KPop Demon Hunters directors and Oscar winners Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans have boarded the award-winning animated short film Living With a Visionary as executive producers.
Narrated by James Cromwell, the documentary, written, directed and animated by Stephen P. Neary, is a reflection on a poet’s 50-year marriage to an art curator grappling with Parkinson’s. The news comes before The New York Times Op-Docs will premiere the short this week.
Living With a Visionary recently won the grand jury award for animation at AFI Fest after earlier this year being honored with the short film jury award for animation at the Sundance Film Festival.
The film, an adaptation of John Matthias’ memoir of the same name, explores the “bittersweet reflection on John’s relationship with his beloved wife Diana, and how it is transformed by the effects of her Parkinson’s treatment,” reads a synopsis. “As Diana’s medication besets her with vivid, often beautiful hallucinations, John, now her caregiver, adapts to her imaginary world.”
Produced by Neary and Mireia Vilanova, the film consists of thousands of drawings, illustrated by hand on intersecting layers of vellum. The creator drew them over the course of three years at nights and on weekends while working full-time as a story artist and teaching classes at the California Institute of the Arts.
Neary is known as the creator and showrunner of The Fungies! on Cartoon Network and HBO Max and the supervising producer on the Annie-nominated show Clarence. As a story artist, his credits include KPop Demon Hunters, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Rio and The Peanuts Movie.
Living With a Visionary
Courtesy of The New York Times Op-Docs
“Somehow while working full-time on KPop Demon Hunters and raising a family, Stephen found the time to make this heartbreaking, beautiful film,” said Kang. “I don’t know how he did it, and honestly I’m worried he doesn’t sleep enough, but we’re so excited for more audiences to see Living With a Visionary. The world needs unique stories in animation and often the most impactful ones come from the least expected places.”
Appelhans shared: “Stephen’s film feels like a sketch of the human soul. This assembly of lines that somehow captures love, grief, hallucination and connection. I got to live inside Cromwell’s narration and experience the heartache of being alive alongside the enduring power of love. A truly special piece of documentary filmmaking.”
Neary expressed his gratitude. “It means the world to have Maggie and Chris support this small film I spent years drawing on paper,” he said. “KPop Demon Hunters and Living With a Visionary are, stylistically, worlds apart. But I believe there’s a throughline of raw, emotional honesty in both these works capable of bringing a needed catharsis to viewers from a place they least expect it — animation.”
Living With a Visionary joins eight other films on Op-Docs’ 2026 slate that it sees as awards contenders, including The Revolution Against Death by Joshua Oppenheimer, The Tuners and A Wolf in the Suburbs.
Watch an exclusive behind-the-scenes animation teaser video for Living With a Visionary below.
