The Oscar-nominated The Girl Who Cryed Pearls, an unforgettable story of a teenage ragamuffin who prioritizes wealth over love, is also the latest animated short from the National Film Board of Canada and writers and directors Chris Lavis and Maciek Shuszabowski to be nominated for an Academy Award this month.
“The Girl Who Cryed Pearls” is one of five short stories nominated for Best Short Story at the 53rd Annie Awards, announced Monday, and one of only three short stories to win the double award.
This is Lavis and Szczerbowski’s second Oscar nomination, following the celebrated Madame Tutli-Putli (2007), and the 39th for an animated short by the National Film Board. As NFB president Suzanne Guevremont pointed out to Variety just before the 2025 Annecy Animation Festival, NFB ranks as the third most nominated organization in that category, behind Disney and MGM.
Packed with emotional power as well as a fable about being careful what you desire, The Girl Who Cryed Pearls is both an ode to the craftsmanship of stop-motion puppetry and a groundbreaking blend of tactile puppetry and digital innovation, reaffirming Lavis and Szczerbowski’s status as pioneers of modern animation, says Variety.
“The Girl Who Cryed Pearls” begins in Paris, where the camera stalks a white marble mansion on a leafy street overlooking the Eiffel Tower, a symbol of bourgeois success. Old Man Cricket, the owner’s granddaughter, discovers a pearl in a red apple-shaped holder. “Of all the treasures in the room, what was the most precious to me? It seems that someone has discovered my secret,” my grandfather confessed, rather happily.
When his granddaughter asks him what his secret is, he tells the story of his time as a homeless street child in Montreal in the early 20th century, watching over a girl whose tears turned into tiny rainbow-colored pearls. He falls in love with her, but he also secures two pearls and sells them to a pawnshop, plotting to make the girl cry more and break her heart, he says.
Lavis and Szczerbowski have been steeped in the well of surrealism throughout their careers. This art movement inspired many of the achievements of the 20th century, which aimed to denounce the middle-class sense of rationality and decorum and to stimulate the workings of the unconscious, chance, and lack of creative control.
For example, the 2008 Academy Award-nominated film that brought Lavis and Szczerbowski to prominence, Madame Tutli-Putli, plays out like a 1920s bourgeois flapper’s fever dream decades later. The story imagines her as a young, homeless woman, riding 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 imagines herself as a moth drawn to light in the film’s finale). Or that could be at least one interpretation.
A very informative article on the National Film Board of Canada’s blog quotes Lavis and Szczerbowski about how the animation of The Girl Who Cried Pearls was shaped by a happy accident. A case in point: the original model of the dilapidated house where the boy sheltered from the winter cold was left outside the studio to dry. But an unexpected rain squall hit and by the time Labis and Szczerbowski returned, the prop was out of shape.
“It looked so good that we included warp in the final model,” they say.
Model of the house from “The Girl Who Cryed Pearls” Credit: National Film Board of Canada
It brings to mind the anecdote of the great surrealist Luis Buñuel, who had already signed Carole Bouquet, sitting in the Madrid bar Chicoté drinking dry martinis and thinking about how to cast Angela Molina to play the femme fatale in The Obscure Object of Desire. Buñuel realized that the film would be better if both actors were cast in the same role.
“The Girl Who Cryed Pearls” incorporates a story within a film narrative, set perhaps 70 years in the future, and its final development cannot be described without revealing multiple spoilers. But it’s safe to say they add multiple levels of richness to the storytelling, reinforcing the film’s social foresight in times of unbridled greed, past and present.
This 17-minute short is also animation art at its finest, as seen in the extraordinary details of the pawn shop’s souvenirs, giving it an immersive and authentic feel. Previously, doll heads were created by layering silicone molds and painting them with oil to make them look like old wood. The film uses both claymation and plastic 3D printing, and the sets are scrubbed with paint spread on trash bags, giving them an eerily weathered look.
Variety spoke to Lavis and Maczek Shuszabowski about The Girl Who Cryed Pearls, produced by the National Film Commission and one of five shorts to open the 2025 Annecy Film 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 composer Patrick Watson and artistic director Bridget Henley about the making of The Girl Who Cried Pearls, you said, Mr. Macek, that “without the right story, nothing else is worth anything.” The old man says the same thing at the end of the movie. I think one of the keys here, as with the entire film, was the long production time, which allowed everything, including the story, to evolve beyond traditional animation.
Maciek Szczerbowski: This was the first story that really relied on the story. We joked that we always make experimental films, but this time we were experimenting with something traditional. Most of the time we have explored the world of dream logic and Dadaist accidents. They create stories in a kind of symbolic way that we try to manage and manage. The trick here was to tell a very specific and concise story. If you don’t understand two or three key moments, it probably means nothing. It turned out like he was joking – the timing was right. good delivery.
Can you give us an early example of a key moment?
Szczerbowski: It’s a simple line that almost gets lost, about how a boy spent his days in Montreal’s old port and how he stole from boxes that fell off ships.
Chris Lavis: You’re absolutely right about how the story evolved while we were working on it. It is an important element to the process. We animated and edited the movie and saw the first version, but it didn’t work out. It wasn’t super technical on any scale. I was stuttering. There was no proper structure. I was confused. Two things happened. Our composer, Patrick Watson, suggested that we needed to spend more time with the film, rather than returning to the present, to properly structure the music.
And what about the second one?
Lavis: It didn’t feel like an old man telling a story. The characters were just talking in the old man’s voice. What we did, which is probably the oldest trick filmmakers have ever done after the first hell of editing, was to go back to our first impulse, the original treatment we gave to the National Film Board of Canada. We wrote it like a short story. The small narrative bridges missing from Grandfather’s dialogue were present in the original treatment. When we weaved them into the film, it was like Eureka. Suddenly, the film had structure and shape.
This is connected to my grandfather’s words, “It’s always the story that gives value to something,” and what touches the audience the most in this film is the story of a girl whose tears turn into pearls.
Lavis: There are two pillars to the story. The first is that a grandfather who was very rich and wealthy and powerful, at the end of his life, discovers his granddaughter stealing something from his office and is very interested in this idea of telling her his darkest secrets. The second pillar is the idea that storytelling itself creates beliefs and values.
Szczerbowski: In so many ways, this is a commentary on what people and writers like us do. They create value out of nothing by inventing stories and constructing myths around objects that might otherwise be completely worthless, ending up in museums or being rendered worthless.
The origin of the story goes back to the dawn of humanity. As Variety pointed out about your work in general, The Girl Who Cryed Pearls is certainly traditionalist in some ways, and very innovative in others. Making a movie was often about using something new, or making something new look old…
Szczerbowski: We aimed for a story that felt like it was discovered in a box from 50 years ago. That’s the whole point of the aging process using trash bags and paint. In a sense, oil painting removes the artist from the process. Especially when you’re creating a fable, you don’t want it to feel like a couple of guys are sitting down and making up a fable. It should feel like something from the collective unconscious.
A very helpful article on the National Film Board blog quotes how animation was shaped by a happy accident. One great example is how a rain-soaked and distorted version of the original maquette was incorporated into the final model.
Lavis: We call chance an invisible collaborator.
Szczerbowski: I think this is part of our education. At one point we were reading an article about architect Frank Gehry. He would make a model of the building he was designing, and when he reached a certain point of satisfaction where he could actually stop it, he would throw it out the window, take the elevator down to the sidewalk, collect all the pieces, and glue them back together. I knew it would never actually be a perfect fit again and there would be an element of confusion and accidents. What John Cage called indeterminacy. Something beautiful will happen. Playing around with these things requires experience in removing your ego from your work.
Lavis: You also get fed up with your decisions. That’s what’s interesting.
Szczerbowski: And you’re in for a surprise. An important part of our work together is to look forward to the moments when thunderstorms or other people’s intervention create this type of uncertainty. What you end up with is usually something completely different than you imagined. What may be a failure for some, is always a boon for us.
