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In a style that feels nostalgic and nascent, Bree O’Donnell is crafting her singular vision of a 3D witch named Mary. Through the tiny window of short clips on Instagram and TikTok, Mary’s world seems enchanting and vast. Bree’s work exudes melancholic emotion and ethereal femininity, painting the surfaces of Mary’s world in the vibrating style of stop-motion animation, dappled with sparkling light and computer-generated surfaces so convincing it feels like you could pose the model with your own hands.
O’Donnell sat down with us to talk a bit about her process creating textures and her life’s work making magic real.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Can you tell me a little bit about your background, how you got into art, and where you learned to animate?
My name is Bree, and I’m an animator, filmmaker. And really, background starts pretty early, when I was a little kid, making a million little stories on paper and taping them together and making little books. Running around in the woods, obsessed with the idea of fantasy and magic. A need for magic to be real, which led me to just continue drawing.
And then as I got older, starting to animate. Animation was really a window to fantasy and magic and worldbuilding in a way that’s very accessible. So I refused to let go of that fantasy and refused to let go of everything I ever wanted coming true. And I think that just naturally led me to continue developing an animation craft that has been informed by whatever tools I’ve had available to me at different stages in my life or working at different companies or at different jobs.
They would have different computer programs and I would adapt from drawing to maybe doing cel animation and then taking cel animation, getting into computer animation. So that’s kind of my little background. In a simpler way, cel animator-turned-computer animator, but obsessed with that stop-motion world.
Your work feels so nostalgic to me, so texturally similar to Rankin and Bass movies.
Whoa, Rankin and Bass. You know, no one has ever brought that reference back to me. There’s something that’s, like, sizzling and alive there and really textural and really nice.
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