Laika blends antique animation, 21st Century technology in 'The Boxtrolls'

Movie sets are confined spaces, all the more so when your actors are 18 inches tall.

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The filmmakers at the Hillsboro movie studio Laika make their movies one frame at a time, manipulating puppets incrementally to simulate movement. Stop-motion animation is an exacting process but it can be beautiful, bringing a degree of physicality to a film that hand-drawn or computer animation lacks.

To a considerable degree, though, it's also restricting. Characters have a limited range, inhabiting worlds constrained by what the studio can build in the Hillsboro warehouse where Laika makes its films.

So Laika has been steadily broadening its palette, augmenting stop-motion techniques that date back more than a century with 21st Century technologies.

Its newest film, "The Boxtrolls," blends Laika's signature puppets with dozens of computer-generated counterparts designed to be indistinguishable from the real thing. Handcrafted neighborhoods built on a Laika soundstage open up to sweeping streetscapes produced by a computer.

The studio – owned by Nike Chairman Phil Knight – hopes these technologies will liven up their films and broaden their appeal beyond a niche of animation enthusiasts, helping a boutique movie studio in rainy Oregon grow into a filmmaking force.

"We're determined at Laika that you're never going to pigeonhole us as a stop-motion studio that makes small movies in small worlds," said Georgina Hayns, the studio's creative supervisor for puppet fabrication.

Laika’s history

Laika’s history dates to 1976, when Oscar-winning Portland animator Will Vinton opened Will Vinton Studios. The studio had intermittent success, including the famous California Raisins “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” ad campign.

The studio was struggling by 1998 when Nike co-founder Phil Knight made his first investment in it and his son, Travis Knight, joined the company as a junior animator. In 2003, Knight acquired the rest of the studio and forced Vinton out. In 2005, he renamed it Laika.

Here’s a timeline of developments at Laika beginning with the release of its first feature, “Coraline.”

February 2009

:

, “Coraline,”

. It premiers in downtown Portland with searchlights and cast members including Teri Hatcher (from TV’s “Desperate Housewives”). The film wins strong reviews and an Oscar nomination for best animated feature. It performed surprisingly well at the box office, too, grossing $125 million worldwide.

March 2009

:

. Travis Knight remains a lead animator on Laika’s films.

September 2009

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, and lays off 63. The studio chooses instead to focus on its signature stop-motion animation.

October 2009

: “Coraline” director

, leaving Laika without its creative visionary.

August 2012

:

,” its second feature and first release aimed at the summer box-office crowd. The film’s worldwide gross was $107 million, down from “Coraline,” but it also earned an Oscar nomination.

May 2014

:

, splitting the company in two. The advertising side of the business is now an independent operation called

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September 2014

: “The Boxtrolls,” Laika’s third feature, opens. Production on the fourth feature is well under way, and hiring has begun for a fifth. Laika has not announced details of either project.

"Boxtrolls," in theaters Friday, is the story of a boy named Eggs, raised by the subterranean creatures of the movie's title in a socially stratified Victorian town called Cheesebridge. The filmmakers stock the movie with a host of anachronisms, giving the boxtrolls electricity, radios from the 1920s and toasters from the 1950s.

Likewise, Laika has taken the antique art of stop motion (you've seen it in Rankin/Bass Christmas specials, including "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and in the original "King Kong") with modern computer effects, 3-D printers and lasers for embroidering the puppets' tiny costumes (sometimes setting them aflame when the laser gets too hot!).

Computer effects have been part of Laika's films since its first, the 2009 feature "Coraline," but they take center stage in "Boxtrolls" as computer-generated characters populate the screen.

"We want to be able to give the filmmakers a chance to tell a story without limitations. I feel that's something that held stop motion back," said Steve Emerson, Laika's visual-effects supervisor.

If the technology has opened up possibilities, though, it hasn't necessarily made stop motion easier. Emerson's visual-effects team – more than 70 worked on "Boxtrolls" – works frame-by-frame, just like the stop-motion animators do. A computer animator might spend all day on a few seconds of film, then send it to Laika's "render farm" – a cluster of high-end servers – where computers spend the night processing it before producing the results in time for the morning shift.

On the screen you see a ballroom full of computer-generated waltzers, knees bending, skirts twirling, blending with two physical puppets (Eggs and a girl called Winnie) who race through the scene.

Laika's guiding principle is that the puppets should be indistinguishable from the computer-generated characters – the goal, Emerson said, is to duplicate their "tactility."

But Emerson says the studio draws a bright line on when to use computer technology. When the directors and animators break down the script, he said, the assumption is that every scene will be done by hand with models and puppets.

"I sit in there and I shut up until they decide they cannot execute it in camera," Emerson said, when he steps into the discussion.

Laika's main characters are always "practical," in the industry's vernacular – real, three-dimensional puppets occupying a physical stage. If it's tempting to imagine computers playing a bigger role, Emerson said that would undermine what the studio is trying to achieve with its throwback stop-motion technique.

"Audiences are sophisticated enough that they'd probably call us on it," he said. "People recognize the extra effort that went into these films."

Nowhere is that effort more vivid than on the characters' faces. Stop-motion animation used to produce wooden effects, literally, with puppets that could do little more than open and close their mouths.

Beginning with "Coraline" in 2009, Laika has used 3-D printing, a relatively new technology that creates three-dimensional objects from blueprints on a computer in a manner similar to the way an inkjet produces images and letters on the page.

The printers Laika employs were built for industrial customers that use them to generate manufacturing samples. Laika used them to create interchangeable parts for each character's head. Animators can swap out eyes, cheeks and mouths to produce thousands of possible expressions.

In "Boxtrolls," the characters' faces swell and contort, a rubbery effect that's actually created by a swapping out characters' faces with a series of rigid, plaster parts from Laika's printers. The studio's work in 3-D printing has earned it consideration for a special Oscar in technical achievement, a process that goes on outside the regular cycle for Academy Awards.

The 3-D printing sounds straightforward, but it's as exacting as the animation process itself. It can take months to create a computer model of a character, and the output from the printer is anything but precise.

The printers were designed for prototypes, rough drafts of a finished product. Laika needs them to produce identical shapes and colors, or else it will create a dizzying, artificial effect on screen as animators replace facial components when characters' expressions change.

The printers' output changes with the seasons, altered by temperature and humidity – or even by the amount of life left in a printer head. So Laika puts a serial number on every part so it knows what printer it came from and when it was produced, clues it can use to recreate a specific effect.

Half of Laika's 50-person "rapid prototyping" team is committed to processing and quality control, ensuring parts the printers make look the way the filmmakers want.

"(The printers) are amazing. They certainly are not easy to work with," said Brian McLean, director of Laika's rapid prototyping group. "They require quite a bit of nail biting and hair pulling to get them to work the best."

Some animation techniques – notably motion-capture – can be so distracting that they pull audiences out of the film and away from the story, said Celia Mercer, head of animation at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television. She credits Laika with being judicious in how it's used technology.

"Using the tools at your disposal and innovating how those tools are used is a pretty smart move," she said. "You get a lot of handmade quality with stop motion, whether it's computer enhanced or not."

Technology has helped revive interest in stop motion, according to Mercer. She said it's made the technique hip for generation of do-it-yourselfers who consider old-fashioned stop motion to be something fresh and original.

"In this era, people crave that," Mercer said. "I think it's sort of delightful to see how technology can be paired with that in a positive way."

-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699

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