"It's another level of acting really," he says. He and the animators painstakingly planned the puppets' exact facial expressions for more nuanced performances. "This was the first time our facial animation was bespoke," says Butler, who also co-wrote Kubo and the Two Strings and wrote and co-directed ParaNorman. So I was trying to tell a story that was big and bright and bold and colorful." "It does that really well, but that shouldn't be all it does. "I think stop motion is often seen as a medium that makes creepy short stories," says Butler, referring to how The Nightmare Before Christmas has defined the genre. Link (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), as he travels with adventurer Sir Lionel Frost ( Hugh Jackman) across the globe in a search for the valley of Shangri-La and long-lost family. But it's come a long way since then.ĭirector and writer Chris Butler describes Missing Link as "Indiana Jones meets Sherlock Holmes and Around the World in 80 Days - with monsters in it." Set in the Victorian era, the movie follows Bigfoot, aka Mr. The studio, based outside Portland, Oregon, has used the technique since its first film, 2009's Oscar-nominated Coraline, fusing it with 3D-printing tech to produce faces that pop on and off. The technique, called replacement animation, involves taking a picture of the puppet wearing one face and then swapping in another with a slightly different expression. It all starts with replacing the puppets' faces, sometimes up to 24 times for one second of film. We went behind the scenes of Missing Link, which won a Golden Globe on Sunday for best animated feature, to find out how Laika has made its puppets more lifelike than ever. The now faceless puppet, a character in the family adventure Missing Link, shows off circuitlike innards that make it look more like an android from TV's Westworld.Ī Sir Lionel Frost puppet from Missing Link, minus his face. "I'm going to take this wonderful puppet and rip his face off," says Brian McLean, director of rapid prototype at Laika, the stop-motion animation studio behind Kubo and the Two Strings and Coraline. A handful of 10-inch posable puppets in tailored costumes - some in checked three-piece suits, others in floor-length gowns - are lined up on a shelf, like a collection of Victorian-era action figures.īut what lies beneath those serene puppets is the stuff of nightmares.
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