From now until summer 2024, the Museum of Pop Culture (or MoPOP) will host “Hidden Worlds: The Films of LAIKA,” a retrospective exhibit that offers a deep-dive into the company’s history and a glimpse into where it may be headed.
Located in a warehouse just outside of Portland, Oregon, LAIKA is an animation studio well known for its dedication to the time-intensive craft of stop-motion. Beginning its journey with “Coraline” (2009), the first ever stop-motion feature film to be conceived and photographed in 3D, LAIKA now has five feature films under its belt and one currently in production.
The “Hidden Worlds” exhibit is chronologically ordered based on each of LAIKA’s releases, beginning with “Coraline” and following with “ParaNorman” (2012), “The BoxTrolls” (2014), “Kubo and the Two Strings” (2016), “Missing Link” (2019) and, finally, “Wildwood,” with a release date to be determined.
On display for each film are many similar components — full-scale puppets of key characters, mood boards featuring different wardrobe elements and massive, intricately-detailed set pieces. Within each section, it also becomes clear that a world of cultural research and technological development goes into creating each film and that while all films shared a similar overall process, no film shares a similar world. “ParaNorman,” for instance, pulled from the haunting modern-day setting of Salem, Massachusetts; “The BoxTrolls” drew inspiration from steampunk aesthetics; and “Kubo and the Two Strings” took classical elements from feudal Japan and mixed them with more fantastical reimaginings.
During the exhibit’s March 16 press preview, many of LAIKA’s key personnel were on site to offer insights into LAIKA’s inner workings. Their presence and candor illuminated an organization that is close-knit and eager to serve a creative vision. Brian McLean, LAIKA’s director of Rapid Prototype, described their warehouse as akin to “Santa’s workshop,” where “there’s so much attention paid to giving artists, technicians and creative individuals just access to whatever tool, whatever resource they can possibly imagine to make these films.”
This commitment to the creative process is seen throughout the “Hidden Worlds” exhibit, starting with LAIKA’s early innovations with “Coraline.” Stop-motion animation uses 24-frames-per-second – where, essentially, 24 subtle movements of a character are used to create one second of animation. Early methods used claymation or a technique called “replacement animation,” where each puppet would have a different series of hand-sculpted faces that could be popped on or off, according to each character’s mood. With “Coraline,” LAIKA merged replacement animation — which had been around for nearly 100 years — with 3D printing, which was in its infancy back in 2006.
“At the time, we were teaching ourselves how to do a lot of this, as well as sort of pioneering some brand new techniques,” McLean explained. “My area of expertise is in 3D printing, and ‘Coraline’ was the first film that used 3D printing for stop-motion [facial] animation.”
This early demo provided a template for LAIKA to use 3D printing in its later work, which carries on to this day. More recent innovations emerged in 2009 with LAIKA’s latest film, “Missing Link.”
“Up until ‘Missing Link,’ the way facial performances were created [was] by essentially creating a library, in pre-production, of existing faces that explored the full range of the character, and then when we got into shot production, we just plucked from that library and strung those faces together and created shot performances,” said LAIKA’s CG Facial Animation Supervisor Benoit Dubuc. “On ‘Missing Link,’ the ask was to enhance the quality of the facial performances, to add more nuance and subtlety and detail. What we decided to do on ‘Missing Link’ was just print bespoke facial performances. That means every single shot in the film has its own set of unique facial prints.”
This update is just one of the many seen throughout “Hidden Worlds.”
“As you walk through the exhibit, you’ll see lots of evolution of the process and the technique. Things to consider in stop motion animation that audience members never really think about are small things — like how a character’s costume moves, how their hair moves, the wrinkles of a fabric or the weight of a fabric, the weave of a fabric,” McClean said. “These are all things that can sort of give away the illusion. You can recognize, ‘Oh, I’m looking at a little puppet — not, you know, getting engrossed in the story and forgetting what you’re actually seeing.”
“Hidden Worlds” offers viewers a sense of the many components involved in creating stop-motion work. While it shares similar elements to scripted live-action films, such as script breakdowns, storyboarding and working with actors, stop-motion animators have different considerations. For the wardrobe of a puppet, for instance, denim on a regular pair of blue jeans would be too coarse to be filmed. In McLean’s words, it would “look like a burlap sack when you blew [the character] up and put her on-screen.” Instead, a puppet’s jeans would be crafted from light-weight summer shirt material with extremely fine weave that would then be dyed and painted to look like denim, so that, when magnified, it would look like normal blue jeans.
Similarly, while a real-life actor might wear a silk Japanese kimono and a camera would catch the smooth flowing movements of the material, gravity works differently on a miniature puppet. To mimic the movement of silks, LAIKA ended up using thicker fabrics and rigging the characters’ costumes with wire armatures, creating a secondary movement that would simulate the flow of silk.
Trouble shooting in this manner is complex. To understand the physics of the movements, LAIKA records live actors moving through each characters’ actions while wearing appropriate wardrobe elements; the real-life models are then used as guides for the puppet animations. The process, while painstaking, allows LAIKA’s puppet worlds to look as realistic and natural as possible, and attention to detail is everything.
One striking interactive exhibit in “Hidden Worlds” features a miniature set rigged with cameras that the viewer is allowed to move around in the space. In real-time, museumgoers are able to see how a small model looks just like real life when cast on screen. “Hidden Worlds” also offers opportunities for participants to create their own stop-motion films or engage with an interactive timeline featuring media dating back to the invention of stop-motion in 1834.
In short, the “Hidden Worlds” exhibit at LAIKA is an illuminating must-see, and the team’s go-getting attitude shines through. Whether LAIKA’s creative teams ever got pushback around creating challenging characters, such as one whose entire body was made of hair, Dubuc simply responded, “There’s not that much pushback at LAIKA.”
Dubuc went on to offer LAIKA’s upcoming film, “Wildwood,” as an example. Set in Portland, Oregon, and written by Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, the project brings with it some challenges and innovations. Yet LAIKA is ready to take them on, just as it is excited to present “Hidden Worlds,” its first show of this kind.
“It used to be that, in stop-motion, you sort of catered your design of characters to the medium,” Dubuc continued. “But at LAIKA, we try to avoid that. We just design the story that we want to tell, and then we figure it out afterwards.”
Read more of the Mar. 29-April 4, 2023 issue.