STONED FOR CHRISTMAS: A TRANS STONER STORY
Stoned for Christmas is a delightfully chaotic, multi-style animated short that follows a weed courier on a surreal holiday-night journey through NYC. a playful blend of comedy, experimentation, and queer storytelling. the film marks the debut animated short from writer-director-producer Morgan Young, whose vibrant, genre-bending approach fuels the project’s wild spirit.
Q+A with Writer, Director, + Producer of Stoned for Christmas, Morgan Young
★ how long have you been animating/ making short films?
Morgan: Talking Cat Productions started as musical shorts about puppets, all shot in my apartment. Comfy (the non-binary puppet pop singer) and Fanny & the Vulvas (a singing sex-education troupe of genital hand puppets) were among the stars of those shorts. Stoned for Christmas was my first independent foray into a full animated short story—and it was a beast! i don’t personally know how to animate. that’s a superpower i long to cultivate and really admire. but i’ve been working professionally in preschool animation for seven years, so short-form animated storytelling is now my bread and butter!
★ why “Stoned for Christmas”? what sparked this story?
Morgan: i love weed! i wanted to tell a story that suited the mixed medium (vignettes = deliveries!).
“i wanted to write a tribute to blunt rotations past: community brought together to share something intimate and smokeable. ”
for me, weed is my queer friends and i sharing a joint on the roof. i wanted to create a short that was a tribute to the warm and fuzzy feelings of both being high and belonging.
★ what made you decide each delivery should have its own animation style?
Morgan: i’m in love with shows like Smiling Friends and The Amazing World of Gumball that not only mix mediums, but abandon strict visual continuity in favor of comedy. these cartoon universes are filled with stop-motion puppets and hand-drawn models alike, because those worlds are big enough for both! i wanted to push stylistic difference to the max, exploring whether we’re able to tell one story with completely different mediums. the mixed-media whirlwind reflects the themes of big city hustling, the rollercoaster of a high, and the chaos of trans existence.
★ which animation style was the hardest to wrangle into the film?
Morgan: each medium had their own challenges, but the sequence that took the longest start to finish was Erma Fiend’s stop-motion (but live-action!) car ride sequence. it was the only portion of the film with the voice actors in live-action; they were separately photographed and pieced together to move like stop-motion. it was an incredibly challenging, layered, and chaotic sequence, and i really think the end result feels like a panic attack or bad trip in a really satisfying way.
★ how did working with 17 artists across 13 styles actually play out behind the scenes?
Morgan: because each section leaned so heavily into each artist’s style and inspiration, the animators themselves were pretty siloed. at times, it was more like producing 13 microshorts than one full 11-minute narrative. lots of spinning plates, but i worked with truly the best group of artists, so it was thrilling and richly rewarding.
★ what part of trans joy/chaos were you most excited to put on screen?
Morgan: i once received video feedback from a festival’s audience members. three people reviewed Stoned for Christmas, and each person gendered the courier differently in their review. something i wanted to play with was the unique unpredictability of navigating the world while trans non-binary. the courier’s gender is ambiguous – a “strong young man” to some, and “girly” to others. i wanted to give us space to laugh at the chaos of misunderstanding instead of being weighed down by it. it’s a fine line to walk but i think we succeeded!
★ what’s something viewers should look for on their first watch (or their high rewatch)?
Morgan: first watch: enjoy the ride!!
high rewatch: i have so many questions for you: which is your favorite animation style? which client smokes like you do? what’s the worst office holiday party you’ve been high at? the list goes on.
★ what are you hoping queer audiences feel when they hit play?
Morgan: a little bit of relief—a reprieve from trans stories full of gloom and struggle. we don’t need another cis person sobbing in drag on our screen. i want fundamentally silly and stupid queer representation. i want transness celebrated through comedy, not tragedy. I don’t want Brokeback Mountain or The Danish Girl, I want The Birdcage—farcical, emotional, silly stories with queer leads front and center.
★ what should people take away from watching this short?
Morgan: to my cis audience, please take a second to think about transness as something other than a predatory and alien extreme. in this climate that paints trans people as dangerous, i want Stoned for Christmas to hold up transness as beautifully and peacefully inconsequential. the courier is trans, and it has both nothing and everything to do with the way they move through the world.
to my trans audience, you have enough going on. i just hope Stoned for Christmas makes you giggle.
