At Laika – the animation studio responsible for Box Trolls and ParaNorman – it’s all about merging new and old. To create its most recent project, Kubo and the Two Strings, the Portland-based firm used new 3D printing technologies in combination with traditional stop-motion techniques to bring ancient Japanese fantasy to the big screen.
Kubo follows the fantastical quest of a young boy in ancient Japan – an ambitious move for the stop-motion studio. A step away from the ‘urban gothic’ aesthetic that Laika normally employs (see: Coraline, ParaNorman, Box Trolls), the film draws heavily in Japanese culture to build an ambitious and imaginative narrative.
WIRED spoke to Travis Knight, CEO of Laika and director of Kubo and the Two Strings, on Japanese influences and why this was the hardest film to create yet.
It’s been two years since Laika made Box Trolls. How has the animation process evolved two years on?
We keep the core creative team together, which means that with each successful film we build on and learn on the artistic and technological innovations. When I think about how we started on Kubo five years ago, I couldn’t have even imagined how we could bring some of the stuff to life. It’s by far the most ambitious thing we’ve ever taken on. We’ve never even considered doing a big epic fantasy before, and for good reason – it’s super hard.
It’s high tech stuff that we developed and built, and low tech stuff you can find in your garage that made this film come to life.
What new technology did you use in the film?
I wanted to make sure on this film we had the most beautiful facial animation we’d ever done and that required reinventing the way we did facial animation. On Coraline, what we started doing for the first time was using rapid prototyping of 3D printing to do our facial expressions, which was a high tech version of an old school method of replacement animation. Instead of doing it by hand, we’d do it by computer and send those files to a 3D printer. In Coraline, that tech was in its infancy, but for this one the manufacturers – Stratasys said to us: “Look we’ve got some technology that isn’t even on the market yet. We want you guys to tell us how to make it better". So they gave us a bunch of beta machine and we worked with them to develop the hardware and the software.
How did the story of Kubo come about?
The original idea came from our product designer Shannon Tindle. He originally pitched the project to me as this stop-motion samurai epic. I was really intrigued. On the one hand I’d been a huge fan of epic fantasy for my entire life, which is something I got from my mum, who was an enormous fan. Also, when I was about eight years old, my dad let me tag along with him on a business trip to Japan and from the moment I set foot in Japan, it was like I’d be transported to another world. I was really changed by the experience. The film is effectively a convergence of those two things. It’s a love of fantasy that I got from my mum, it’s a love of the transcendent art of Japan that I got from my dad, all bound together that became about the sustaining love of a family.
The Japanese fantasy aesthetic of Kubo is quite a departure from Laika’s previous films, how much of an adaptation or learning process was that?
We want every film to have an aesthetic that arises naturally out of the narrative. We don’t really want a house style and we want every film to feel unique. For something like this, where we’re telling a big fantasy story, it had to had that vibe. Most of our influences were classic forms of Japanese art – that includes everything from origami, ink wash paintings, Noh theatre, late Edo-period doll making inspired a lot of the character design. The biggest visual influence on the film was ukiyo-e, which literally means ‘pictures of a floating world’. The most prominent form of ukiyo-e is the classic Japanese woodblock print, so that became the real touchstone for the movie visually. We wanted the film to look and feel as if it’s a moving woodblock print, drawing inspiration from the masters including Hokusai and Hiroshige, Koichi Sato – a 20th century graphic artist who fused those things together. It’s definitely a different kind of aesthetic for us that you don’t typically see on the big screen, but what we’re trying to do is create an impressionist painting of Japan. I was trying to capture visually the feeling I had going to Japan for the first time.
Kubo is your directorial debut, what was that experience like?
It was exhausting. You become the nexus of every key artistic and creative technical decision. I knew this was going to be a really challenging movie, but it was by far the hardest thing we’ve ever done. It really tested every single department and pushed them into new and uncomfortable areas. At the beginning we started talking about this film as a stop-motion David Lean film, which, if you know how these films are made, you know how absurd that idea is. We filmed this movie in a crummy warehouse and we made these sets on these old wooden table tops that you have to make look like a real place, so it’s a very small scale movie that we wanted to make feel like a large scale epic. We have these endless majestic vistas, when in fact it’s a table top that’s 12-feet-long. The idea of making an epic fantasy on that scale was kind of silly and yet that was what the story required.
What about TV? Do you think we could ever see Laika making television shows?
I think it’s interesting to see how both mediums are evolving as TV has become more like movies, movies have become more like TV. It's an exciting time to think about how you can tell a longer-form story in a different kind of way and a different kind of format. It's something we’re exploring.
What’s next for Laika? There was talk of Wildwood and Goblins being optioned – are those still on?
We’re making our next film right now, which we actually started shooting while we were shooting Kubo. There are so many different kind of stories we want to tell, and in terms of the way we make them there’s only so much time you have on this Earth. Goblins and Wildwood are absolutely still in the pipeline – but I’m not going to say what we’re working on next, but it’s really unlike anything we’ve done before tonally and aesthetically.
Kubo and the Two Stringsis released on September 9, 2016
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
