Marjut Rimminen

Short films

The Stain

1991 · Short film · 16mm · 11 minutes

A film by Marjut Rimminen and Christine Roche

Still from The Stain, puppet figures around a dining table

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, drawn animation, family scene

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.

Photographs 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 man in a dark suit walks down a corridor past pale limbs towards a small figure.
A puppet in a dark red dress reaches towards a domed silver cover on a laid table.
Three drawn figures with outstretched arms rush down a narrow passage between pink and green walls.

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
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

Retrospectives

Writing about the work

  • Some Protection, The Stain: Paul Wells, Understanding Animation 1998, Routledge. Some Protection is the worked example of the documentary tendency in animation (page 27): the film "documents the deep anxiety of Josie O'Dwyer, using her own troubled recollections of abuse, petty crime and the brutalities of imprisonment, and effectively shows the perception of reality as it is experienced by O'Dwyer. Arguably, this is a more truthful reality and one which is only possible to document in animation." The Stain appears in the chapter on the feminine aesthetic (page 199). The book spells her name Rimmenen throughout, index included
  • I'm not a Feminist, but…, Some Protection, The Stain: Jayne Pilling (ed.), Women and Animation: A Compendium 1992, British Film Institute. A three-page profile (pages 37 to 40) on the making of I'm not a Feminist, but… with Christine Roche, on Some Protection, and on The Stain, of which Pilling writes: "it's rare to meet someone who's seen The Stain who hasn't been, quite simply, knocked out by it"; plus a filmography entry. The source of several quotations on this site
  • The Stain: Jayne Pilling (ed.), Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality and Animation 2012, Wallflower Press. Three pieces on the film: Karen Beckman's essay Mixing Memory and Desire (pages 187 to 192), which finds that "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"; interviews with Marjut Rimminen and Christine Roche (193 to 198); and Roche's sketchbooks (199 to 207). Ruth Hayes returns to the film on page 216. Reviewed by Ben Mitchell in Skwigly
  • The Stain: Stephen Holden, Animated Inventiveness 21 January 1994, The New York Times, reviewing The 24th International Tournée of Animation at the Angelika Film Center, where The Stain was the longest film: "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." Reprinted in The New York Times Film Reviews, 1993–1994
  • Marjut Rimminen: Giannalberto Bendazzi, Animation: A World History, Volume III: Contemporary Times 2016, CRC Press: a biographical paragraph in the chapter on Great Britain (pages 71 to 72), from the 1968 graduation and Vivante's Zagreb award through Halas and Batchelor, the commercials for Finland, The Stain, Urpo & Turpo, Many Happy Returns, Mixed Feelings and Red Ribbon to Learned by Heart, with a still from it; and a passage in the Finland chapter (page 135): Learned by Heart "x-rays the country's history through the eyes of a child"
  • Some Protection, The Stain, Many Happy Returns, Mixed Feelings: Clare Kitson, British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor 2008, Parliament Hill Books, the history of the channel's animation commissioning: of the Blind Justice series, "the final film, Some Protection by Marjut Rimminen, would attract the most accolades"; The Stain was "brought to the channel by two of the Blind Justice team"; Mixed Feelings and the credits of Many Happy Returns; a photograph of Marjut at Fantoche with its Grand Prix (page 165)
  • The Stain: Hannah Hamad, Feminist narratives 2025, in The Encyclopaedia of Animation Studies, volume 4, Bloomsbury: the film as a dark narrative of patriarchal domestic violence and family trauma told in the mode of the fairytale
  • Some Protection, The Frog King, The Stain: Richard Taylor, The Encyclopedia of Animation Techniques 1996: stills from the three films with captions, "excellent examples" of their techniques
  • The Stain: Olivier Cotte, Il était une fois le dessin animé… et le cinéma d'animation 2001: the invitation to Halas and Batchelor, the independent career in England, and the film
  • The Stain, Learned by Heart: Meghan Annette Gilbride, Memory Migrations: Bringing the Past to Life in Contemporary Animated Film 2012, PhD thesis, University College London: both films in the corpus of animated non-fiction of personal remembrance
  • The Stain, Some Protection: Sight and Sound October 1992, Jeanette Winterson's review of the year's shorts ("Two of the best shorts, The Stain…"), and a full entry on The Stain in the November 1992 issue for its BFI and Connoisseur video release; The Times, 17 August 1993, listing both films for television
  • Listed in: The British Edge (1987); British National Film and Video Catalogue (1989); The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (1991); Arrows of Desire: New Directions in British Film and Video (1993); The British Cinema Source Book (1995, the BFI's viewing copies of Some Protection and The Stain); Film, Video and Multimedia Guide (1997); The Complete Index to British Sound Film Since 1928 and the Facets Video Encyclopedia (1999); Kino plus (2002); Directory of World Cinema: Finland (2012); and the Finnish periodical index, the Art Index, the Humanities Index and the International Index to Film Periodicals

Get in touch

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

marjut.rimminen@gmail.com