thesis, University College London, 2012. The Stain is one of the thesis's animated films of personal remembrance, with Learned by Heart.
  • "Two of the best shorts, The Stain…" Jeanette Winterson, reviewing the year's shorts in Sight and Sound, October 1992. The November 1992 issue gave The Stain a full entry for its BFI and Connoisseur video release, and The Times listed it with Some Protection for television on 17 August 1993.
  • The British Cinema Source Book, 1995, lists the British Film Institute's viewing copy of The Stain.

Get in touch

For festival and screening enquiries, teaching, masterclasses, or correspondence:

marjut.rimminen@gmail.com