‘Wednesday’ Season 2 Scene Took Eight Months of Moving Puppets Frame by Frame
In the season premiere of Wednesday season two, director Tim Burton returned to his stop-motion animation roots for a visually stunning flashback sequence that took eight months to complete.
The 90-second black-and-white sequence tells the tale of an ill-fated Nevermore Academy student. The character — who bears some resemblance to Burton — is a young genius who designs a clockwork heart to replace his own fragile one but is then destroyed by one of his own inventions.
The style of the sequence resembles Burton’s 1982 animated short Vincent (below), which he made while working as a Disney animator, as well as his later feature-length animated work such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride.
“I loved it,” Burton tells The Hollywood Reporter of the sequence. “This is the kind of a show where we get to play around with things, and that was special to me. In fact, kind of went old school with it and I ended up designing the puppet. I remember doing Vincent, and [we tried to go] back to the first thing I did. … I kept having to tell the animators, ‘No, it’s looking too good. No, the animation’s too slick. We need to pretend like I’m back in my student days and do it like I did it in the beginning [of my career].’”
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Showrunners Al Gough and Miles Millar said the flashback scene was originally conceived as being conventionally shot with voice-over.
“Then we thought, ‘This is such a gift where we are with the show, we have a real opportunity to be special,” Millar said. “And it just struck us that it would be a great opportunity to do some stop-motion. It felt so Tim, and most shows don’t have the luxury of being able to do this in terms of the time and the money. Tim loved the idea, and it took a really long time to pull together.”
For the animation, the team enlisted Mackinnon & Saunders, the same company that worked with Burton for Corpse Bride.
“All those sets are hand-built, all the puppets are manipulated frame by frame,” Millar said. “It’s incredibly time intensive. But the attention to detail and the love and care that was put into every single shot really shows on screen and just elevates that episode and that story. I’m so proud of it. It’s really beautiful.”
Burton has previously had to contend with people using AI to try and replicate (or steal) his animation style and called it “like a robot taking your humanity, your soul.”
Here is Burton’s debut animated short from five decades ago. The six-minute film says so much about Burton’s personality and gives an early look at elements of his style that will mark several of his later features.
Read more from Burton with Jenna Ortega for THR‘s recent cover story about season two’s release.
