2025 Oscars Short Film Contenders: ‘Tennis, Oranges’ Director Sean Pecknold

Cartoon Brew is putting the spotlight on animated short films that have qualified for the 2025 Oscars.

In this installment, we’re looking at Tennis, Oranges from American filmmaker Sean Pecknold. The short earned its Oscars qualification by winning the short jury award at New Hampshire Film Festival.

As a robot vacuum in a pandemic hospital quits its repetitive job, Tennis, Oranges follows this peculiar protagonist as it travels to Chinatown looking for meaning. There, the vacuum befriends a rabbit trapped in his own repetition. Through this chance encounter, our robotic character discovers community and purpose beyond his programmed cleaning routines in this moving stop-motion short.

Cartoon Brew: Why did you choose rabbits to portray the story’s very humane characters?

Sean Pecknold: I’ve always loved anthropomorphic stories. Watership Down was one of my favorite books as a kid, as well as Redwall, Velveteen Rabbit, Wind In The Willows, Roald Dahl, Narnia, etc. I think when my imagination was forming I was attracted to the type of stories where there wasn’t a big difference between a human character, an animal character, or a spirit character for that matter. For me, it allows for an expansion of reality so the viewer can experience the emotions in a new way, and not get too distracted by the details or specificity of humans.

I think sometimes in cg and stop motion there can be the unavoidable ‘uncanny valley’ where a human character’s designs feel close, but not close-enough. With anthropomorphic animals you don’t necessarily have to fight against that reality.This was also a way to simplify and focus on something that was a little more forgiving, while still giving us enough expressive detail so you care about them.

Actually, in the original script the robot vacuum character was a full-scale anthropomorphic rabbit nurse who worked at the hospital, but that felt too real and too expensive, so I decided to simplify it to the vacuum. This made the animation process easier, but I also wanted to see how simple a main character could be while still evoking an emotional attachment. I think you can communicate universal ideas when you use abstraction or place human emotions in a new context. This approach gives the audience a chance to connect with the film’s themes in a fresh way.

What was it about this story or concept that connected with you and compelled you to direct the film?

When I first moved to Los Angeles I felt rather displaced and alone. Flash forward a year, and I realized what was missing from my life was a space to make films and try to build community! So I rented an old art gallery on Chung King Road in Chinatown. And I convinced Adi Goodrich, my wife and eventual production designer of Tennis, Oranges, to join me there. We formed our creative studio Sing-Sing and for four years worked there most hours and days, and slowly met more people on the street.

In 2019, we moved out of the studio and said our goodbyes to our friends on the street — two of whom we’d seen almost every day for four years. The street stayed with us, and the idea of creating an animated short film set there continued to grow in our minds. Throughout the pandemic year of 2020, there was an overwhelming sense of sudden, large-scale loss. Although I already had the script and storyboards completed by that time, I felt a desire to create a film that explored a search for friendship, but also illustrated a sense of release or contentment for someone nearing their final moment. Additionally, we had recently made several music films that relied on choreography to convey the story, and I was eager to expand this approach into animation — telling a story using only movement, sound, and music. Although the pandemic has waned, we now find ourselves in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, with people feeling more disconnected than ever. So this became something I wanted to explore deeper.

What did you learn through the experience of making this film, either production-wise, filmmaking-wise, creatively, or about the subject matter?

I learned to trust your original impulse to make something, even when it feels impossible. If you have a vision for something, and you really must make it, you will figure out a way to make it whether you have a million dollars or ten dollars. This can take six months, three years, or ten years! But the important thing is that you begin, and keep moving forward, always keeping in mind why you wanted to make the thing in the first place.

I learned our small studio (primarily myself and Adi and frequent collaborators) can create high-quality work on a very independent scale. Funding for animated shorts is pretty scarce in the U.S. so I ended up self-producing it, doing some of the animation, the lighting, cinematography, and all the post, which took a lot of time, but it kept costs down, and also helped keep the workflow contained and swift. We were very specific about how we were spending the little money we had and making sure what we spent ended up on the screen. Next time, I will definitely try to not do all of the rig removal myself.

Though it was a difficult journey to make the film, I’m proud that we were able to learn lessons along the way, adapt as needed, bring in new collaborators to keep it exciting, and in the end, finish a film that we were proud to put into the world. It’s comforting knowing the independent film and animation communities will continue to make their films, regardless of what their budgets are. In doing so, we can show that you can make something special with less.

Can you describe how you developed your visual approach to the film? Why did you settle on this style / technique?

I’ve worked in all styles of stop motion from pixilation to claymation and multi-plane glass with paper puppets, but I’d always wanted to make a proper 3d puppet stop-motion film. What makes stop motion special is that it has a timeless quality to it that I believe connects with the viewer in a different way.

As far as the visual look of the film, Adi and I had spent so many hours walking around Chung King Road and soaking up the visual inspiration there, we had a lot to be inspired by. So it became more about how to translate the real-life inspiration into miniature form, what the colors would look like, what shape the architecture would take, etc. Adi developed the color palette, some inspired by real life, others from old photographs from the 1970s. We’re always trying to find a balance between warm and cool colors and find harmony when those tones support each other.

For the photographic look of the film, I wanted to create a stop-motion look that felt more like live-action. Sometimes stop motion can intentionally draw your eyes to the fact that everything is small, but I wanted to make it feel like this world was as large as our own. So I developed a look of framing, lighting, and depth-of-field that pushed it more towards the live-action sense of scale.