Hidari's wooden puppets: director Masashi Kawamura on carving the craft into the story

Hidari, the stop-motion samurai feature from Dwarf Studios, Whatever Co. and TECARAT, drew a crowd at Annecy 2026 when director Masashi Kawamura appeared alongside a video message from Keanu Reeves, who voices the lead, Jingoro Hidari. Kawamura's own description of the project -- "Imagine 'John Wick' set in feudal Japan and performed by wooden puppets on steroids" -- points at the production's central craft choice: puppets carved from wood rather than built with the skin-over-armature method used on most contemporary stop-motion characters, deliberately left showing "every grain, every hand-carved chisel mark," a look the production calls "wood punk." Kawamura frames the resulting hand-intensive pace as the point, not a cost: "Every single frame is created entirely by hand. That's the kind of film we want to create," a contrast he draws directly against AI-generated video. The project began as a 3.5-minute proof-of-concept short that won more than 20 festival awards before Reeves's casting was announced in May 2026; the 90-minute feature is still in financing and is not expected to complete before 2029.

For the database, Hidari (already catalogued) is a rare sourced example of a production choosing carved wood as its visible puppet material rather than a soft skin over an armature -- durable enough craft information to fold into a dedicated Wiki page (Wood as a puppet material) rather than leaving it to a single news cycle.