Sphinx Alberta's Smile (2026)
There is a particular kind of pleasure in watching stop-motion animation done really well, the knowledge that every single frame of what you are seeing was built, lit and nudged into place by hand, and Sphinx Alberta's Smile, Dace Riduze and Janis Cimmermanis's short film, is a lovely example of it. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival and found it one of the finer stop-motion shorts I have seen in a good while. Three and a half stars.
The story has the gentle logic of a children's picture book, which is fitting given its origins. Alberta, a stone sphinx who sits on one of Riga's most beautiful streets, has lost her smile, and it falls to a ragtag band of her neighbours and friends, an assortment of charming little creatures and characters, to get it back. Their quest to do so takes them on a genuinely adventurous journey halfway across the world to Egypt, a big odyssey told at a small, handmade scale, and it carries a sweet message about ingenuity, resourcefulness and what people can achieve when they pull together.
The craft is the real star. You can only imagine how painstakingly slow and labour-intensive a piece like this must have been to produce, and every second of that effort is up on the screen. The animation is fantastic, the puppets full of warmth and personality, and it is all brought off with the kind of care and patience that this most unforgiving of mediums demands. A good soundtrack rounds it out nicely, carrying the mood and the humour without a word being needed.
And that is the other thing: it tells its story cleanly and engagingly without any dialogue at all, trusting its images and its character work to do the heavy lifting, which they absolutely do. Best of all, for me, is how ingeniously it uses its own medium. There are moments where the film plays with the possibilities of stop-motion in genuinely clever, delightful ways, little flourishes that only this form could pull off, and those are the bits that lift it from charming to properly memorable.
Three and a half stars. Sphinx Alberta's Smile is a beautifully crafted, warm-hearted and quietly inventive piece of stop-motion storytelling, the sort of handmade animation that reminds you why the form endures. It is engaging, good-looking and genuinely clever in its use of the medium, and I would happily point anyone who loves this kind of thing straight towards it.
Related on Movies With Macca
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More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More animation: Jabberwocky (1971), Dance of the Spirits (2026), Loulou (2026)
