This relatable story of a young girl preparing for the biggest performance of her life will have you wiping your eyes (and tapping your feet).

Ten-year-old Isla prepares for her school Christmas talent show by practising her dance moves everywhere from her front room to between the supermarket aisles, but feels that her father Raj is always just a bit too distracted with work to notice her dance.

As the curtain falls for her big moment, and Isla freezes up with stage-fright, Raj steps up to the plate by supporting his daughter and encouraging her to remember the moves, showing that he was in fact paying attention all along.

The heartwarming power of this Christmas film is a demonstration of the ability of the director’s ability to take a simple story and turn it into something truly magical.

The director led an exhaustive Pixar-inspired story development process, in which we iteratively refined a storyboard animatic through several writers rooms over many weeks, to get to the final frame-perfect incarnation of the narrative, which became the blueprint for the entire stop-frame animation process to follow.

The director worked with a choreographer and two dancers who matched the proportions of their animated counterparts to create a dance routine in live action for an expert team of animators to recreate one painstaking frame at a time. The puppets were animated using stop-motion, but the director worked with CGI artists to create the facial expressions of the characters and then mapped on the puppets to bring them to life.