The retrieval of non-rigid 3D shapes is an important task. A common technique is to simplify this problem to a rigid shape retrieval task by producing a bending-invariant canonical form for each shape in the dataset to be searched. It is common for these techniques to attempt to “unbend” a shape by applying multidimensional scaling (MDS) to the distances between points on the mesh, but this leads to unwanted local shape distortions. We instead perform the unbending on the skeleton of the mesh, and use this to drive the deformation of the mesh itself. This leads to computational speed-up, and reduced distortion of local shape detail. We compare our method against other canonical forms: our experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy in a recent canonical forms benchmark, and only a small drop in retrieval accuracy over the state-of-the-art in a second recent benchmark, while being significantly faster.