A haunting tale of a ragamuffin teen who puts wealth before love, the Oscar shortlisted “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” also weighs in as the latest animated short from both the National Film Board of Canada and writer-directors Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski which bids fair for an Academy Award nomination this month.
‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’ is already one of five titles which scored an nomination for the 53rd Annie Awards in their best short subject category, announced Monday.
An Oscar nomination would be Lavis and Szczerbowski’s second after the notable “Madame Tutli-Putli” (2007) and the National Film Board’s 39th for an animated short. The NFB ranks as the third most-nominated entity in that category after Disney and MGM, as NFB chairperson Suzanne Guèvremont noted to Variety just before 2025’s Annecy Animation Festival.
Packing emotional force but also a fable about be-careful-what you-wish-for greed, “”The Girl Who Cried Pearls” is both an ode to the craftsmanship of stop-motion puppetry and a groundbreaking blend of tactile puppetry with digital innovation, reaffirming Lavis and Szczerbowski ’s status as pioneers in contemporary animation, Variety has observed.
“The Girl Who Cried Pearls” begins in Paris with the camera creeping up on a white marble mansion in a leafy street with a view of the Eiffel Tower – the epitome of bourgeois success. The granddaughter of its owner, a crickety old man, discovers a pearl in an red apple-shaped holder. “Of all the treasures in the entire room, you’ve guessed what’s most precious to me. It would seem someone has discovered my secret,” her grandfather confesses, quite willingly.
Pushed by his granddaughter to say what the secret is, he tells his tale of when he was a homeless street-kid in Montreal at the turn of the 20th century who spies on a young girl whose tears transform into iridescent small pearls. He falls in love with her, he says, but also secures two pearls which he sells to a pawnbroker – and sets out to make the girl cry more, breaking her heart.
Throughout their career, Lavis and Szczerbowski have drunk deep at the well of surrealism, the artistic movement inspiring many of the 20th century’s achievements which set out to decry the rationality and sense of propriety of middle-classes, priming the workings of the unconscious, chance and a lack of creative control.
“Madame Tutli-Putli,” the film 2008 Academy Awards contender which brought Lavis and Szczerbowski to notice, plays out, for instance, like the fever dream of a 1920s bourgeois flapper dreamt many decades later. The narrative imagines her younger self without a home and then on a train where logic is replaced by chance as she confronts her deepest fears: sex, robbery, helplessness, the death of others (the train has a morgue-like dining car) and the inevitability of extinction (she pictures a moth drawn to the light at the film’s finale). Or that at least could be one interpretation.
A highly useful article on the Canada National Film Board’s blog quotes Lavis and Szczerbowski about how their animation on “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” was shaped by happy accident. One case in point: the original maquette of the decrepit house where the young boy shelters from winter cold was left outside the studio to dry. But an unexpected rain squall hit and by the time Lavis and Szczerbowski returned, the prop was warped out of shape.
“It looked so much better that way, so we incorporated the warps into the final model,” they say.
Model for the house in ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’ Credit: National Film Board of Canada
That is reminiscent of an anecdote about how the great surrealist Luis Buñuel was sitting in Madrid bar Chicote drinking dry martinis trying to work out how he could cast Angela Molina as the supposed femme fatale of “The Obscure Object of Desire” when he already had Carole Bouquet under contract. Buñuel realized that the film would work much better if they were both cast in the same role.
“The Girl Who Cried Pearls” frames a tale within tale of the film, part set maybe 70 years later whose final stretches cannot be described without revealing multiple spoilers. Safe to say, however, that they add multiple levels of storytelling richness and reenforce the film’s social prescience in ages past and present of unfettered greed.
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. The puppets’ heads in the past are silicon moulds multi-layered by oil painting to look like aged wood. The film uses both claymation and plastic 3D printing and sets scrubbed with paint spread on garbage bags to make them look grimily weathered.
Variety talked to Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski about “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” which, produced by the National Film Board, was one of five shorts to open the 2025 Annecy Festival.
It also won the Short Cuts Award for best Canadian short film at the Toronto Festival and the Canadian Film Institute Award for best Canadian Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the second most important animation festival in the world.
In a conversation with your composer Patrick Watson and artistic director Brigitte Henry about making “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” you say, Maciek, that “without the right story, there is no value” in anything else. The grandfather says much the same towards the end of the film. I suspect here, as indeed in the film at large, that one key was the long time you spent making it, which maybe allowed you to evolve everything, including the story, more than is traditional in animation.
Maciek Szczerbowski: 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. The result was almost like telling a joke— Proper timing. Good delivery.
Could you give an early example of a crucial moment?
Szczerbowski: Just a simple line which almost gets lost that the boy says about how he spent his days at Montreal’s old port, how he stole from boxes that had fallen off ships.
Chris Lavis: You’re absolutely right about how the story evolved as we worked on it. That’s a crucial element to the process. We had animated and edited the film and watched a first version and it didn’t work. It wasn’t virtuosic on any scale. It was stuttering. It had no proper structure. It was confusing. Two things happened. Our composer, Patrick Watson, made a suggestion that he needed the film to spend more time in the past, without cutting back to the present, for him to build the music properly.
And the second?
Lavis: It didn’t feel like the grandfather was telling a story. Characters were just speaking dialogue in the grandfather’s voice. What we did – maybe the oldest trick of filmmakers after that first hellish edit—was we went back to the first impulse: The original treatment we gave to the National Film Board of Canada. We had written that like a short story. Those little narrative bridges missing from the grandfather’s dialogue were there in the original treatment. When we weaved them back into the film, it was like Eureka! Suddenly, the movie had structure and shape.
Which connects to the grandfather’s comment that “It’s always the story that gives something the value” and it’s the story of a girl whose tears become pearls is what strikes spectators most from the film….
Lavis: The story has two pillars. One, we were really interested in this idea of the grandfather, being extremely rich and wealthy and powerful, at the end of his life, discovering his granddaughter stealing something from his office and telling her his darkest secret. The second pillar is the idea that storytelling itself creates belief and value.
Szczerbowski: In so many ways it’s a commentary on what people like us or writers do. You’re making value out of nothing by inventing a narrative, by building a mythology around an object that could otherwise have become utterly worthless, and turning it into something that could end up in a museum or be priceless.
Storytelling dates back to the dawn of humankind. “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” could indeed be said to be in some ways traditionalist and in others, highly innovative, as Variety noted of your work in general. Making the film was often about using the new or making the new look old…..
Szczerbowski: We wanted the story to feel like it was found in a box from 50 years ago. That’s the whole point of that process of aging and using garbage bags and paint. Oil paint is to remove the author from the process in a way. Especially when you’re creating a fable, you don’t want it to feel like a couple of guys were sitting around inventing a fable. It should feel like it came from the collective unconscious.
A highly useful article on the National Film Board blog quotes you about how your animation was shaped by happy accident. One case in point: how you incorporated the rain-drenched warped version of your original maquette into the final model.
Lavis: We call chance an invisible collaborator.
Szczerbowski: This is part of our education, I guess. At some point, we were reading an article about Frank Gehry, the architect. He would build a maquette for a building he was designing and when it hit a particular level of of satisfaction where he knew he could have actually stopped, he would throw it out the window, and take the elevator down to the sidewalk collect all the pieces and re-glue it, knowing that it would never actually fit perfectly ever again, that there would be an element of chaos and accident. What John Cage calls indeterminacy. Something beautiful happens. You have to have had some experience in removing your own ego from your work in order to even play with these things.
Lavis: You get sick of your own decisions, too. That’s what makes it interesting.
Szczerbowski: And you’re looking forward to surprise. The whole point of us working in in collaboration is to look forward to these moments when this kind of indeterminacy happens, either because of a thunderstorm or the other person’s intervention. Usually what you get at the end is something that is really different than what you thought it would look like. For some that might be a failure, but to us it’s always a boon.