Mark Waring, Andy Gent and Sainsbury’s encourage us to find the "surprisingly strange" in a new animation

Have you ever, ever felt like…a petrified pumpkin? That’s the question that director Mark Waring is asking in his stop-motion film for Sainsbury’s ahead of the most magical — and spooky — time of the year.

Waring, who was the animation director on Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, directs the short, while the pumpkin was crafted by Andy Gent, an animator acclaimed for creating puppetry for Isle of Dogs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Agency Wieden+Kennedy London collaborated to create the 30” film for Sainsbury’s, which follows a petrified pumpkin spooked by hairy spiders, flying skeletons, witches and ghouls as our helpless orange friend lip-syncs cult 1990s TV theme song Round the Twist. The aim is to encourage us to find ‘surprisingly strange things’ in-store – petrified pumpkin and all.