Anna Mantzaris On Please Her Stop Motion Ode To Neediness And Getting Stellan Skarsgrd To Play Winston

Creative Boom: News Motion Anna Mantzaris on Please, her stop-motion ode to neediness, and getting Stellan Skarsgård to play 'Winston' The Enough and Fuzzy Feelings director and filmmaker returns to short filmmaking with a tender, funny and increasingly unhinged portrait of people who just want to be loved. Written By: Katy Cowan 22 June 2026 Most of us spend a fair amount of energy hiding the needy, pathetic parts of ourselves. (I know I do.) Anna Mantzaris wanted to put them on screen instead.

Her new stop-motion short, Please, is a comedy about the very human longing to love and be loved – told through a run of loosely connected, tender and absurd scenes, and anchored by a starring voice performance from Oscar-nominated Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård as a character named Winston. The film won Audience Award at Animafest Zagreb earlier this month and will be screened at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this week. It marks Anna's return to short filmmaking after her enormously successful Good Intentions and Enough, and her Emmy-winning film for Apple, Fuzzy Feelings.

Anna, who also animated on Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs, wrote and directed Please, with additional voices from Molly Nilsson, Jonatan Unge and Ika Nord, and music by Phil Brookes. The idea has been bubbling in her head for ages. "It started during the Covid pandemic and the lockdowns in London, when everyone was so isolated for a long time and so much became online," she tells Creative Boom. "We became more obsessed with our self-image because we saw ourselves on screens in Zoom calls all day.

We spent a lot of time looking at ourselves while feeling disconnected from other people." It was this acute self-awareness running alongside a deep hunger for connection that became the film's beating heart. "I wanted the characters to try to break out of this bubble, to reach out, to show their longing, but in a not-so-perfect way." Running through Please is Anna's pushback against self-help culture and its promise that we can optimise our way out of difficult feelings. "I love the flaws we have as humans – I think it's what makes us interesting and relatable," she says.

"There's this self-improvement idea that we can somehow decide what and when to feel something, that it's something we could control. I don't really believe that. To feel needy or pathetic is part of being human. I wanted to let those feelings exist rather than fix them. "I'm interested in the difference between what we show the world and what we actually feel. Presenting the 'ugly' feelings through the puppets makes us feel seen. They get to do it for us, so we feel we're not alone." Instead of a single narrative, Please is built from overlapping vignettes that reappear and gradually accumulate into something much bigger.

"I love observations – little moments that tell a lot," Anna explains. "Working in a vignette-like way suits me. I also like the idea that many people are struggling with the same thing." It's an approach she developed on Enough and wanted to push further. "I've kept the vignette format, but now we revisit characters and give them a couple of beats on their journey. There's a lot of freedom to play with rhythm, escalation and the juxtaposition of scenes.

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