“You Immediately Feel It”: Partizan on the Staying Power of Animation

Animation has endless appeal, forming a core part of Partizan’s 40-year legacy. To celebrate its anniversary, the production company brought three directors together to reflect on why animation remains such a desirable format for creatives and brands. By demystifying the animation process, the conversation highlighted how tactile craft thrives in an AI-first world, how animation streamlines pre-visualisation and why human-led craft still holds pride of place across branded work, TV, and passion projects.

Reflecting on that 40-year heritage, Jenny Beckett, managing partner and executive producer at Partizan Films, emphasises that this versatility has always been part of the company’s DNA.

"Animation's been part of Partizan since the very beginning, and forty years in, there's still no such thing as a Partizan house style - which is exactly how we like it," says Jenny. "From Flat Eric to Michael Gracey's 'Roller Babies' to Warren Fu's work with Daft Punk, Michel Gondry’s paper cut-outs and Picnic’s East meets West animation wizardry, the thread has never been a signature look.

"Animation here isn't a department; it's a way of thinking. Technique is something you reach for, not something you're boxed into: stop motion, cut paper, CG, puppets sharing a frame with live action, post so good you never notice it. They're all just different ways of getting an idea to move."

This commitment to craft was central for Partizan director Rick Thiele on his adaptation of William Nicholson’s 1920s classic ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’ for Apple TV+. The holiday special combined live-action with animation, bringing the toys to life with animated segments and a painstaking, trial-and-error approach to make sure the toys avoided over-the-top character tropes.

'The Velveteen Rabbit’ for Apple TV+

"Because it’s a TV drama, you think about using hand animation as being really over-the-top, characterful, and cartoony,” said Rick. ‘“You think about ‘Toy Story’, about how Woody comes out of the box and how he moves, but we wanted to completely stay away from that, to make sure it felt very much like a real toy from the 1920s."

Rick intentionally introduced physical constraints to make the main character more rounded and emotionally resonant. By keeping the rabbit’s legs short, its mouth stiff and removing distracting facial whiskers, the team found that the rabbit started to gain its personality. They focused on adding subtle ocular expressions to make the performance feel more human.

"Putting these limitations onto the animator helped us keep within the style of what we're animating and how we're animating it,” said Rick. “A lot of the time, if you get an animator who's used to doing very cartoonish, stretchy, squashy animation, you need to then give them limitations because then they can achieve that more realistic result quicker."

The film blended live-action plates with CG stop-motion, 2.5D, and realistic CG animals, which required careful consideration of camera movement, scale, and pacing. Slowing down the animation gave viewers room to build a genuine connection to the animation.

"We paid great attention to make sure that the characters didn’t move too fast or weren’t too distracting,” said Rick. “Because again, with a lot of the details, I feel like you'll only see them on maybe the second or third watch. But the first time you watch it, you immediately feel it."

"I'm a big advocate for believing that the idea and the style go hand-in-hand,” agreed director Honor Price, who adopts a medium-agnostic but always experimental approach to filmmaking. “The concept dictates the medium. I would never say I have one set 'look' as a director; I'm very much an ideas person."

Like Rick, experimentation is vital to Honor’s practice. Whether directing stop-motion goats for the feature ‘Sister Midnight’, building giant live-action puppets for a nine-minute promo for Of Monsters and Men, or unearthing new techniques for her own shorts, she embraces the total freedom and anything-is-possible ethos that animation provides.

She’s currently developing a personal short, ‘Lost At Sea’, which explores the tides of grief through layered line illustrations and painting on glass. She hand-painted 25 frames per second using a brush made from her late horse's mane. Honor talked about the importance of embedding personal tactile elements directly into her work to expand the sense of emotional connection.

‘Lost At Sea’ trailer

"I came to the conclusion that it would be better to use that horsehair to create a custom paintbrush, and use it to paint a film to connect with other people,” she said. “We were basically hand-painting every single frame on glass... You paint the picture, take a photo, wipe it away, paint it again slightly differently, and move it along. That's how it all comes to life."

​Picnic Studio, founded by Mina Song and Liam O'Connor, takes a slightly experimental approach by adapting vibrant 2D anime workflows across commercial and music video briefs. Liam explained how using a traditional anime pipeline creates highly-detailed and crafted pre-visualisations, demystifying the 2D process for clients while speeding up turnaround times.

"A big selling point for us is that we use anime workflows and anime pipelines,” said Liam. “We design the animation in a way that is super clear, just like the Japanese studios do, but then we're making the shots and stories as cinematic as possible. Taking shots from the rough to the final is like a blueprint; you can put them on top of each other and it's very clear."

By using early ‘ugly-matics’ and pre-vis overlays, clients don't have to guess the end result. This approach has won over clients Vans, Meta and BREACHB!!NNY x Allianz insurance. For BREACHB!!NNY's ‘Shit Happens, Get Covered’ launch campaign, Picnic built rich hand-drawn worlds, naturally generating a massive extra ecosystem of social content and brand assets.

BREACHB!!NNY x Allianz insurance, ‘Shit Happens, Get Covered’ launch campaign

"You've just got months and months of content when you make this kind of work, from art books to merch to behind-the-scenes 'making-of' assets,” said Liam. “It turns into more material than the actual finished film itself, so the longevity and the sheer amount of stuff you get from a job like this is incredible."

Partizan’s retrospective proves that animation remains as varied, vital, and inventive as ever. By championing trial and error, physical craft and tailored pipelines, these directors demonstrate the irreplaceable power of human touch. As Partizan looks back on 40 years, it reaffirms a simple truth, that no two hand-crafted stories ever look or feel the same.

Looking ahead to where the medium is heading, Jenny believes that even as technology rapidly evolves, human authorship will remain the bedrock of impactful filmmaking.

"As for where it's going, the tools will keep changing, as they always have," Jenny concludes. "We're using AI, our clients are excited about its possibilities, and directors like Antoine Bardou-Jacquet are already folding it into traditional filmmaking in really interesting ways. But the thing people respond to hasn't changed: the sense that a film was actually made by someone. That's not going anywhere - and if anything, the more tools we have, the more that authorship matters. Which is why I think the future's bright."