Time to talk about Laika.
First, an excellent post-credits scene (no spoilers):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h7p0NckTKc
So, there's a company in the US specialising in puppet animation — LAIKA Studios (named, yes, after the Soviet Laika). Its founder, Travis Knight, worked for a long time as a puppet animator and is an incredibly devoted man; I strongly recommend a short two-minute "interview" with him:
Laika started as a production studio, doing animation for Tim Burton's Corpse Bride in 2005, and since 2009 have released five films of their own: Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014), Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) and, in 2019, Missing Link. I've seen them all; any of them can be recommended as family or children's viewing.
To my great regret their last film bombed spectacularly, recouping only a quarter of its budget — completely undeservedly; it's a lovely story, a kind and funny children's comedy. Do watch it 🙂
But as a former 3D person and someone who likes to get into production, what always interested me is "how?" And that's where hell begins.
To start with, a shift of twenty animators can produce roughly one to two minutes of film per week. That's in an ideal world with no problems. Films are 24 frames per second; even with animation on twos it's still 10–12 different frames with slightly changing expressions on the puppet's face.
Naturally they use replacement animation: a relatively old technique where one puppet has many pre-made "mouths," or entire heads, as with Jack in The Nightmare Before Christmas.
At Laika they went further and combined 3D with puppet animation. Characters are partly animated in a 3D package, after which the "faces" go to 3D printing. They've used the technology since their first film, Coraline, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then and the tech has moved on.
Initially printing was single-colour, and all the tens of thousands of puppet faces had to be handled by the paint department, hand-painting five freckles on Coraline's left and right cheeks. Then printing became colour, but powder-based: the faces were fragile and post-processing still took a lot of time. In 2015 the team started working with a new technology — colour voxel printing on a resin printer — but only three colours were possible, which severely limited the characters' palette. And then in 2019, on Missing Link, they used six-colour resin printing with software developed specially for them, which allowed the models' UV mapping and textures to be used for automatic colouring.
Plenty is still touched up on the computer, of course, but that's what's good about Laika's approach — they aren't afraid to combine. Amusingly, the studio shoots on a Canon 5D.
Anyway, I'll drop some videos here for anyone who wants to get into the subject, and images in the next message:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHyTYL1Z1aM — a bit of behind-the-scenes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NGeGcV9dXw — a fairly detailed 45-minute talk on using 3D printing in production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKsDg5-BeIA — the process of building one character's puppet, shot in stop motion
https://www.youtube.com/c/LAIKAStudios/videos — I can confidently recommend the videos on their channel generally; they'll tell you how Coraline's little jumpers were hand-knitted and how Mr. Link, an enormous avocado-shaped Yeti, can move his belly via a lever in his back to create the effect of the puppet "breathing."
