The miniature performers in a children’s TV show must figure out what to do when their human creator dies. Wander to Wonder goes down unexpected paths. Director Nina Gantz explains how she arrived at making her 2025 Oscars shortlisted animated short. (This Animation Scoop Interview was conducted as an Email Q&A and was edited for length and clarity. Images Credits: Gantz and Y. Bosch)

Jackson Murphy: What do you love about children’s TV shows?

Nina Gantz: I mostly like the older kids TV shows which show a lot of craft and use a lot of traditional techniques, such as The Wombles, The Clangers, Colargol and Cheburaska. A lot of them are sweet and innocent but they all have a slight weirdness which I love!

JM: How difficult was it to craft this story? There are certainly a lot of directions to take a concept like this.

NG: The difficulty with crafting the story was to choose a direction that would give the feeling of the history and success of the show. We took it in a few directions over the course of development and at some point Gilly was alive and holding the characters captive. However, due to some personal experiences, I got much more interested in the three miniature humans and how they cope with their creator passing away.

JM: How interesting of an experience was designing the set and examining the proportions of the characters and other objects?

NG: Gilly’s studio was full size and with real props, and I felt that if the tiny human characters were too large then they would look creepy, so I wanted them to look much smaller in relation to the set. This meant that we needed to make them smaller than your average stop-motion puppet, which brought some challenges. The eyelids were so tiny that they kept jumping off their faces like fleas! We spent a lot of time on our hands and knees searching for them after long days animating.

JM: What was the editing process like going back and forth from scenes of the TV show to what the characters are going through after the host has died?

NG: We were able to use old video footage of past Wander to Wonder episodes to establish the backstory of the characters instead of flashbacks which helped us jump between the past and present. It’s also edited as a series of vignettes and snapshots so it feels like a large amount of time is passing. It allowed for more experimentation in the edit after we had finished shooting. (Joseph Comar edited the film).

JM: How was it working with the great Toby Jones and the rest of your cast?

NG: The entire cast were marvelous.Toby Jones and Amanda Lawrence delivered exceptional performances during the voice recording, bringing the characters to life with far more depth than I ever anticipated. Luckily, we also filmed the session so we could use their facial expressions as a reference for the animation, which I feel gave the puppets the sense of human vulnerability and soul that you can see in the final film. Neil Savage, who plays the live-action Uncle Gilly, was also brilliant and completely embodied the kids TV presenter I was looking for.

JM: Many children and adults are devoted to their favorite television programs. What animation work inspires you?

NG: When I was young I loved watching the old Disney films and series like Pingu and Pat & Mat, but later at art school, I discovered the work of Jan Švankmajer and Michaela Pavlátová. Their films made me realize that animation is not just for children and it showed me that I could tell my kind of stories through this medium. Wander to Wonder was also very much inspired by the work of Ray Harryhausen. I love the traditional ways of combining live-action with stop-motion. His films don’t hide the craft completely but it still looks very convincing. It just ages so beautifully.

JM: You’re a BAFTA winner [for animated short Edmond]. How would you feel about becoming an Oscar nominee?

NG: When I was making this film, I was mostly thinking ”I need to do everything in my power to make sure this doesn’t turn out rubbish!” So the idea of getting an Oscar nomination is wild. I would be incredibly proud of the whole team because they worked so hard on it.