Animation is an art form well suited to adapting traditional stories, because—like the art of oral storytelling—it can conjure worlds governed by spiritual forces and magical transformations while keeping visible its artifice and leaving space for the audience’s imagination. Iqaluit-based Taqqut Productions, founded by Inuk educator, author, and filmmaker Louise Flaherty and educator and writer Neil Christopher, embraces this potential with award-winning animated films that carry Inuit creation stories across generations.
When Flaherty was an elementary student in Kangiqtugaapik (Clyde River), NU, class field trips included home visits with Elders. This is how Flaherty recalls first hearing the story of Mangittatuarjuk from Elder Levi Iqalugjuaq. He described Mangittatuarjuk as an ancient and fearsome cave-dwelling land spirit who lures children that stray from camp by leaving trails of beautiful stones. As she listened, Flaherty animated the story in her mind like a televised film. She pictured a towering cave-dwelling hag feasting on the gruesome corpses of her young victims. Decades later, Flaherty decided to bring these images to life in Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) (2025), a stop-motion animated film produced in collaboration with Stop Motion Department in Toronto, ON. “Working on this project, I wanted to capture that vivid imagination that would come to me while listening to the Elder tell stories,” she tells me. “There are gruesome details in there that I thought, how gross is that? Or, how scary is that?” [1] Reviewing the ensemble of puppets crafted for her film, Flaherty instructed the animators to lean into the gory details she conjured in her childhood. The undead talking heads of Mangittatuarjuk’s dismembered victims, she noted, should have snot dribbling from their nostrils.
Puppets of undead victim heads produced by Stop Motion Department for Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) (2025) COURTESY ALLA GADASSIK
Still of undead victim heads in Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) (2025) COURTESY TAQQUT PRODUCTIONS
Animation has always had a close relationship with traditional stories and folklore, because it’s a visibly crafted—drawn, painted, sculpted—form of storytelling that relies on the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief and accept a universe teeming with hidden life. In animated films, as in creation stories, wondrous worlds come into being, laws of nature and social conduct are established and bent, and human characters navigate a shapeshifting cosmos. People have been animating stories even before the cinema, using their fingers and objects to cast moving shadows by flickering firelight. Evoking this practice, Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) begins inside a tent illuminated by the flame of a qulliq. An elderly woman narrates the film’s story to a spellbound child, and the qulliq shimmers like a fiery projection screen transforming the tent into a small cinema of shadows. I imagine this scene as a moment of time travel—Flaherty as a young impressionable listener, meeting herself as an experienced storyteller.
Puppet of Mangittatuarjuk in Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) (2025)
COURTESY TAQQUT PRODUCTIONS
Directing animated films was not a straightforward career path for Flaherty. An educator by profession, she worked as the coordinator of regional programs at Nunavut Arctic College and supervised teacher training. In this role, Flaherty and her colleague Neil Christopher confronted a systemic problem: All storytelling resources available to teachers, such as illustrated books and study guides, were produced in a southern cultural framework. As educators, they learned that children’s knowledge of their community’s creations stories is essential to intergenerational cultural resilience. Yet Inuit stories, passed down through oral storytelling, are rarely published beyond second-hand anthropological accounts. In 2006 the duo founded Inhabit Media in Iqaluit to commercially publish children’s books focused on unikkaaqtuat—traditional Inuit stories of creation, spirits, and legendary beings. Their interest in animation came later, when Flaherty witnessed her granddaughter eagerly learning Spanish from the animated television series Dora the Explorer (2000–2019). Determined to engage young generations in the art form of their choice, Flaherty and Christopher formed Taqqut Productions in 2012 as the media branch of their company and dove into animation.
Louise Flaherty and animator Akash Jones working on the set of Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) (2025) COURTESY STOP MOTION DEPARTMENT PHOTO EVAN DERUSHIE
Puppetmaker Karen Valleau sculpting a puppet faceplate for Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice (2021) COURTESY STOP MOTION DEPARTMENT
Today, Taqqut’s most widely screened project is the preschool television show Anaana’s Tent (2018–2024), which features both live-action and animated sequences, but their most internationally acclaimed work is a series of animated stop-motion films made in partnership with Stop Motion Department. Their first released collaboration, Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice (2021), received major awards at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Canadian Screen Awards, and the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival. In the film, a young apprentice shaman accompanies her mentor grandmother on a descent to the underworld to diagnose a man’s mysterious illness. The journey tests the apprentice’s courage, as she encounters the powerful Kannaaluk (“the great one below”) and her fierce canine partner. The film was directed by Zacharias Kunuk, OC, ONu, LLD, who grew up in Iglulik, NU, at a time when stories of Inuit spiritual cosmology were repressed in a community dominated by Christian theology. Kunuk is renowned as a director of live-action films, yet Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice was an opportunity for him to depict a story of shamanic magic that could not be easily staged with actors for a camera. “I didn’t know it was so much work,” he lamented to me in hindsight. “We were lucky to get 10 seconds a day!” [2]
Animator Akash Jones on the set of Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) (2025) COURTESY STOP MOTION DEPARTMENT PHOTO EVAN DERUSHIE
Stop-motion animation is a slow and labour-intensive process, but it has some advantages over other animation techniques used in Taqqut’s films. In most types of animation, different components of a scene are produced separately by specialist artists and brought together later in the process. In stop-motion puppetry, all parts of a scene are crafted and assembled like a miniature live-action set, including lighting and camera placement. According to animator Evan DeRushie, co-founder of Stop Motion Department, having a small tangible model allows directors and community consultants new to the art form to personally craft, review, or contribute to a film production. [3] For example, to clothe the characters in Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks), Flaherty taught the film’s costume designer how to assemble amauti patterns that reflected the distinct style of the Qikiqtaaluk Region, as worn by her grandmother. During the production of Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice, Kunuk travelled to Toronto to accurately dress a tiny qamutiik, or dog sled, with zigzag patterns of sinew rope.
Puppet of the Shaman in Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice (2021) COURTESY STOP MOTION DEPARTMENT
Sled dog puppets in Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice (2021) COURTESY STOP MOTION DEPARTMENT
Although traditional stories are not set in specific time periods and are open to artistic interpretation, tethering their animation to confirmed and tangible details of traditional Inuit culture allows Taqqut to craft small time capsules of material and spiritual knowledge before colonization. When a completed edit of Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice was previewed by Elders in Iglulik, they noted that an essential prop in the film—a qurvik, or piss pot—should not have been made with handles. DeRushie and his team painstakingly removed the handles from every frame of the film, learning the value of confirming details through early consultation and archival research.
Taqqut’s animated films are revitalizing a 50-year history of animation in Nunavut that began in 1973, when the National Film Board (NFB) animation unit developed two initiatives in response to Inuit community concerns about the intrusion of southern televised content. The first initiative commissioned southern animators to adapt traditional stories under the art direction of Inuit artists, including Agnes Nanogak Goose and Germaine Arnaktauyok. The second initiative, a project titled Sikusilarmiut, trialled an animation workshop in Kinngait, NU, that was inspired by the success of its printmaking co-operative. A cohort of young Inuit artists received training and access to equipment to make their own animated films. Their animated sketches and short films were compiled in the anthology film Animation from Cape Dorset (1973) and have recently been expanded with newly released footage.
Stills from “The Birth of Kayak” by Timmun Alariaq included in Animation from Cape Dorset (1973) COURTESY NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA
Both initiatives were short-lived due to lack of sustained financial and technical support, but three decades later the NFB returned to a similar model with the Nunavut Animation Lab—again pairing Nunavut artists like Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, MSC, and Ame Papatsie with southern animators. It was through this project that Christopher met animator Daniel Gies and persuaded him to collaborate on adapting a story of a wolf-human shapeshifter told by Elder Mark Kalluak. Amaqqut Nunaat (The Country of Wolves) (2012) was Taqqut’s first completed animated short. The film uses a relatively simple method of animated illustrations, and the team wasn’t sure how audiences would react to its stylistically minimal approach. When credits rolled following the film’s screening at the Alianait Arts Festival in 2011, the crowd was silent. “We were about to walk off stage,” Christopher recalled, “then everyone stood up and started applauding.” [4]
Whereas prior NFB initiatives to develop Inuit animation were undermined by transient investment, Taqqut aims to foster a more sustainable ecosystem led by Inuit directors and supported by enduring connections with southern collaborators. This requires not only financial continuity but also an approach to animation grounded in Inuit storytelling principles. The animation industry, like the education system, is structured according to segmented demographics and age-calibrated content. Stories are sorted into developmental categories, and traditional stories, which are frequently classified as content for young children, are expected to move toward clear resolutions and moral lessons. Taqqut’s animated films do not follow these premises. Their narratives are intergenerational and open to multiple interpretations, sparking questions more often than conclusions. Illness and death are part of the fabric of the world, spirits can be indifferent or outright hostile to humans, and children have high-stakes responsibilities. In Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks), two girls are lured into the ancient spirit’s lair while caring for their baby siblings. The infants spend the film quietly tucked away in their sisters’ amautiit, blissfully unaware of the mortal danger facing them. The girls bravely outwit Mangittatuarjuk by appealing to her arrogance, yet the ending does not offer a tidy conclusion. The film’s elderly narrator turns out to be a stranger, whom the young listener met by following a trail of sparkling rocks to her tent. “Do you understand what I am telling you?” the woman asks, pointedly. The child does not respond, and the audience is invited to form their own interpretation.
Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks) (2025) (still) COURTESY TAQQUT PRODUCTIONS
In addition to resisting southern pressure for narrative closure, Flaherty and Christopher also decline occasional notes to speed up the action of their films. Following the tempo of oral storytelling, Taqqut’s animated films frequently leave pauses and moments of silence for viewers to contemplate and react to events. Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice is especially striking in its slower rhythm and embrace of gestural subtlety. Questions are asked with a slight turn of the head, and instructions are provided with a flick of the eyebrows. The puppets’ faces are frequently still, like pensive masks, inviting the audience to project or speculate. The stylized quality of animation, whether sculpted or drawn, leaves more ambiguity and room for active interpretation than the irreducible specificity of live-action cinema.
Traditional stories question perceptible reality, and each oral telling adapts them anew in the listener’'s imagination. When Flaherty heard about Mangittatuarjuk as a child, the details—the creature’s face, the horrors of its lair, even its gender—were her construction. Other versions may have played in the minds of her classmates. “Our stories, when we’re talking, don’t have gendered pronouns,” she tells me. “Unless the storyteller says, ‘Mangittatuarjuk was a woman,’ we don’t know.” Translating an oral story into objects and moving images requires making decisions about shape and rhythm, foreclosing some of its openness. Yet unlike live-action cinema, animation doesn’t hide its crafted nature. A handmade puppet of Mangittatuarjuk does not claim to be the real thing, only one fashioned version. Taqqut’s animated films place viewers into miniature scenes of traditional Nunavut life, but future Inuit animators may imagine otherwise. A portal to the underworld can open in a land of satellite transmission and subterranean data centres, and a vain land spirit can entrap wanderers in Inuit Nunangat today.
Dr. Alla Gadassik is a scholar and curator of animation and media art. She is the author of Graphite: Animated Traces (2024), Interlaced: Animation & Textiles (2025), and academic articles on animation and creative labour. She is currently an associate professor at Emily Carr University, where she founded the Animate Materials Workshop.
Notes
1 All quotes Louise Flaherty, interview with Alla Gadassik, February 2024.
2 Zacharias Kunuk, interview with Alla Gadassik, July 2024.
3 Evan DeRushie, interview with Alla Gadassik, January 2024.
4 Neil Christopher, interview with Alla Gadassik, June 2024.