Oscar winners Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans are stepping in as executive producers for Living With a Visionary, a short animated documentary coming to The New York Times Op-Docs section this week, MUNDIARIO reported.
- Stephen P. Neary wrote, directed, and animated the short over three years while working full-time on other projects.
- The film adapts John Matthias’s memoir about caring for his wife Diana, whose Parkinson’s treatment causes vivid hallucinations.
- It arrives backed by top festival wins, including the animated short jury prizes at both Sundance and the AFI Fest.
The project stands far apart from the sleek studio aesthetics of K-Pop: Demon Hunters, the Netflix hit that earned Kang and Appelhans widespread acclaim. Instead, Living With a Visionary relies on thousands of hand-drawn illustrations layered over vellum sheets. Neary crafted the piece during nights and weekends while maintaining a demanding schedule as a storyboard artist and instructor at the California Institute of the Arts.
His industry credits include serving as showrunner for Cartoon Network and HBO Max’s The Fungies! and supervising production on Clarence. He has also contributed storyboard artistry to major theatrical features such as Ice Age 3: el origen de los dinosaurios, Río, and Carlitos y Snoopy: la película de Peanuts.
Despite the demanding production process, the short found a home among the eight titles presented as awards contenders in 2026 by NYT Op-Docs.
'K-POP DEMON HUNTERS' directors, Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans have boarded the award winning short 'LIVING WITH A VISIONARY' by Stephen Neary (THE FUNGIES) as executive producers. The movie has been screened at festivals such as Sundance and AFI Fest. pic.twitter.com/69vEqugp5H
The film’s festival run established its critical standing early in the year by securing the grand jury prize for animation at the AFI Fest. That momentum continued when the project claimed the animated short jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Those wins caught the attention of Kang and Appelhans, who praised the dedication required to bring the intimate documentary to the screen.
Kang commended Neary for carving out time to finish a “moving and beautiful” work while balancing family life and full-time animation duties. Appelhans described the film as a genuine “outline of the human soul” that captures love, grief, and connection. Narrated by actor James Cromwell, the documentary charts fifty years of marriage disrupted by the neurological toll of Parkinson’s medication.
