Tim Burton has always been the master of all things creepy and eerie. Give him a gloomy set, a quirky character, and a touch of whimsy, and he’ll spin it into something unforgettable. But there’s one scene in ‘Wednesday‘ Season 2 that breaks all his past records.
No, it’s not Wednesday’s one-liners or Thing crawling across the floor, but barely a one-and-a-half-minute short and unsettling sequence. Surprisingly, those 90 seconds took eight months to make. And once you know how it was done, the duration makes perfect sense.
‘Wednesday’: The History Of Puppet Nightmare
The moment happens when students share a chilling Nevermore tale. A student’s heart gives out, and instead of a normal flashback, the show cuts to puppets. No, we are not talking about CGI puppets but the old-school, handmade stop-motion. We see the heart pulled out, replaced by a crude mechanical one. It ticks unevenly, almost painfully, as the puppet stares.
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There’s nothing aesthetic; movements are stiff, shadows flicker, and almost nothing feels right. But that’s the best part about it. It seems just like the morbid fairy tale Burton has been spinning his entire career. The weird part: the puppet even bears a resemblance to Burton himself, as if he stepped into his own show just to wink at us.
Originally, this flashback scene was going to be shot the usual way: live actors, voiceover, done and dusted. But the showrunners, Al Gough and Miles Millar, saw a chance to do something nobody else on TV would dare. And to Burton, it felt like a homecoming. “This is the kind of show where we get to play around with things,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
Adding to it, he said, “And that was special to me. I kind of went old school with it, and I ended up designing the puppet.” Yes, Burton himself designed the puppet. And then, he told his animators (Mackinnon & Saunders, the same stop-motion wizards who worked with Burton on ‘Corpse Bride’) to make the whole thing look, well, “worse”. Only Tim Burton could look at flawless animation and say, “Nah, bumpier, please.”
Eight Months Of Hard Work
You’re now probably thinking, “Eight months for this?” Well, compared to CGI, stop-motion is beautiful, but it’s also painfully slow. Every second requires 24 individual frames. Each puppet has to be moved by hand, a fraction of an inch at a time. A blink can take hours. A heartbeat can take days. Do that thousands of times and you get a minute and a half of story. So while you breezed through the season in a weekend, Burton’s animation team spent the better part of a year nudging puppets millimeter by millimeter.
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Burton is someone who’s never been fond of anything flawless. Pixar can have the polish. Burton wants the cracks. That’s why he insisted the animation look rougher, more handmade, why the puppet’s eyes linger a little too long. Why the mechanical heart ticks unevenly, like it’s about to fail. None of them were mistakes. It feels like a mini-Burton film smuggled inside a Netflix episode. You could literally lift it out of ‘Wednesday‘ entirely, play it before a midnight screening of Nightmare Before Christmas, and no one would blink.
Besides, Burton has been pretty open about his feelings on technology, trying to copy his style. When AI-generated “Burton-like” images started popping up online, he compared them to “a robot taking your humanity, your soul,” which makes this scene feel like a rebellion itself. Instead of handing it to a computer, Burton doubled down on the old way: handmade puppets, human mistakes, months of sweat. It’s as if he wanted to remind everyone, this is what real art looks like. Now, go and rewatch this ‘Wednesday‘ scene again on Netflix and get traumatized!
