The Offbeat Production Methods Of The NFB’s Stop-Motion Film ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’

On his 80th birthday, inside a grand Parisian villa, a wealthy grandfather catches his granddaughter stealing a rare pearl from his collection. But instead of reacting with anger, the moment opens a portal to the past. He sees something of himself in her and recounts a long-buried memory: as an orphan in 1910 Montréal, he once lived in squalor, squatting in a collapsing tenement. Through a small hole in the wall, he discovered a girl — persecuted and isolated — who wept pearls. What began as secret fascination became an obsession, and a miracle that altered both their lives.

This is the premise of The Girl Who Cried Pearls, a stop-motion short film by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski (Madame Tutli-Putli, 2007). It is a modern fable told with reverence and oddity, a story about desire, memory, and the strange value humans place on things, especially those bound to stories. With handcrafted puppets, a score by longtime collaborator Patrick Watson, and a tactile visual language, the film shimmers between epochs, between reality and myth.

The film uses two distinct puppet styles. “The past ones — we wanted them to look like religious icons,” Szczerbowski explained. “Whereas the present-day puppets were silicone and painted as realistically as possible.”

The handmade oil-painted puppets evoke the work of old European masters like Jiří Trnka and Elbert Tuganov, but there’s also a strong religious influence. “We were going for a Catholic iconography,” Lavis said. “Like the old wooden saints in a rural church. That was the feeling; we wanted the faces to feel really worn.”

To distinguish the story’s temporal layers, the filmmakers not only used different puppet materials but also distinct animation approaches. “We wanted a chunk of the film to feel like Eastern European animation,” Lavis said. “But also, there’s been a push in stop motion, with 3d printing, to get so close to cg that it’s almost indistinguishable. And we simply could not. First, we couldn’t afford it. So doing 80% of what the industry’s doing would’ve been kind of sad. Then we thought, if we can’t match them, or even come close, let’s take puppets back 150 years and show the theatrical power of a puppet.”

The puppets’ movements have a kind of stumbling realism, recalling the awkward gestures of live puppeteering. “Everybody uses a ball-and-socket armature, and I think that gives you certain restrictions,” said Szczerbowski. “They’re precise and strong, but we use aluminum wire. With our puppets, you can crush and squeeze them in ways ball-and-socket armatures can’t. With claymation, you can shape them further, so you get more fluidity.”

The duo also eschews traditional pre-production methods like storyboarding. “We invite actors to the studio and build a kind of primitive black-box set with tape marks, fake desks, and an idea of where a window might be, and then run the scene over and over,” said Szczerbowski.

They film these rehearsals with multiple handheld cameras — capturing close-ups, mid-shots, long shots — and preserving spontaneous gestures and emotional rhythms. “I think some of that fluidity comes from the immediacy of handheld cameras. A stiffness gets removed. It feels more like cinema language. When the camera and puppet are both moving, it becomes more convincing than something abstracted from a storyboard.”

“We’re not rotoscoping,” he added. “It’s about capturing those weird little gestures you wouldn’t think about. Like reaching for a coffee cup, it’s not always obvious. You might start with the wrong hand and switch halfway through. There are false starts.”

This instinctive messiness is something they deliberately preserve. “An animator is often not just an actor, they’re also the director. But the gestures aren’t pretentious; they have a purpose,” Szczerbowski said. “People often strive for the economy of movement, but we don’t. We let the actors go wild. In fact, we encourage them to exaggerate. It might look ridiculous, even like overacting. But when used as reference for puppetry, the puppet rises above its role. It stops feeling like a puppet; it becomes a live object.”

A constant in their creative world is composer Patrick Watson. “I don’t even think we ever ask him to do the music,” Szczerbowski said. “He just assumes that whatever we do next, he’s doing the score. When we say we’re making another movie, he says, ‘Great, I already have ideas.’”

They began trading musical sketches years before production. “We started a folder with little pieces and improvisations,” Lavis said. “He’d be in France somewhere, playing an unusual piano with a particular flavor, and he’d record little pieces.” Some of these improvisations, performed live during a work-in-progress screening, ended up in the final film.

“He’s terminally a romantic; his music isn’t melancholy, it’s beautiful” said Szczerbowski. On previous collaborations, such as Cochemare (2013), the filmmakers would steer him away from romanticism, but for The Girl Who Cried Pearls, they embraced it. “This time, we needed a romantic soundtrack—something beautiful to sell the hook. And he did very well.”

Watson’s sensitivity to narrative structure even helped reshape the film’s edit. Lavis recalled, “He looked at it and said, ‘I can’t work with this. Every time I try to build a mood in the past, you drag me back to the present and it just fucks everything up. If you just stayed in the past for a while, the movie would work better, and I could actually cook a little.’”

They trusted his instincts. “So we reduced; we cut a lot of animation to make it flow the way Pat needed. And he was completely right,” Szczerbowski said.

For the English-language narration, they turned to Colm Feore. “We’ve been fans of his since Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” Lavis said. “He had the text before we met him and, as if it were Shakespeare or Molière, he made detailed notes and had choices already worked out.”

Interestingly, some of those choices were inspired by the filmmakers’ own temporary voiceover recordings. “Sometimes he went with those,” they said. “Which was fascinating, because they were amateur takes, but sometimes there was an interesting emotion in them.”

Near the end of The Girl Who Cried Pearls, the grandfather delivers a quiet but pivotal reflection about objects and the stories attached to them, a moment that distills the film’s thematic core.

“It’s definitely a movie about the value we put on things,” said Lavis. “One of the Robertson Davies books talks about this. If you have an old rag with some kind of dried blood on it, you throw it in the garbage. If I tell you that old rag was in the breast pocket of Louis XIV before he was executed, that’s a priceless rag. I think that’s a big part of the theme of the movie.”

Szczerbowski recalled a specific influence that helped sharpen this idea: a documentary about an Austrian art forger. “He would make perfect copies of paintings, not just copies, but he did something clever,” he said. “He knew most paintings don’t exist anymore; they’ve been lost in fires or wars, or sold and never tracked. So he would paint ones that were missing. For example, with someone like Rembrandt, there are paintings we don’t know what happened to. So he’d paint those and pretend he’d discovered them. And people went crazy.”

Eventually, the forger slipped. “He used the wrong titanium white, which was discovered under some X-ray,” said Szczerbowski. “That pigment didn’t exist in the period he claimed the painting was from. So he got revealed. Discredited. And those paintings overnight went from ‘Look at the magnificent composition and the brilliant use of color’ to ‘This is garbage.’”

“Though he should’ve seen it coming, he was actually sad and kind of insulted,” Szczerbowski added. “He said something like, ‘These are great paintings I made. You liked them yesterday. You thought they were amazing. And today you think they’re fucking garbage. What gives?’ And we realized the only thing that changed was the narrative. The myth. The mythology changed.”

That realization struck a chord with both filmmakers. “It’s actually the job we do as writers and filmmakers,” Szczerbowski said. “We create mythologies. These new narratives give all the value to the thing.”

“Like Chris was saying,” he continued, “is this a dollar-store earring that’s worth a dollar, or is this the earring that David Bowie wore at the last Ziggy Stardust concert?”

Lavis extended the analogy: “Or is this the piano Leonard Cohen played, or is it a piano from a pawn shop? If you could actually switch them, without anybody knowing, the one that has the story, that it’s the Leonard Cohen piano, is gonna fetch quite a lot at auction.”

“The object remains the same,” Szczerbowski said. “It’s the invention we lay on top of it.”

And for them, that process isn’t metaphorical, it’s literal. “That’s the nature of our job,” he said. “To take garbage — stuff that should end up in recycling — that we pull out and stick in our bags on the way to work, glue all the stuff together, paint it with dollar-store paints… and claim that it’s real. And at that point, it actually becomes valuable.”

It’s ironic, and perhaps deliberate, that a film so deeply invested in the value of narrative is also so visually arresting. The puppets, textures, and light may catch the eye, but it’s the myth they carry that lingers.