Twenty years ago, an ambitious stop-motion production brought an international team to Łódź.
Suzie Templeton’s Peter & the Wolf was originally planned elsewhere. The filmmakers considered producing it in the UK and explored other possibilities before discovering the work of the legendary Polish studio Se-ma-for. Its craftsmanship, artistic sensibility and stop-motion expertise convinced Templeton and her producers that Łódź was where the film should be made.
What followed was one of the largest animation productions realised in Poland at the time. Puppets and sets were built here, the stop-motion photography took place in Łódź, and more than a hundred people worked on the production. Two years later, Peter & the Wolf won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
But its significance goes beyond the Oscar.
The film became a meeting point between Poland’s long tradition of puppet animation and a new model of international stop-motion production. It created an opportunity for Polish artists and craftspeople to work on an ambitious project made for a global audience and demonstrated what could happen when local expertise met international collaboration on a large scale.
It would be too simple to say that one film changed an entire industry. But Peter & the Wolf became one of its landmarks — a production whose people, experience and international connections became part of the story of Polish stop motion that followed.
In 2026, ANIMARKT returns to that story.
Twenty years after the film was made, we will look at why Peter & the Wolf came to Poland, how it was created, what it left behind — and what its legacy means for the next generation of stop-motion filmmakers.