Blood Tea and Red String


Blood Tea and Red String is a stop-motion-animated feature film, called by director Christiane Cegavske a "fairy tale for adults". It was released on February 2, 2006 after a production time of 13 years, having been filmed in various places in the West Coast and in two studios. The musical score was composed and performed by Mark Growden.
Cegavske says in the audio commentary to the DVD for this film that it is to be the first in a trilogy.

Critical reception

Brett D. Rogers of Frames Per Second magazine praised Blood Tea, calling it "exquisitely realized... an antidote to modern digital precision and diluted creativity." The same review highlighted Mark Growden's score as suiting the film perfectly, "rapping Blood Tea's intricate scenery and its characters' wordless dialect in a lingering, haunting layer of spectral sound." Harvard's Deirdre Barrett also reviewed the film positively. “’Each man kills the thing he loves' seems to be message of the film," she wrote, "Mice, rats and spider compete for a doll and her exotic child with tragic consequences... The whole film had a dream or storybook feel. But it is the childhood nightmare or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Its magic serves sudden, violent death as often as love or beauty. It’s a tale with childhood’s imagery but not a tale for children.”