The Directors of Prize-Winning Short ‘Budō’ on Crafting a Stop-Motion Cat Tale

When a lonely widow comes across a stray cat on her way to the supermarket one day, her life takes an unexpected turn in Alexander Toma and Amanda Aagard’s charming stop-motion short Budō, which won the Oscar-qualifying Best Animated Short award at the Palm Springs International ShortFest last weekend.

We wanted to find out a little more about these talented Swedish directors, so we emailed them a few questions, and they were kind enough to provide us with their insightful answers:

Animation Magazine: First of all, congrats on the recent success of your charming and unpredictable short, which took home the big prize at Palm Springs ShortFest this past weekend. Can you give us a little bit of background about Budō and how you came to make it?

Amanda Aagard: When COVID hit Sweden our regular work in the commercial film industry almost completely disappeared. As a way to cope with loss of work and to stay creative, I started building miniatures at home based on memories and pictures from when I used to live in Japan 10 years ago. It was then Alex who felt that we should make a film in this world. So the set was designed before the story! I have always wanted to shoot a film in Japan, but it has always felt too complicated with all the expenses, permissions, money, etc. Budō made it possible for us to shoot in Japan without leaving Sweden!

Alex: The miniature Tokyo world Amanda created really made me inspired to write a story, and so the first draft of the script was ready in a day or two. This was also the first time I wrote something for animation and I felt a strong urge to just explore the possibilities. I think my naïveté about the whole animation process was probably a good thing during this stage, so I got excited to write things that would have been impossible to do in a live-action short film. The starting point was that I wanted to set up a tone in the beginning that made you totally unprepared for some fun and quirky twists and turns!

When did you begin work on it and how long did it take to make?

Pre-production started during the pandemic in 2020 with a long period of set building, script tweaking and of course financing. We started shooting in 2022 and finished in 2023 five months later. We spent around a year in post-production and had our premiere during early 2024. So in total, it took about four years!

Why do you love working in this medium?

For us, stop motion opened up the possibility to do stuff that would be very expensive or even impossible to do in live action. During shooting and animating we discovered that it was the freedom that made it a really special medium. How fast you can make light changes, cinematography choices, blocking, etc. You see the results very fast and you can tweak it to perfection, which is sometimes also kind of dangerous when you’re already pressed for time … and a perfectionist (Alex speaking).

We also need to add that in this time of AI making its way into every aspect of filmmaking, working with miniatures and hands-on animation feels important. Filmmaking is so much about the process, and if you throw that out the window you’re not doing film anymore. Let’s keep creativity in the hands of the people and let AI do our chores instead!

How many people worked on the project?

We (Alex & Amanda) directed and produced the film together, and animated a fair part of it as well. Our head of animation, Mikael Lindbom, was a big part of the team and did a lot of the more complex shots. All in all, there were about 15 people working on the film.

How big were the puppets/sets and what were they made of?

Budō is made in a 1:8 scale. The main ball jointed puppet Miho is about 17cm (6.7 inches) and her felted companion Budō the cat differs in scale during the film; from the smallest one being around 7cm (2.75 inches) in height to the biggest one where his face is over 40cm (15.7 inches) wide.

We worked with two main sets; the big exterior main street, which was around 4.5 meters long, and the small interior apartment where Miho lives. It’s built in a bunch of different materials, from MDF for the house base to paper and clay for food items and smaller props. We wanted to make as much as possible by hand, and avoid 3D printing, but in the end we printed two items which needed high stability, everything else was made by hand.

What would you say were your biggest challenges?

Amanda: Since this was our first stop motion, all aspects regarding animation were a big challenge in the beginning. We had a great teacher in our head of animation Mikael Lindbom, who taught us everything we know today. Of course time was also a problem, as it often is in all kinds of animation. At first we scheduled two months for the shooting but four months later we were still in a cold garage animating. Things going wrong during filmmaking is just part of the process and we’re used to it but it’s still very frustrating when you’ve been shooting a scene for 10 hours and you lose an eyebrow somewhere on the floor, and now you’re spending 20 minutes crawling around on all four looking for a 2mm-wide eyebrow in a shitty dark studio.

Alex: I only cried two times during the shooting process…

What do you love about the final short?

Amanda: I love that we succeeded in creating our own little Tokyo in a cold studio in the middle of the Swedish winter! I’m really happy with the level of detail we managed to put into Budō, and I’m pretty sure we managed to not misspell any of the Japanese signs in the background haha … I’m also really happy with the ending song we composed together with musician Isak Lundholm, it really captures everything I love with the Japanese anime feel we wanted to explore. I wanted it to feel like a classic cool anime soundtrack and I think Isak nailed it!

Alex: For me, there are two main things I’m crazy proud of. First there’s the look we managed to create thanks to our gaffer Mikael Linell and our grader Sander Wan Wijk who really pushed us to go in a direction we’re not used to. I’m just really proud of the cinematography. Secondly I’m so happy when people approach us after a screening to share their interpretation of the story and their take on what’s really going on. If we’ve managed to make people have thoughts that they really want to share with us, it can’t get any better than that, especially since we’ve gotten a lot of different and creative takes on it!

What did you love best about the festival experience?

We had our international premiere at Tribeca Festival in June 2024, where our short was part of “Animated Shorts Curated by Whoopi G,” so meeting Whoopi Goldberg was a crazy surreal experience — not to mention the Robert De Niro’s directors lunch… We ended up receiving a Special Jury Mention in the animation category, crazy! We also just received the news that the film won Best Animated Short at Palm Springs International ShortFest which is a really big win for us! Having also screened at AFI Fest and Atlanta it seems like U.S. audiences really enjoy the film.

Of course, we can’t travel to every festival we screen at, but when we do the most enjoyable thing is meeting the audience and other fellow filmmakers. In a couple of days we will travel to the BIFAN festival in South Korea which will be our first time attending an Asian festival. Hope to receive some more fun interpretations of the story!

Who are your big animation heroes?

Amanda: I really enjoy the work of Laika (especially Kubo), but my heart is with the more messy and crowded type of animation. As a set designer at heart, Wes Anderson’s (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs) style will always be my fave. I love the stories, but for me the set design and especially the set dressing is a never-ending pleasure to get lost in.

Alex: Maybe it sounds cliché, but I cannot not mention Miyazaki as one of my heroes. Budō for me is definitely a little homage to the worlds he creates. When it comes to stop motion, I really enjoyed Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail and of course Mary and Max is also crazy good. There is such an amazing tone in his films that wouldn’t have been the same if it wasn’t stop motion. There’s also an animated film neither me nor Amanda have been able to get out of our heads since we saw it, and it’s Jérémie Périn’s Mars Express. Just watch it, it’s absolutely amazing!

What are you working on next?

Amanda: We are in the very early development stage of our next stop-motion short, which is an existential sci-fi comedy under the working name The Oldest Man in the Universe. We hope to go into production during 2026! Space has always been a dream location, and once again stop motion gives us the possibility to make a film in a pretty complicated environment! But right at this moment I’m finishing up my work as a set designer for Anna Mantzaris’ upcoming short Please and set building for Niki Lindroth von Bahrs short, The Rose.

Alex: Except writing on our next short as Amanda mentions, I’m also working on developing my first live-action feature film through a talent program here on the west coast of Sweden called “Five4Fiction”. The long format is a completely different beast, but I’m crazy excited for the challenge!

Any tips for young animation filmmakers who want to get into the shorts world?

We think that naivety is a pretty healthy thing to have when getting into the animation business. Budō was our first stop motion and we really approached the project as more of live-action directors, which I think really was to our advantage. I don’t know if we would have had the guts to get into it if we knew how hard the process would be … But now, being on the other side and looking back, it was such a great experience! We’ve already forgotten about all the hardships … haha!

We would encourage younger filmmakers to just go for it. You don’t need those expensive fancy cameras you do for live action, you just need time and space. Go build something cool and try not to lose it! Or do, that’s healthy too.

See more of Amanda and Alexander’s work at amandaaagard.com, alexandertoma.com and amsaga.se.