Mackinnon & Saunders, Nihil Declarandum Team On Tiffany Kimmel’s Retro-Futurist, Stop-Motion Feature ‘Heads’

Manchester’s Mackinnon & Saunders and Nihil Declarandum are teaming up on a new stop-motion feature from writer-director Tiffany Kimmel that aims to become one of the largest animated productions ever developed in the region.

The companies announced this week that they are co-producing Heads, an 80-minute stop-motion feature currently in development, with delivery targeted for 2029.

Set in a retro-futuristic Manchester, Heads imagines a world where severed human heads can survive independently from their bodies. In the film’s dystopian society, a powerful corporation persuades poor citizens to sell their heads to benefit the wealthy. The story follows two women whose lives become intertwined as they struggle to reclaim control over their own bodies and futures.

The project is billed as a fantasy story for teen and adult audiences, combining horror, social satire, and adventure. Its visual design draws inspiration from Manchester’s industrial past, with all stages of production planned for the Greater Manchester region. According to the producers, the film could generate roughly 120 jobs, with a majority expected to be filled locally.

In a release, Kimmel said:

Dark fantasy has always given us a way to explore and understand the world by imagining it as something stranger. With Heads, we are building a stop-motion universe that is gothic, satirical, absurd yet emotionally grounded. This is a story for teens and adults that explores bodily autonomy and inequality through a lens that is as unsettling as it is wondrous. We are creating the kind of animated feature film that audiences carry with them for years: visually distinctive, evocative, and unapologetically original.

Kimmel leads the project alongside creator and illustrator Chris Alsop. The producing team includes Simon Quinn, Chris Bowden, and Martina Silcock, while veteran stop-motion cinematographer Tristan Oliver is attached as director of photography. Oliver’s credits include Chicken Run, Fantastic Mr. Fox, ParaNorman, and multiple Oscar-winning collaborations with Aardman and director Wes Anderson.

Mackinnon & Saunders is best known for its character fabrication work on films including Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. More recently, the studio contributed animation work to Wednesday, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and Netflix’s The House.

Ian Mackinnon, founder and managing director of Mackinnon & Saunders, said:

Collaboration with creators sits at the heart of everything we do, and we are thrilled to be partnering with the team at Nihil Declarandum to bring the unsettling yet darkly beautiful world of Heads to life.