Stop-motion is the most punishing bargain in filmmaking: months of labor for seconds of screen time, a craft so slow it has never scaled into a dependable business. Starburns Industries is trying to solve that math the way Hollywood solves most things — by throwing famous names at it. The studio’s adaptation of Lincoln in the Bardo has assembled a voice cast deep enough to headline three ordinary films, a wager that literary prestige and star wattage can make an arthouse animation format legible to buyers who would otherwise never finance it.

As The Hollywood Reporter first revealed, Meryl Streep, Colman Domingo, Bill Hader and Tom Waits have joined the ensemble, deepening a lineup that already included Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe, Jonathan Bailey and Peter Dinklage. Streep alone voices four parts — a woman named Abigail Blass, another named Elizabeth Crawford, an angel dispatched to coax lost souls out of the bardo, and a demon determined to trap a child there forever.

The project reunites director Duke Johnson with Starburns, the animation house behind Anomalisa, the 2015 stop-motion drama that earned Johnson an Academy Award nomination and proved the form could carry adult, unglamorous feeling. George Saunders adapts his own 2017 novel, which won the Booker Prize for its polyphonic chorus of graveyard ghosts. Johnson’s conceit splits the film in two: Hanks plays a grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln in live action, mourning his eleven-year-old son Willie, while the dead who crowd around the boy are rendered in stop-motion.

The casting reads less like a table read than a gallery of voices chosen for grain and character. Waits plays Jaspar Randall, a dancehall performer so long dead he has worn down to a singing smudge on the cemetery ground; Hader doubles as a grifter and one of a trio called the Three Rakes. For a picture where every face is sculpted by hand, a cast this recognizable is also a marketing asset — a way to sell puppets on the strength of the people breathing behind them.

That pitch is being made in the open. CAA Media Finance and WME Independent are shopping the film to distributors at the Toronto International Film Festival market, with no release date or domestic home yet attached.

It is a familiar Hollywood sleight of hand, inverted: instead of hiding expensive stars inside a blockbuster, Starburns is stacking them behind puppets — betting that a Booker winner and a dozen famous throats can finally make the slowest art in movies move at the speed of a sale.

Tags: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Colman Domingo, stop-motion, Duke Johnson, Lincoln in the Bardo