January 3rd, 2023 
Jackson Murphy 
Lachlan Pendragon recently won a Student Academy Award for his stop-motion animation short about stop-motion animation, An Ostrich Told Me The World is Fake and I Think I Believe It. Now he’s on the 2023 Oscars shortlist as one of the 15 finalists for Best Animated Short Film honors. Pendragon, from Brisbane, Australia, made this clever comedy at home during the early days of the pandemic. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: How does it feel to be on the Oscar shortlist?
Lachlan Pendragon: Pretty crazy. It’s been a wild ride. I was only [a few months ago] at the Student Academy Awards. It just keeps snowballing into this crazy thing. A dream come true.
JM: You have a very cool short. I saw the title, and the title obviously is a standout and unique. I went in cold… knowing nothing, and I’m glad. I was totally surprised and loved it. We are going to have to give away a few things for this piece [but not everything]. This is really a tribute to stop-motion animation. How did you decide to make this short a tribute to this art form?
LP: It is. I’ve been doing stop-motion animation since high school. I’ve always loved it and enjoyed it. In the back of my mind, I’ve also realized there’s a lot of things that can be done with computer animation. You can almost imitate the style of stop-motion. And likewise with stop-motion, there are a lot of new technologies to make it look slicker, smoother and more polished. There’s this question of, “What should stop-motion look like in order to get that charm?” There’s a lot of risk of losing the tactile, handmade qualities of stop-motion. It was very important to make sure that you never forget that this is a handmade film, and it does that to the extreme.
JM: Yes it does. And how did you figure out just how much of the process you wanted to show?
LP: That was a lot of back and forth. There were a lot of different ideas thrown around. The film is shown through a camera monitor, and you can see around it with everything that’s going on in the animator’s workspace. It was shot a lot wider, and then it was up to me: “How much do I crop in? Is this gonna be too distracting? What do I want the focus to be on?” A lot of back and forth on how much I want to show.
JM: You do the right amount. We’re watching the screen but also the hands moving just around it. Which stop-motion films and television series inspired this directly and inspired you when you were younger?
LP: Definitely Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run and those films from Aardman. Definitely Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. Those films do an amazing job of using those recognizable materials like plasticine — giving it those tactile qualities. And also what’s happening at Laika with their innovative pursuits. I’ve used a lot of 3D printing for this and that’s inspired by everything they do… and try to figure out if I can do something similar or use a tool in a cool way.
Lachlan Pendragon
LP: Yes! A long time coming. (laughs)
JM: Tell me about designing the office. What inspired that and how did that process go?
LP: I modeled it in the computer software to get an idea of all the different camera angles and how big it was gonna be — if it was gonna fit in the living room, which is where I shot it during lockdown.
JM: Wow!
LP: It all needed to fit and work and pull apart into different chunks. It ended-up being about one and half meters by one and a half meters [nearly five feet by five feet].
JM: And how long was it in your living room?
LP: About 10 months.
JM: Amazing.
LP: It shows what you can do with not very much.
JM: Being stuck in a place. And now you’re on an Academy Awards shortlist. Why an ostrich?
LP: It’s a great question. I guess one of the more boring reasons is: I was looking for… there’s this twist that happens… and it needed to work with alliteration. I had a long list of different things [it] could be. Ostrich was in there. I also wanted something that was out of place in an office setting — really big and gangly and ridiculous. An ostrich was a clear choice for me. There’s also some deeper meaning that you can read into it with a ‘head in the sand’ kind of thing, which you could suggest about an ostrich. Although [this] ostrich isn’t like that at all. It’s more like Neil is the ostrich who’s got his head in the sand.
JM: Neil is an interesting character because he has to take on a lot. What do you like about him?
LP: He’s got a lot of me in him. I do the voice. I did the acting and the animating. There’s definitely a lot of me in him… the mannerisms. He’s that underdog character who’s an oddball, doesn’t really know where he’s going in life. He doesn’t like his job and doesn’t know what to do. And to make things worse: his whole reality is crushed around him. That’s always amusing for us and horrifying to watch, sometimes.
JM: (laughs) How many versions of everyone did you make?
LP: I made six finished puppets. I had prototypes early on to test things, but there were six identical puppets that I made. The weird thing about stop-motion is that everything has a shelf life. Nothing lasts forever. They eventually break or they get dirty from handling them so much. So I made six of them. One puppet would maybe last about a minute or two of animation before I would have to retire it. I was able to incorporate that into the narrative. The whole plan of the film was to incorporate as much of this into the narrative. Make fun of it. Poke fun and lift the curtain on the whole process.
JM: Right. It’s a balance. Was it tricky for you to figure out that balance? This could be seen by some of the most esteemed people in stop-motion. This is a beautiful art form, but you also want to pull back the curtain and put some comedy into this.
LP: Yeah, and that’s happened a lot in animation history. Tex Avery is a great example of the meta gag where an animated character will point to the background and be like, “Oh, where’s the background?” This is a little bit more subtle in my [short], but it’s the same idea. And it didn’t really occur to me that it would go to so many people when I finished the film. It’s amazing when I hear back from all my idols of the stop-motion world. Peter Lord from Aardman has seen the film. That’s mind-blowing that that could happen — that I would be in the same sphere.
JM: And tying into that, what your short also does is bring-up this awareness factor of characters being aware of their surroundings. Would you want all animated characters to know the worlds that they’re in?
LP: When I watch a stop-motion film, I do feel like, “Could we look around to see what’s going on in the room?” It all happened in a room somewhere. There was a cool 360-degree video made for Isle of Dogs where it was a series of interviews with puppets, but it was 360, so you could look around the room at everything that was going on at the same time. You’re feeling like you’re there in the animator’s workspace. I wanted to try to recreate that feeling, and I feel like I’ve achieved that.
JM: And what into the editing process?
LP: A lot of conventional editing stuff was figured out in the storyboarding and animatic phrase. You don’t want to animate more than you need because it takes a long time. There was quite a lot of editing in terms of making sure that it was cleaned up to a point where it all made sense, but I didn’t want to clean it up too much that it lost stuff — some of the qualities I wanted to have it there. How much do I remove certain details that shouldn’t be there? Some of the hands of the puppets had defects because they’re very small and very hard to make. Sometimes I just had to roll with this hand that I made even though it’s got a hole in it. In the edit I thought, “Do I go through the effort of painting that out or do I leave it there? What’s my duty there to the audience? Is this gonna be too distracting or worth the effort?”
JM: The title has 14 words. If you are nominated for the Academy Award for this, there are going to be articles written about the fact that this is probably the nominee with the longest title.
LP: (laughs) Coming-up with the title was one of the final things. One of the jokes that was thrown around was, “Say this won an Oscar. They would have to read this out.” It’s so weird and crazy that that could happen. It’s insane. It’s been a love-hate relationship with that title because it’s very long but it has been one of the joys of it. A lot of people have found it hilarious. It definitely stands out.
JM: And when people have their printable ballots, it could be very interesting to see how it fits into the columns!
LP: (laughs)
JM: What would it mean to you to be an Academy Award nominee — to get to go to the show with quite a short, with quite a title?
LP: It would be unprecedented. This is not anything I thought would happen when I finished the film. To be honest I thought I would chuck it under the rug and move on to the next one. It didn’t feel like it could go this far. It’s been one surprise after another. It’s amazing.
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