Wendell Wild - [portable]

His characters are quilted, patched, and visibly stapled together. In his breakout feature, The Whistling Scarecrow (2011), the protagonist has a visible zipper running down his spine. For , animation is not about hiding the seams; it is about celebrating the construction of the lie. You are never allowed to forget that you are watching puppets, which makes their misery all the more poignant.

is not for everyone. In fact, he is intentionally for only a few. But for those who fall into his orbit—who see the beauty in the frayed edge and the humor in the severed limb—he is nothing less than a genius. He is the last angry man of stop-motion, and as long as his glue gun stays hot, the world remains just a little bit stranger. Wendell Wild

The film that put on the map. A scarecrow (voiced by Paul Giamatti) gains sentience on Halloween, only to realize he is afraid of birds, heights, and the color yellow. The film is a 90-minute existential crisis set in a cornfield. The climax involves the scarecrow negotiating with a murder of crows via a legal contract written in berry juice. It grossed $2 million against a $200,000 budget and has since become a staple of late-night horror programming. His characters are quilted, patched, and visibly stapled