‘Living Large’ Tackles Heavy Themes with Stop-Motion Puppetry (and Real Hair)

Director Kristina Dufková tells IndieWire about her Annency Jury Award winner, which follows a teen struggling with bullies, puberty, and his weight.

For those who lack patience, watching stop-motion animation is akin to watching a magic trick. Even shortcuts don’t cut down the time-consuming process — and watching the Czech stop-motion animated film “Living Large,” the feature film debut from director Kristina Dufková, is a jaw-dropping wonder.

Nevermind the stop-motion characters; the Jury Award winner at the 2024 Annecy International Animated Film Festival also includes exotic animals rendered in stop-motion, along with multiple cooking sequences involved enough that the creators released a companion cooking book in the Czech Republic and France. Is it any wonder that Dufková spent 13 years on the film?

First introduced to the story — 12-year-old Ben is hit hard by puberty, which gives everyone a reason to comment on his weight, while juggling divorced parents, a burgeoning band with his friends, first love, and bullies — when she read Mikaël Ollivier’s novel aloud to her daughter, Dufková was determined to bring it to screens for her. “We have a great tradition in the Czech Republic of puppetry,” Dufková told IndieWire through producer Matej Chlupacek. “And puppetry was very fitting for the theme of the film.”

Over the course of the story (written by Petr Jarchovský, Barbora Drevikovska, and Anna Vásová), the happy-go-lucky Ben undergoes the traumas of adolescence in vivid and memorable ways, from singing while cooking to battling depression. But “Living Large” never becomes bleak or too pointed; Ben is as adept at cracking a joke to defuse a tense situation at school as he is at making dinner for his mother, an exotic pet vet. And his ultimate design was a lengthy process of trial and error.

“It was very complicated to [design] Ben because he would need to look sympathetic and also, with his bigger scale when you compare him to other characters, it was complicated to fit him in the frame and for the shots themselves,” the filmmaker said. “And we spent a lot of time designing him. We were doing some tests back in 2015 or ’16.”

Part of the design for all the characters is their distinctive hair — and all the puppets used real human hair. “I wanted to animate the hair so it’s moving a bit,” Dufková said. “We tried different materials, and we found out real hair is the thing that can be animated the best way possible. They actually needed to be washed after [every day fiming]. Once, we were missing a puppet, so one of our animators had to cut her own hair and implement it on the puppet.”

Dufková and her team utilized the film’s five sets to film scenes simultaneously, but even that hack could only accomplish so much in terms of time-saving. Throughout, they relied on surprising materials to bring the story to life, from the real hair to costumes made from used clothing (including one made from Dufková’s daughter’s shirt) to cat food.

The latter was used for a sequence involving beef stew, but it didn’t make the final cut. “When we saw the edit, we were like, ‘It’s still not working somehow,’ so we decided to use real beef stew and reshot the take,” Dufková said. “And then it worked.”

Nothing could have alleviated the stress of the stop-motion scenes set at a community pool, something so daunting that the team decided to make it the final shoot of the film. “It was the biggest challenge of this shoot because we were very afraid of animating water and the whole sequence,” Dufková said. “Finally, we just decided to fake it a bit. You don’t see that many takes of the water itself — you see just a couple of general shots, and then it’s mostly close-ups [of characters]. And we were using light design heavily. So it’s created this feeling of water, but it’s not present all the time.”

As the film turns darker and Ben struggles with his emotions, Dufková leaned on her experience raising her own teenagers. “It was very difficult to find the balance in the script,” she said. “The whole film is still balancing on the edge. It’s not for [children], it’s not for adults only. It’s a very complicated, complex story.”

In other words, a story for grown-ups — and more proof that animation can bring to life even the most complex stories. Beef stew included.

“Living Large” is currently playing an awards-qualifying run in L.A. theaters; it will be released theatrically in 2025.