January 7th, 2025 
Jackson Murphy 
Director Nicolas Keppens’ stop-motion Beautiful Men is on the 2025 Academy Awards Best Animated Short Film shortlist. Three brothers, who happen to be bald, go to Istanbul for hair transplants. What will they discover, will they get along, and will they feel happy with their decisions? Keppens dissects it all in this Animation Scoop Q&A. (This interview was conducted via email and was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: The concept is very attention-grabbing. Was it inspired by real life, someone you know, or just a unique idea you came up with?
Nicolas Keppens: I went to Istanbul for work in 2018. My colleagues and I stayed at a hotel which had a collaboration with a hair clinic, so in the morning, at breakfast, we were all surprised by the look of the breakfast room. It was filled with bald men, waiting for their hair transplant. It was surreal and touching at the same time. I always wanted to implement this image in the film but we decided rather late in the process to change the technique to stop-motion, which made it a very expensive sequence.
JM: Did you do research on how bald men feel about their look and why some men are desperate to have hair?
NK: My brother and I are both getting bald. So that’s about the research I did. Of course it’s a theme when you are my age (35), and we get together with friends in a bar. I asked myself the question if it’s the hair loss itself or the fact that hair is a very clear feature to recognize someone. It’s a joke I often hear to mistake a bald man on purpose for another one. It’s not something that keeps me busy daily but I think a lot of people would prefer to stand out a bit rather than be mistaken for not having a clear visual identity. Again, I don’t know, the film came with the small confesses from friends and family members.
JM: What was most interesting about making the hotel set?
NK: I drew the plans for the hotel starting from research on Booking.com. I didn’t go back to Istanbul (which is one of the reasons for the mist) but collected a lot of screenshots from similar hotels. It was nice to imagine a hotel and its history. The idea was that it was located in an old building, renovated around the year 2000, with features that are classic for tourism, like nice places messed up by vending machines, signs, etc.
JM: What did you want to convey about how the men are with each other vs. when they’re alone?
NK: The idea that we could have relationships in which we aren’t able to live nor without each other anymore. The fact that we feel lonely without certain people but also very fast frustrated when they are around.
JM: It’s set in 2021. People are wearing masks because of COVID. How grounded and ‘real’ did you want to make this film for audiences?
NK: The idea comes from a painting by Pieter Breughel that I really like. It’s called “Landscape with the fall of Icarus”. In my opinion it’s a very interesting work because as told in the title, you see a landscape with a farmer in the foreground, some ships at the sea… and in the distance you see Icarus falling in the water. This shows how every personal drama, even death, is super relative when placed in a much bigger context. It’s not that no one cares, but no one notices. Life goes on. In this film I wanted to show the same feeling in a way. The brothers have their own small drama, and although the world tries to fight a pandemic, it still remains their focus to have hair. The world clearly doesn’t care, but in a way, while having our dramas, we sometimes forget the bigger picture.
JM: No spoilers, but did you always know you wanted the story to play-out the way it does, or were there alternate endings?
NK: There were a lot of alternative endings, too many to name. One of the most important was Christmas with their mother some months later. Another one was with the operation shown on screen. I still regret that this wasn’t possible in the end.
JM: How would you feel about being Academy Award nominated for “Beautiful Men”?
NK: Proud and a bit weird.
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