Yay! i'm happy it made you smile, oscar. ^w^
The animations for the backgrounds were done with six photos I took, moving the rocks and bark around for each one.
The magpie animations were actually all done digitally! I originally wanted to animate magpie by photographing all the different poses so that the lighting would shine differently on her cardboard differently. That would have been very difficult to adjust poses or fine tune animations because I'd need consistent lighting conditions and to be taking lots more photos (And my cat liked to play with the paper doll, so leaving it out while I work would be asking for trouble.)
Instead I photographed each of part of the 'pie individually, cut them out digitally, and placed each one on it's own layer in a krita document. Then I could move around each piece digitally to pose each frame, so it was still like playing with the doll, just with a digital interface. Maybe I could write up that process and the files for your digital pet jam. :thinking:
On another note, I rewatched PMMM while making this, and the animation in the witch mazes were a big inspiration for this project.