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Creating the perfect fairytale is no easy feat, but the Montreal-based animators Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski are used to a challenge. Five years in the making is the expertly and beautifully crafted The Girl Who Cried Pearls. Narrated by Colm Feore and James Hyndman in the English and French versions of the movie, respectively, the 17-minute stop-motion short follows a poor young boy who discovers a girl whose tears, evoked by a sad home life, turn into pristine pearls. Seeing this as an opportunity to escape poverty, the boy sells the girl’s tears to a greedy pawnbroker, but once he finds himself falling in love with her, he must choose between desire and social standing.
The film, backed by the National Film Board of Canada, recently landed the 2026 Oscars shortlist and a Best Short Subject nomination at the 2026 Annie Awards. It also had a world premiere in the Official Competition at the opening night of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and snagged the TIFF IMDB Pro Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Film.
Here, the duo talks to Deadline about unique methods employed to make one of the year’s most eye-catching short films.
DEADLINE: What was the importance of telling the story through a grandfather talking to his granddaughter?
CHRIS LAVIS: This idea came about quite early in the writing process. We already had the idea of a boy looking through a hole in a wall at a girl, her shamefully collecting the pearls [she creates] in the wall, and him discovering them. Back then, I think we thought, “OK, so where is this story going?” We thought about where this little pearl that the boy keeps led to. And it led to this old man who is rich and powerful in this grand apartment in Paris. So, it became an origin story. The idea of the granddaughter came from us thinking about who he would tell his origin story to. So, it was important to show this through her first appearance, which shows her rifling through her grandfather’s things. When he walks into the room and sees her, she’s a thief, and in our imagination, his own daughter has grown up quite privileged and wealthy. And in some ways, often, people who are first-generation wealthy have a hard time relating to their kids and the rest of their family because they didn’t grow up the way they did. So, we thought, what if the old man saw this hint of his younger self in his granddaughter, just from the act of her stealing from his office, and that triggered this moment of confession in him, which becomes the story of our film.
DEADLINE: I know we have to draw our own conclusions for the ending, but I am holding out hope that the girl who cried the pearls ended up being his wife.
LAVIS: We’re not going to deny that possibility, but we aren’t going to answer it either. It’s funny because there’s a Letterboxd comment that we saw where someone was like, “[The girl] is your grandmother, you fool,” or something like that [laughs].
MACIEK SZCZERBOWSKI: This is the first time we’ve made a story where we try to make sense, because previously, all of our work has been more from the realm of surrealism, using some twisted symbolic dream logic, always leaving many opportunities for the viewer to give it their own sensibility. We tried more specifically than ever before to answer questions and make sense in this one. However, our instincts were still trailing us on this one, and we like leaving some open-endedness to our stories, where we’re not actually shoveling meaning into your head, but letting you invent it based on your own experience. That’s similar to music, where you’ll hear a song with romantic lyricism, and the perception changes for each person who listens. It becomes about you, the people you love, and that’s what gives those songs their value. At some point, it doesn’t matter what the author might intend.
DEADLINE: Talk about working with Colm Feore on the narration for the story.
SZCZERBOWSKI: He’s been on our radar for most of our adult lives. We’ve been [obsessed] with him since Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. It’s an excellent piece that ruminates on the life of the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Colm embodied that personality so perfectly that I couldn’t imagine those two people being separate.
LAVIS: We went after him. He was the number one guy we wanted for the voice. I mean, he’s played Richard III and Laufey, father of Loki, in the MCU, and he also popped up on Landman. He’s just one of those actors who can handle any type of material. What was quite wonderful was how prepared he was for that session. We were just delighted that he said yes. We sent him the script, and he watched this movie, a video we made for the short film, where he had an actor playing the role before we animated. Colm just wanted to see what the actor’s decisions were before doing the voice. He had extensive notes on the script, the motivation and the ideas. He prepared for it as if he were preparing for a play he was doing on stage.
DEADLINE: So, you don’t storyboard? You make live-action versions of your films?
LAVIS: We never storyboard. Occasionally, when we have interns or teach classes, it drives the teachers who are in the room crazy when we tell the students this. We much prefer to work with actors. Sometimes we hire actors or just work with friends. We have a cast we just use over and over again, and we develop the story and character gestures with them. We even set up these rooms with just the objects that they need to pick up. We love seeing what actors bring to a scene. After all this is done, then we move the puppets frame by frame with total control and no fun involved whatsoever [laughs]. The moment we work with an actor is when the scene really comes to life and we get to play.
SZCZERBOWSKI: 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? The storyboarding happens intuitively in the live moment, rather than before we start shooting. 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. For us, the idea of storyboarding it in real time is where the fun comes, the last moment we’re going to have that’s fun.
LAVIS: This is a bit inside baseball, but really, doing it this way, the actors imbue those moments with so much soul, and our job as animators is to keep much of that performance that they did in the puppet’s performance. There were little gestures like the jeweler shaking his head in a certain way, or the way he puts on his hat as he goes outside the door, or the way he reaches inside his coat for his light. Those are not our gestures; those were invented by these wonderful actors. We’re coming with the story, but it’s pretty thin stuff until actors bring something to it and then Colm brings something to it. That’s the magical collaboration of stop-motion animation. There’s so many layers of artistry going on, and we’re not talking about us; we’re talking about the people we get to work with.
DEADLINE: What else is unique about this film?
LAVIS: Interestingly enough, the film was originally French. The script was French.
SZCZERBOWSKI: We made two films, one called The Girl Who Cried Pearls and one called La Jeune Fille Qui Pleurait Des Perles with another local actor, James Hyndman, who did it in French. And from that, our composer, Patrick Watson, had to facilitate an interesting challenge. James has a very bassy voice and Colm has a lighter voice, so he had to find instruments that worked with both of them.
LAVIS: Which was fascinating because this movie is just wall-to-wall narration. It’s just talking, talking, talking. Patrick, who has worked with us on our other films, which were way less verbal or nonverbal, could guide the emotion of the story through the music. He had to work under, through, and around Colm’s voice without [the audience] really feeling it and letting the narration come forward. The film is a fable with a modern twist. One of the things that Patrick did to hint at the ending was creating this beautiful piece of music, while the girl is crying pearls, which was designed to be synthetic keyboard music. And even outside of that, as well, I think he did a great job of scoring all those classically romantic stop-motion emotional moments.
DEADLINE: This movie is multifaceted. It can be about first love, greed or classism. What themes did you want to really emphasize?
LAVIS: The power of storytelling is to create value and belief. It’s summed up by the grandfather at the end in his line about the power of storytelling. That’s what movies are and what we do for a living [make people believe the stories we tell them]. The themes of poverty, greed and love, that’s the part that the viewers are putting into their enjoyment of the movie. All of those ingredients are baked in the movie, but which one the audience picks up on really depends on who you are when you’re watching this story play out.
SZCZERBOWSKI: There’s also a bit of meta commentary on what writers and filmmakers do in the first place. The beauty of this confabulation is that you’re creating something out of nothing and building a mythology around this thing that you invented, thereby giving it meaning and value. If the narrative around these things were to change, then so would its value.
DEADLINE: From a prior Oscar nomination in 2008 for your film Madame Tutli-Putili to your current run with this short film at TIFF, Annecy and landing the 2026 Oscars shortlist, what has all of this meant for you?
LAVIS: Honestly, the journey for this film has been amazing. We’re meeting so many extraordinary people who want to talk to us about the movie and we’re grateful every time.
SZCZERBOWSKI: We’re almost incredulous. We’re wondering whether this has something to do with a counterreaction to our shared fears of AI, which is why people want to discuss this with us so much, perhaps because our film is handmade.
LAVIS: I also think our film is the fastest 17 minutes most people have all year [laughs]. We really wanted to tell a good story, and our greatest fear with this movie was trying to figure out how to make nice puppets and light things in a way that is aesthetically –
SZCZERBOWSKI: Effective.
LAVIS: It was such a challenge for us to tell a good story in those tight 17 minutes, and it means the world to us that people have responded with love to our story.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
English (US) ·