The House uses fur and cloth-based stop-motion animation to tell three independent stories set in a house. That might not be thrilling by the sound of it, but it’s a pretty fascinating and sometimes fascinatingly weird presentation.

The first story uses fabric-based human dolls to tell its story and, right out the gate, it’s kind of creepy. The doll faces just look wrong. The story is simple though… a family is invited to stay in an artist’s mansion for cryptic reasons. Things get strange the first night and there’s just an eerie, unsettling feeling about the whole short.

The second story is about a mouse trying to renovate the house for resale. He works hard at it but finds he has unwelcome visitors (before, during, and after an open house). This one is viscerally less creepy than the first but still has a pretty solid dollop of Kafkaesque existentialism as it goes along.

The third has some surreal moments but is generally not creepy. It’s about a cat who owns a house in the middle of a flood. She really wants to make improvements to get more tenants but her existing renters aren’t paying up. But then a mystical guru… who might be full of hokum – shows up in a boat.

The first and maybe the second short feel like Tim Burton had his hands all over them. Just that off-kilter creepiness he loves, though with less goth influence. The third feels more like a Wes Anderson stop-motion… like Fantastic Mr. Fox. I liked all three of them with the first being more akin to horror, the second more relatable, and the third more surreal.

I enjoyed this very odd movie. Clever of them to stick with stop-motion across three different director’s stories. It’s worth watching for animation fans and for folks who like their anthology movies just a little (or a lot) off-kilter. Enjoyable and nice to see Netflix take this gamble (instead of giving us Brazen 2: Electric Boogaloo).

Score: 83