Tim Burton is proving that sometimes the tiniest things take the most time—especially if you’re making them move one frame at a time. He spent EIGHT MONTHS creating a 90-second stop-motion animation for the first episode of “Wednesday” Season 2, and he says it was a chance to return to the art form that launched his career.
If you’re not familiar with stop-motion, it’s the ultimate patience test. Artists hand-build sets and puppets, then photograph them one painstaking frame at a time, moving them ever so slightly between shots. The process is so slow that even a short scene can take weeks or months to complete—so eight months for a minute and a half is actually… pretty on brand for Burton.
For this sequence, Burton brought in the same team that worked with him on “Corpse Bride”. The scene follows a Nevermore Academy student who crafts a clockwork heart to replace his own—a perfectly eerie concept for a show that’s already dripping with gothic quirk. Burton even designed the puppet himself.
“It’s the kind of show where we get to play around with things,” Burton told “The Hollywood Reporter“.
“I went old school with it and kept telling the animators, ‘We need to pretend I’m back in my student days, doing it like I did at the beginning.’”
That “beginning” includes Burton’s early short film “Vincent“ from 1982, a stop-motion ode to childhood imagination, Vincent Price, and the macabre. Fans have already noted the similarities in tone and style between that short and this new sequence. If you’ve never seen “Vincent”, it’s worth the six minutes of your life—it’s Burton in pure, unfiltered form.
While most big productions would lean on CGI for such a scene, Burton’s choice to go physical and tactile shows why his work still stands out. Stop-motion might be slow, but the result has a handcrafted charm that digital animation rarely matches. It’s the cinematic equivalent of hearing a vinyl record instead of a compressed MP3—you can feel the fingerprints on it.
And judging by the buzz among “Wednesday” fans, those eight months were well worth it. Now the only question is whether Burton will sneak more stop-motion moments into the season.