From London, Ont., to Hollywood: Animation short earns Oscar nomination

A handcrafted stop-motion short film rooted in fable and folklore made by an artist who grew up in London is headed to Hollywood’s biggest stage.

The Girl Who Cried Pearls co-created by Maciek Szczerbowski and Montreal artist Chris Lavis, has been nominated for best animated short film at the upcoming Academy Awards.

“We're still absorbing the news,” Szczerbowski said after learning of the nomination. “It's difficult to know what to do with such a thing. It's big.”

While the film is set in early 20th-century Montreal, Szczerbowski has deep ties to London, Ont., where he moved with his family from Poland at age 12 and completed both elementary school and high school.

The nomination marks the second Oscar nod for Szczerbowski and Lavis, nearly two decades after Madame Tutli-Putli was nominated in the same category. It places a filmmaker who came of age in London back into the international spotlight, this time with a painstakingly crafted fable that he says took five years to complete.

A modern fable, told frame by frame

The short film tells the story of a poor boy who falls in love with a girl whose tears turn into pearls.

Using handmade puppets, The Girl Who Cried Pearls explores themes of desire, choice and consequence. Szczerbowski describes the film as a love letter to Montreal, the city where he and Lavis live and work.

“Belonging to a culture demands that you not only absorb it for your own nourishment, but return some,” he said. “Think of it as a dialogue to which you have to contribute.”

Szczerbowski says his approach to storytelling was also shaped much earlier, during his years growing up in London.

As a high school student, he said it often felt like life was happening elsewhere, an experience that pushed him inward and forced him to rely on imagination.

“It certainly did a number on forcing your imagination to sustain your interest” he said. “You have to find fantastical aspects and build a universe you could happily live in without worrying too much about the world outside.”

Method to the madness

That imaginative impulse would later guide his work in animation, drawing him toward stop-motion, a medium he says he embraces despite, or perhaps because of, its slow and painstaking nature.

“Part of embracing stop motion animation as a form of making, of telling stories, means that you've said yes to the slowest imaginable way of making a film.”

In stop-motion, movement is created one frame at a time, with 24 individual photographs stitched together to produce just a single second of finished footage.

“You have to be terrifically impatient to not surrender to want to drive it towards the finish line as quickly as you can.” he said. “Before you know it, your daughter has doubled in age and in height”

Once a project is greenlit, Szczerbowski said, he and Lavis more or less disappear working in isolation for years at a time as the film slowly takes shape.

“It’s part of the reality of what we do,” he said. “We say goodbye to the world for five years and we’ve just now crawled out.”

“It was a medium that managed to absorb perfectly all of our neuroses in one shot,” he said. “That’s what gave us the courage to do something so unlikely.”

That work will now be acknowledged on the global stage when The Girl Who Cried Pearls competes for best animated short film at the Academy Awards, airing March 15, 2026.