Spike Jonze Directs Stop-Motion Skeletal Love Story

This week sees the premiere of the latest effort from renowned indie filmmaker, Spike Jonze, and it's as spectacularly bizarre as you would expect: a stop-motion animated short film that ends with two felt skeletons having sex all over the bookshelves of Paris' Shakespeare & Co.

Mourir Auprès De Toi (roughly translated as 'to die by your side') reveals the filthy, filthy things that happen at night when all the world's booksellers are innocently sleeping. After the lights have been turned off, Macbeth, voiced by Jonze, a sprightly skeleton, unstitches himself from the cover of his book with the aim of reaching the bed of the doe-eyed redhead in a nightgown across the shelf, ostensibly Dracula's Mina (voiced by French singer Soko, famous for threats of murder). On the way he's waylaid by the malevolent whale from Moby Dick, forcing Mina to tear a slit in her nightgown and set out to rescue him. The film concludes with the aforementioned skeleton sex, a little post-coital cigarette smoking and a baby. It's amazing.

Mourir Auprès De Toi is the product of the collaboration between Jonze and Olympia Le-Tan, a French accessories designer with a penchant for creating literary bags. Le-Tan channelled her talents into hand-crafting the 3000-odd felt parts that make up the books lining the shelves of Shakespeare & Co., Paris' infamous English-language bookshop and haunt of luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway and William S. Burroughs. While the film premiered in May of this year at La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, it had its official online premiere this week.