‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’ Directors Discuss Crafting a Modern Fable in Miniature

This article was written for the May-June ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 350).

“Our joke is that some of the Hans Christian Andersen stories have a Hans Christian agenda. … It would’ve been disingenuous of us to tell a story like that. It is not how the world filters through our consciousness.”

— Director Maciek Szczerbowski

Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski return to Annecy this month with a luminous stop-motion tale years in the making. The Girl Who Cried Pearls, produced by Julie Roy, Marc Bertrand and Christine Noël at the National Film Board of Canada, will make its world premiere at the festival as part of the official shorts competition. Set in Montreal at the turn of the 20th century, the 17.5-minute short is a handcrafted modern fable about a boy and a girl brought together by sorrow — and the temptations of greed.

The Girl Who Cried Pearls marks a deliberate departure from the surreal, dreamlike space that defined Lavis and Szczerbowski’s 2008 Oscar-nominated short, Madame Tutli-Putli. Working under their Clyde Henry Productions banner, the longtime creative partners embraced the challenges of linear storytelling while continuing their commitment to collaboration, creative risk and deliberate resistance to ego.

The Necklace Incident

The image that sparked the film first emerged during production of Madame Tutli-Putli, a hybrid short blending stop motion and live action. While filming a chaotic sequence that ends with the titular character in tears, a prop necklace broke unexpectedly, scattering pearls across the set.

“There was Laurie [Maher] sitting in a chair with tears streaming down her face,” Szczerbowski recounts. “And when I looked down, there were pearls all over the ground, and it was like, ‘Hey, come check this out. This is something.’”

That fleeting, accidental image became the seed of The Girl Who Cried Pearls — but it would be years before the idea took shape. Along the way, other inspirations surfaced, including Man Ray’s 1932 photograph “Glass Tears,” with its iconic close-up of synthetic pearls on a weeping face.

“The most avant-garde challenge for us was to tell a straight story,” says Lavis. “The fact is, it’s the first thing we’ve ever written that has actual spoilers,” he adds, explaining how they built what he describes as “the basic idea of this sort of Hans Christian Andersen story,” only to find themselves struggling with how to resolve it. “We couldn’t figure out a way out of that kind of basic storytelling,” he said.

“Those stories are wonderful,” Szczerbowski says. “We grew up on them, and they’re very straightforward, and they’re intriguing and unforgettable. But our joke is that some of the Hans Christian Andersen stories have a Hans Christian agenda. … It would’ve been disingenuous of us to tell a story like that. It is not how the world filters through our consciousness.”

“The most avant-garde challenge for us was to tell a straight story. The fact is, it’s the first thing we’ve ever written that has actual spoilers.”

— Director Chris Lavis

The visual world of The Girl Who Cried Pearls is both richly atmospheric and intricately detailed. Drawing inspiration from religious statuary, the directors designed puppets with serene, mask-like faces that evoke sacred iconography. The decision to leave the faces expressionless meant the animators had to convey emotion entirely through body language, posture and timing.

The animation was shot using a Canon EOS 6D DSLR camera, with lighting and even color correction captured in camera — a deliberate choice that lends the film its painterly, luminous quality. The cinematography is executed on a grand scale, employing meticulous framing and ambitious wide shots with complex camera moves, many of which the duo have detailed on their Instagram page.

The film unfolds across nearly a dozen sets, from Parisian exteriors and interiors to early 20th century Montreal neighborhoods near the Old Port. Montreal-specific details — like the vintage streetcars and familiar facades — add texture and resonate as a quiet love letter to the filmmakers’ home city.

The production team invested deeply in the film’s material world. Costumes were designed and hand-sewn by longtime collaborator Yso South, using textiles carefully selected to work at puppet scale. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of props populate the film’s miniature sets. Some were 3D printed by art director Brigitte Henry and painted by hand; others were thrifted or handcrafted from scratch, including tiny books and curiosities in the film’s cluttered pawn shop. The animation was executed by a small team, including Laura Stewart, Laura Venditti and Peggy Arel, all of whom brought their own sensibilities to the film’s finely tuned emotional beats.

Crafting Emotion in Constraint

Production began in earnest in 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic forced the team to rethink their working methods. Puppets were sculpted and exchanged through alleyway handoffs, and social distancing protocols resulted in oversized puppet heads — a practical constraint that became an unexpected stylistic feature.

In place of traditional storyboards, Lavis and Szczerbowski drew on their background in experimental theater, staging scenes with live actors and filming rough live-action cinematics to explore rhythm and timing. “We have no storyboards,” Lavis explains. “And our animatics are live action.” Storyboarding, Szczerbowski adds, felt fundamentally wrong for their process: “It’s the antithesis of live theater … This is comics. This is not film language.”

For the first time, the directors also shared animation duties with their team, embracing an “exquisite corpse” approach in which each animator worked independently. Stewart, tasked with a tender sequence of a father bandaging his daughter’s hand, delivered such emotionally precise work that the directors restructured animation assignments around her sensibility.

They even began splitting scenes between animators, with one handling a character on one side of the frame while another animated the one opposite — a practical workaround that soon evolved into a creative choice. “We took away this idea that shots are sacred,” says Lavis. “And that actually became this whole new technique that we’d never indulged before … it almost becomes like an improvisation where you take over a sentence.”

Sound, Music and the Clyde Henry Vibe

To score the film, Lavis and Szczerbowski turned to longtime creative partner and Canadian recording artist Patrick Watson, whose earlier collaborations with the duo include Gymnasia, Strangers and a series of music videos. Watson’s music is integral to the atmosphere of The Girl Who Cried Pearls — so much so that the directors credit it with saving the film during a difficult editing phase.

“There was a truly dark moment,” Szczerbowski recalls, “when we first assembled the entire thing into a running picture and realized that it was gravely lacking in tempo.” Watson immediately saw what was missing. “‘Linger,’ he said. ‘Let these things play out so I can actually give them emotional meaning.’” The suggestion ultimately reshaped the film’s pacing — and deepened its emotional core.

The idea for The Girl Who Cried Pearls first surfaced over 15 years ago, but the project didn’t gain traction until Lavis and Szczerbowski connected with producer Julie Roy following a 2017 retrospective screening of Madame Tutli-Putli at Annecy. Then head of the NFB’s French Program, Roy approved The Girl Who Cried Pearls as a French-language production — a decision the filmmakers recall with poignancy. Although the NFB’s English and French programs have since merged, the directors still consider the project primarily a French film.

“We actually have two really unique and really, I think, pretty good films in both languages,” Szczerbowski says, noting the separate English and French narration recorded by Canadian actor Colm Feore and theater veteran James Hyndman.

In 2023, The Girl Who Cried Pearls was presented at Annecy as a work in progress — the first time a short film had been featured in that format. This year, the creative journey of the filmmakers has come full circle as the short is one of 35 titles competing in the festival’s official competition.

For more info, visit nfb.ca/animation.