Dan grows a new spine in Chris Landreth's The Spine. (Copper Heart/NFB)

Toronto animator Chris Landreth brings a unique style in which people's psychological state is reflected in their physical appearance to The Spine, his new film making its North American debut on Wednesday.

The Oscar-winning animator hopes his creation is not the grotesque but the beautiful, he said in an interview with CBC News.

"I find that, with a visual alteration that reflects people's psychology, that there is a new layer of storytelling that takes what otherwise might be mundane and common aspects of people's behaviour and the way they live their lives and creates something beautiful out of them," Landreth said.

Landreth won an Oscar in 2005 for his short film, Ryan, about Canadian animator Ryan Larkin who lived on the streets at the end of his life. That film also used distorted imagery to reflect Larkin's mental state.

Mary appears as a large bloated figure against spineless Dan (Copper Heart/NFB)

The Spine is a fictional story about a dysfunctional couple, Dan and Mary Rutherford, who have been married 26 years. The characters are voiced by Canadian actors Gordon Pinsent and Alberta Watson.

"The main character, the man played by Gordon Pinsent, is a fellow who, because he does not have a backbone in the beginning of the film, literally shrivels and melts into whatever piece of furniture he's sitting on. He has this very cathartic moment when his wife, Mary, leaves him in the middle of the film," Landreth said.

Landreth views the couple through a third character, Angela, who meets Mary and Dan in a therapy group and tries to figure out how their relationship works.

"You see this very overbearing bloated woman who's also kind of a bully to him and you think 'oh poor guy, poor little sap, he's lost his spine, he's lost his inner strength because of decades of being with this woman.' And you see a kind of transformation as a result of her leaving and then the question is, what happens when she comes back?" Landreth said.

Dan develops a spine in a 25-second shot in which a camera corkscrews around him twice, being transformed as vertebrae snap into place.

"It conveys something I've never seen in film before and would like to see more of," Landreth said, adding that this technique has great potential for enriching storytelling.

He uses the same computer animation that is used to create realistic figures in films such as Polar Express.

"What I do is to use that kind of realism, but to alter it a lot in order to get a kind of surrealistic portrayal of real people and what I do with the surrealistic part is to make people's emotional, psychological and spiritual state kind of very evident on their faces and in their body so that they look …scarred in a way that reflects their history," he said.

Landreth takes 10 minutes to tell the story of the couple's dysfunctional relationship, but he takes the viewer through a complete change of heart about the couple.

"One of the things I'm trying to do with this story is create a conflicting mood at the end of the story — on one hand there is a tragedy about the hopelessness of being in this poisoned or toxic relationship ... but on the other hand a kind of redemptive noble ending that there's something that is actually quite valid and quite beautiful about staying together in spite of or even because of this toxic mix of emotions," he said.

The Spine, produced by Copper Heart Entertainment and the National Film Board, has its North American premiere Wednesday at the Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto.

It is just starting its tour of the festival circuit, having shown in Annecy last week. Landreth's Oscar winning film Ryan is available online.