How Oscar-winning animation ‘The Girl Who Cried Pearls’ used 3D printing
When I sat down to watch The Girl Who Cried Pearls (2025) this weekend, I was prepared to be moved. Not only because the animated film is made and set in my own home city of Montreal, but because it had recently taken home the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the 2026 Academy Awards. What I was less prepared for was the immediate wonder of whether the creators of the stop-motion film had used 3D printing to create the incredibly detailed, lived in sets. As it turns out, my hunch was correct: 3D printing has been cited by the filmmakers as a critical tool that enabled them to maximize their resources and bring their vision to life.
The Girl Who Cried Pears was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, a public agency that produces and distributes Canadian films. While the NFB has been behind a wide range of incredible content since its founding in 1939, it has gained a particular reputation for animated works, fostering the talent of innovative artists like Norman McLaren, Evelyn Lambart, Torill Kove, and Chris Landreth. Animators Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski continue this legacy with their award-winning The Girl Who Cried Pearls, which has brought them their first (and the NFB’s seventh) Oscar for Best Animated Short.
The film itself is a stunning stop motion about a grandfather telling his granddaughter the story of his youth growing up poor in Montreal and how a discovery changes his life forever. This narrative is brought to us through a world of intricate miniature sets that take us to various neighborhoods in a gritty, old-fashioned Montreal, from the boarded up apartment and seedy pawn shop in Saint-Henri, to the refined jeweler in Old Montreal, to the bustling industrial port.
These sets are incredibly detailed, with layers of objects and textures that convey how lived in the spaces are. It goes without saying that while much of the magic of the world was created by hand, the sheer amount of detail involved in each set would have required an incredible amount of time or labor to realize. According to the creative team, 3D scanning and 3D printing thus came to play a hugely important role in the production, enabling them to easily miniaturize certain elements and have the physical models ready within mere hours.
Chris Lavis, the co-director of the animated film, said: “The technology in this was actually largely scanning and 3D printing, which we dove into a huge way.” For the small production team, having 3D printing available to them meant that they could extend their skills and effectively do more with less.
Artistic Director Brigitte Henry was inspired to bring the technology on set by seeing how 3D printing was used on other projects she had worked on. “I bought a machine and for three months I just learned it,” she said. “It completely changed the way we work at the studio, because we could build something in a day and test it. And then, we had a scanner and we could scan stuff and miniaturize it. The ideas just kept going and going, like ‘we can take this puppet we made by hand, scan it, enlarge it, and film it in closeup. It was just endless this technology that helped us. It would not have been possible building everything by hand, it was just magical.”
Of course, it would be tough to spot a 3D printed prop amidst the intricate sets, which are equally occupied with objects from dollhouses and hand-made pieces. The overall effect is stunning and has a unique quality that is owed to the artistic talents and styles of the film’s creators. The Girl Who Cried Pearls is available to stream for free on the NFB—something I highly recommend doing.
3D printing is taking on an increasingly important role behind the scenes in film and animation. In the case of the latter, we covered how award-winning studio LAIKA has been using the technology for years to bring films like Missing Link (2019) to life. More recently, another 2026 Oscar recipient, Frankenstein (2025), used 3D printing to create detailed elements for its “bigature” models. The technology is also playing an archival function: at the BFI, for instance, archivists are turning to 3D printing to reproduce components for obsolete technologies.
