Stage Fright

Stage Fright is a 1997 stop-motion short film produced, directed, and written by Steve Box. The story follows Tiny, a vaudeville performer, Arnold Hugh, a silent film actor, and Tiny's co-worker Daphne, as they attempt to adjust to the coming age of film. All of the characters are voiced by Graham Fellows. The short film is eleven minutes in length, and won a BAFTA Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1998. Plot Tiny, a dog trainer, hides with his dogs in a wicker basket on the stage of an abandoned vaudeville theater. He emerges to have them practice a trick, attacking a tattered straw boater hat on command. When a second man, Arnold Hugh, emerges menacingly onto the stage, Tiny fearfully backs away from him and falls into the orchestra pit, getting his clothes snagged on a broken plank. Years earlier, Tiny had found one of his dogs missing while performing his trained-dog act in the theater. Even though he fears that the crowd no longer likes the act, his friend Daphne encourages him to go on with the show. He is booed off the stage in favor of a silent movie, which stars Arnold and Daphne and features the missing dog, taken by Daphne. Arnold pressures her not to tell Tiny about the theft and goes on to make a string of successful movies with Daphne and the dogs. With each of his films, Arnold takes all the credit for Tiny’s training of the dogs with Daphne reluctantly sworn to silence. Tiny trains the dogs to jump up and place a boater on his head at his command. When Arnold uses this trick in one of his movies, though, it fails because he is taller than Tiny; he confronts Tiny and threatens to torture the animals unless they can reach his height. Angered, Tiny re-trains them to attack instead, prompting Arnold to leave the studio for the confrontation seen at the beginning of the film once he finds out. Daphne decides that she no longer wants to work with Arnold and follows him to the theater.