‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’: How the Oscar-Winning Animation Was Created

oscary_232_the_girl_who_cried_pearls_gettyimages-2266710915.jpg, default, Chris Lavis (left) & Maciek Szczerbowski pose with their Oscars for Best Animated Short Film for 'The Girl Who Cried Pearls' at the 98th Academy Award

#film

How did soaked cardboard boxes transform into an image of turn-of-the-century Montréal? What’s the story behind the disproportionately large heads of the characters? How did the pandemic influence the mode of working on the animations? And what came out of combining a Hans Christian Andersen tale and a Man Ray photograph? Let us tell you a story about how the Oscar-winning film ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’ came into existence.

A couple of animated dolls and a dozen or so eye-catching mise-en-scenes transport us to fin de siècle Montréal. Thousands of miniscule props fill the frames of this moving tale of empathy and greed. The Girl Who Cried Pearls, the Academy Award-winning stop motion animation by Maciej Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis, ignites hope that classic animation will live on. After all, in the times when artificial intelligence is becoming ubiquitous, perhaps it’s human imagination, handicraft, and technical imperfection that’ll prove to be the key to the viewers’ hearts.

Lavis and Szczerbowski enclose their film in a narrative frame: an elderly rich man catches his granddaughter red-handed as she attempts to steal a pearl, a keepsake from his childhood years. He then proceeds to tell her the story of the precious object. Thus begins the tale of an orphaned boy who one day, while peeking through a hole in a wall, notices an unhappy girl whose tears turn into pearls. Struggling to get out of poverty, the boy begins to sell the pearls to the owner of a local pawn shop – until he falls in love with the mysterious girl and, instead of profiting off her sadness, tries to make her happy.

The story behind the film

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Frame from the animated film ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’, directed by Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis, photo: National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Picture image

the_girl_who_cried_pearls_123.jpg

The idea for The Girl… came as the artists were working on their previous animation Madame Tutli-Putli, a surrealist tale nominated for an Academy Award in 2007. During the making of a scene in which the protagonist bursts into tears, one of the props, a bead necklace, suddenly broke. The pearls scattered all over the floor, a sight both strange and beautiful that immediately captivated Szczerbowski. An accident on set was a starting point of this new journey. Still, preparing to work on The Girl…, the creators also drew from the works of the great masters. One of the inspirations was Man Ray’s classic photograph from 1932 titled Glass Tears, depicting a crying woman with glass beads resembling tears on her face. That’s the origin of the story about a girl whose sadness transforms into precious tears and a boy who must choose between greed and empathy and love.

However, the vaguely delineated idea had to wait a long time to be realised. Work on it only began a decade later, when the creators of Madame… attended the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and Market. That’s where they shared their idea with Julie Roy, a producer associated with the National Film Board of Canada who took interest in their project and decided to include it in the Board’s French-language programme.

Before the film was presented to the public at the prestigious French festival in 2025, its authors spent long years developing the designs, the scenography, and the animations thanks to which the dolls and their world truly come alive on screen.

Andersen and ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Photo from the set of ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’, directed by Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis, National Film Board of Canada (NFB), photo: Martin Gros

Picture image

plan_the_girl_who_cried_pearls.jpg

Hitherto mostly associated with surrealist stories and hybrid animation techniques, this time the artists decided to tell a more classic story. They wanted to bring to life the energy they remembered from their childhood when reading Andersen’s fairytales, which combine Christian motifs with elements of horror and the supernatural, and whose educational aspects don’t overshadow their captivating plot.

In conversation with Variety, Maciek Szczerbowski said:

This was our first story completely dependent on story. We joked that we usually make experimental films and the experiment this time was doing something traditional. For the most part, we’ve been exploring the worlds of dream logic and Dadaist accidents that create story in a kind of symbolistic way which we try to curate and control. Here the trick was to tell a very specific, concise story. If you don’t understand the two or three crucial moments, it probably means nothing.

Religious motifs present in the works of Andersen served the creators as a point of reference in designing the dolls for the film. Specifically, as Jennifer Wolfe wrote in Animation Magazine: ‘Drawing inspiration from religious statuary, the directors designed puppets with serene, mask-like faces that evoke sacred iconography’.

Still, the decision to make the dolls’ faces motionless wasn’t motivated only by the influence of sacred art – it was also a side effect of a limited budget. Initially, the story as it was originally written included extensive dialogues between the characters. The problem, however, was that in stop motion animation, each shot requires the dolls to be specially positioned and each phase of their movement photographed – which was why animating the movement of the characters’ lips would have generated much larger costs and significantly prolonged the process. The budget Lavis and Szczerbowski had at their disposal would have sufficed to create merely three minutes of such animation, and so they decided to make a film in which the movement of the characters’ lips isn’t visible, their emotions expressed mostly through movement and gestures. The only characters that do move their lips are those in the ‘contemporary’ part of the tale, that is, the narrator and the granddaughter listening to his story. The central narrative, contained in the form of a flashback, is acted out by dolls with ‘lifeless’ faces.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Brigitte Henry, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski on the set of ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’, directed by Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis, National Film Board of Canada (NFB), photo: Martin Gros

Picture image

plan_the_girl_who_cried_pearls_22.jpg

Because of all that, especially important was the role of the actors whom the artists invited to join the project for the purpose of creating on-screen movement. Instead of drawing storyboards, Szczerbowski and Lavis employed real actors, asking their friends to collaborate. First, they acted out the scenes; then, their gestures and movements were transposed onto the animated dolls. For the purpose of the shoot, the directors went as far as to arrange rooms filled with props similar to those featured in the film.

In conversation with Deadline, Chris Lavis stated:

The moment we work with an actor is when the scene really comes to life and we get to play.

Maciej Szczerbowski then added:

It’s like the film is happening live in front of us and our job at that moment becomes where to put ourselves with the camera. How do we look at this thing that is happening in front of us? (…) Honestly, stop-motion is such a rigorous process, so ill-suited for improvisation. The only spontaneity and fun you’re going to have is in those moments of working with the actors first. Once the puppets are in place and the lighting is on, you don’t get to be too inventive. You have to get from the first frame to the last.

Preparing for the making of the film, the artists had to create not only the models of the dolls used but also meticulously designed sets that conveyed the reality of Montréal at the turn of the century: urban tenement homes with glamorous stores and dingy vacant buildings; a transport ship moored in the dock and a pawn shop filled to the brim with a multitude of items. The directors gained a co-author in the form of… blind chance and the resulting fateful occurrences. One example would be the model of the house, which served as the central point in many of the frames and whose on-screen shape differs from the original project. In an interview on the National Film Board of Canada blog, the authors explained:

The original maquette of the house was left outside our studio to dry. An unexpected rain squall hit and by the time we returned, the prop was warped out of shape. But actually, it looked so much better that way, so we incorporated the warps into the final model.

This wasn’t the only accident that proved lucky. Another element of the film that resulted from a misunderstanding were… the dolls. They were being made during the coronavirus pandemic, and because of the sanitary restrictions, the two creators couldn’t work side by side. And so, they split the tasks that went into the making of the dolls: one of them was preparing their bodies, the other the heads. During the process, an error occurred – or, more specifically, a misunderstanding regarding the scale of the dolls, due to which the finished models turned out to have small bodies and disproportionately large heads. However, instead of despairing over the communicational failure, Lavis and Szczerbowski decided to take advantage of serendipity. That’s how dolls with surrealistically large heads became an element of the film’s overall aesthetics.

Items come alive

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Animation artist Peggy Arel on the set of ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’, directed by Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis, National Film Board of Canada (NFB), photo: Martin Gros

Picture image

plan_the_girl_who_cried_pearls_8.jpg

The authors of The Girl… spent long months creating the miniature world of their film’s characters. Entrusted with the costumes was the duo’s collaborator of many years, Yso South, who sewed all the clothes by hand. The set design was composed of thousands of props made by Brigitte Henry and a team of animators, which included Laura Stewart, Laura Venditti, and Peggy Arel. Miniature bits and bobs printed using 3D technology were employed, as well as a variety of found objects: steel hairs from brushes used in cars cleaning the streets were used in the film as structural support for the buildings, whereas the interior of the pawn shop was filled with toys and clocks taken from dollhouses. Among the pawned objects filling this space we see, for example, the gramophone from Madame Tutli-Putli, as well as a piano which, in 2019, ‘performed’ in a VR production inspired by Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class, titled Gymnasia and created by Szczerbowski in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Preparing the scenography for The Girl…, the artists also utilised trash bags to create curious, irregular textures for the surfaces as well as to give them an aged look.

The finished models underwent an arduous animation process consisting of the artists registering the characters’ each movement, frame by frame. For this purpose, they used a Canon EOS 6D DSLR camera, whose specifications enabled them to properly capture lighting and details of colours, endowing the film with a painterly character.

Another challenge consisted in adding the sound and composing a fitting score. ‘[W]hen we first assembled the entire thing into a running picture [we] realized that it was gravely lacking in tempo’, reminisces Szczerbowski in conversation with Animation Magazine.

What turned out to be the solution was music, composed by Patrick Wilson, who had collaborated with the duo for many years. While composing the music, Wilson made sure to tailor it not only to the visual layer of the film but also to the voices of the actors: Colm Feore, who does the voice-over for the English version, and James Hyndman, responsible for the French dialogue.

‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’, directed by Maciek Szczerbowski & Chris Lavis – Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

In conversation with Deadline, Szczerbowski discusses the challenge that working on the two language versions posed for the composer: ‘James has a very bassy voice and Colm has a lighter voice, so he had to find instruments that worked with both of them’.

The road to the Oscar shortlist

The Girl Who Cried Pearls premiered in 2025 at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival. At the Toronto International Film Festival, it won the award for Best Canadian Short Film.

In her review on the Eye for Film website, Jennie Kermode wrote:

The care taken with the puppets is echoed in the landscape through which they move. It feels coherent and particular, but is assembled from an eclectic assemblage of materials and found objects (…). One might watch this over and over again across the course of years and still spot new treasures hidden away in the background. Masterful lighting adds to the atmosphere, and then there’s Patrick Watson’s wonderful score, its melodies shifting and blending (…).

Similarly, John Hopewell of Variety praised the remarkable techniques employed by the artists:

The 17-minute short is also animation art of the highest order, seen in the extraordinary bric-a-brac detail of a pawnshop, lending it an immersive authenticity.

In 2026, the film was nominated for Best Animated Short Subject at the Annie Awards and, most importantly, for an Academy Award, for which it competed with productions such as Butterfly by Florence Miailhe and Ron Dyens, Forevergreen by Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears, Retirement Plan by John Kelly and Andrew Freedman, and The Three Sisters by Konstantin Bronzit. The film won the Oscar for Best Short Film (Animated).

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

Language English

oscars

animation

canada

annecy international aniimation film festival

puppet animation