Tina Kakadelis
For a certain generation, Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was their first introduction to stop-motion animation. It’s an exhausting, incomprehensible labor of love that is so difficult to wrap your head around unless you’ve spent time molding clay characters and moving them ever so slightly to create the illusion of motion. One of the animators from Nightmare Before Christmas, Anthony Scott, is helping to bring writer/director Andrew Duplessie’s story to life in The Littles.
The Littles is a blend of live action and stop-motion animation. It tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl, Juliet (Violet McGraw), who stubs her toe on a loose floorboard. This small misstep leads her to discover an entirely new world that exists under her floor. Juliet decides to investigate the odd glow and strange sounds which pulls her into a chilling otherworldly adventure.
Writer/director Duplessie’s journey to The Littles is an odd one. He is a bestselling author whose debut novel, Too Scared to Sleep, was bought by HarperCollins and Warner Brothers. Duplessie, at 26, sold his tech startup to the former CEO of Verizon before diving wholeheartedly into his writing career. He has gone viral on social media for his scary short stories and works as a produced on American Horror Stories.
Duplessie is not the only member of the cast and crew of The Littles who has quite a few horror stories under their belt. McGraw befriended the psycho killer AI robot in M3GAN and M3GAN 2.0. She’s also a member of Mike Flanagan’s group of regular actors and starred in his The Haunting of Hill House and the recent The Life of Chuck. Adding to the cast, Dominic Sherwood, whose role is unknown, starred in the cult favorite Vampire Academy and the 2017 film, Don’t Sleep.
On the crew side of the project, Anthony Scott is a bit of a legend in the stop-motion field. Aside from The Nightmare Before Christmas, he also worked on James and the Giant Peach, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, ParaNorman, and more. The Littles also promises puppets and miniatures. For building the miniature world below the floorboard, Duplessie tapped Instagram-famous hobbyist Aiden. In charge of the puppetry is Katy Strutz, fresh off projects for Beetlejuice, A24, The New Yorker, and more.
Short films often act as a calling card or a proof of concept for a larger project. Whether Duplessie plans to expand The Littles into something bigger is a question that’s up in the air. What he does want to make clear with The Littles is that he wants to rebel a bit against the world we’re living in now. Where it’s harder to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake. Duplessie puts it simply, The Littles is “deeply human.”
Directed and written by Andrew Duplessie and starring Violet McGraw, Janel Parrish, and Dominic Sherwood, The Littles will debut at New York City Comic Con this October.
