Yorgos Lanthimos and his Poor Things screenwriter Tony McNamara didn’t set out to make a feminist Frankenstein. But in adapting Alasdair Gray’s story of a reanimated woman who embarks on a sexual odyssey across 19th-century Europe, it ended up that way.

“In our approach, we never went, ‘It’s a feminist movie, that’s what we’re making,’” McNamara tells Inverse. “We were just like, we’re making a movie about this woman and the control everyone tries to have over her.”

In Gray’s 1992 novel, the story is told through the eyes and letters of the men who become obsessed with Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). But McNamara, who was handed the book by Lanthimos before they’d finished work on their first feature collaboration The Favourite, realized the most interesting journey was Bella’s.

In the opening minutes of The Boy and the Heron, director Hayao Miyazaki does something he’s never done before. The soft, rounded character designs that have come to characterize Studio Ghibli’s signature style start to morph and mutate.

It’s a breathtaking sequence that looks like nothing Miyazaki has animated before: dark, shadowy, malleable, even a little grotesque. In those first 10 minutes, it feels like Miyazaki is rejecting every stereotype of Studio Ghibli films as the purveyor of whimsical fluff, as if to say, “Look! I can make you feel so much more than cozy!”

But the sequence is a result of more than just Miyazaki’s handiwork. “That scene was, of course, not done by one single animator,” The Boy and the Heron cinematographer Atsushi Okui tells Inverse. “All of the motion that you see in the film or in that scene, in that opening sequence, was hand drawn. So that means layer after layer, after a lot of layers.”