Tom Carey

Tom Carey is a stop-motion animator, who grew up in West Sussex, but is originally from New Jersey, USA. His passion for the craft began at an early age, inspired by the worlds of LAIKA’s Coraline and Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit. He went on to study Animation Production at Arts University Bournemouth, where he developed his practice across fine art, life drawing and animation before specialising in stop motion.

Tom joined LAIKA in 2021 as a Stop Motion Animation Intern and progressed through the studio’s animation department from Assistant Animator to Junior Animator and ultimately Stop Motion Animator. Over more than four years at LAIKA, he worked across multiple sequences of Wildwood, animating a diverse range of characters and performances, from action sequences featuring Prue and Mac cycling through downtown Portland to some of the film’s more emotionally complex and climactic moments.

Tom’s approach to animation is deeply rooted in performance. Having spent much of his childhood performing with a local theatre school, he is particularly drawn to the emotional truth and nuance of character acting. He sees stop motion as a discipline that allows him to combine his longstanding passions for performance, fine art and miniature worlds. His progression at LAIKA was a formative chapter in his career, and he credits the studio and its artists with nurturing his professional and creative development throughout his time on Wildwood.

He is currently working at 3Mills Studios in London with Starburns Industries, animating on the hybrid live-action and stop-motion adaptation of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, directed and produced by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Duke Johnson and starring Tom Hanks.