How Stop-Motion Movies Are Animated At The Studio Behind 'Missing Link' | Movies Insider

[00:00] Stop-motion animated movies have been around a long time, but there's a Hollywood studio

[00:19] solely dedicated to bringing the animation style into the 21st century. Like a studio is responsible for movies like Coraline, Paranormon, Kubo and the Two Strings and most recently, Missing Link.

[00:33] Creating each movie is more painstaking than the last for the Oscar-nominated studio, with Missing Link being its most ambitious to date.

[00:55] I think for me, Stop-motion is truly special because it has a unique quality to it that almost speaks to your childhood when you're a kid and you're playing with toys and you're imagining them come to life.

[01:07] This is Chris Butler, he's the movie's writer and director, he decided to direct Missing Link in the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark and around the world in 80 days and it was an idea of 15 years in the making.

[01:25] But first, a little background. The first Stop-motion animation film is thought to be 1898's The Humpty Dumpty Circus. It's a painstaking process in which objects are moved in small increments, framed by frame,

[01:39] and though it's difficult, it stood the test of time. And few places are doing it better right now than Leica, which was first founded in 2005 and continues to push the envelope while remaining true to Stop-motion roots.

[01:53] Take for example its use of rigging systems as seen on this horse puppet. The rig doesn't help move the puppet, but rather enables animators to manipulate it. This is helpful for puppets of unusual shapes and sizes, and thus allows the animators

[02:08] to dream big. It also came in handy for some of the movie's action scenes, like one that takes place on a collapsing ice bridge.

[02:30] Even with the support system, this sequence was so complicated that it took about a year to shoot. Butler wanted the action to feel like something you might see in a live action movie.

[02:44] In Missing Link, Hugh Jackman plays Sir Lionel Frost, an adventurer who discovers the Missing Link known to some as Bigfoot or Sasquatch, voiced by Zach Galfanakis.

[02:58] Frost is given an unlikely task, helping a night link with his long lost ancestors. Missing Link is the first Leica production in which all the main protagonists are adults in a greatly shaped how the movie was designed.

[03:16] So it's not the puppets themselves that need to be bigger, but what they interact with needs to be smaller. There is an optimal size for a puppet, it's around about 12-13 inches, that's a good size. If you get bigger than that, then the poor animator has to wrestle with it.

[03:30] If you get smaller than that, then you can't get the amount of mechanics into the actual puppet that you require. Sir Lionel Frost hit the sweet spot at about 13 inches tall.

[03:44] Link meanwhile stood at about 16 inches tall. The sets on Missing Link, Butler estimated, were about two thirds the size of those on Kubo, which meant they could fit more sets into one building, which is very useful for a movie

[03:57] that had such a wide array of locations, including forests, mountains, and the open ocean. But you wouldn't call any of these constructions tiny at all. The hardest character on Missing Link was probably Link himself.

[04:11] He's certainly the most complicated puppet that we've ever had at the studio. I think he took over a year to figure out. And really, it's because he's covered in hair, head to toe, and it doesn't help that he

[04:25] is the shape of an avocado. He doesn't have a neck, he's basically a big cuddly lump. Furr might be the most difficult part of the design of a given claymation character.

[04:38] Butler and the Missing Link team found a way around this. They didn't cover Link in actual hair. I think because of the stylization of this movie, we decided that Link should, his hair should look the same as the hair on the heads of the characters.

[04:50] So we went for this very intricate sculpted tuffing, which was hand sculpted in clay and then cast and eventually he became a silicon puppet. The world the characters are given to inhabit is truly amazing.

[05:04] The crew built a moving train and an accompanying track for it. A sequence set inside a stagecoach was powered by motors and rumble seats. Yet, this famously practical medium isn't CGI free.

[05:18] The Loch Ness Monster, who pops up early in the movie, required CG animation for most of its massive body. The head and neck are practical, but a lot of what you see underwater had to be computer animated.

[05:31] This is just one of the ways in which stop motion, which has been around practically since the start of movies, stays modern without abandoning what makes it so special. I think as long as there are artists out there who love and respect the medium of stop motion,

[05:49] they will continue to be stories told. I don't think it will ever really go away. It just requires people to champion it. Certainly it like we love it, we love the look of it, we love the feel of it,

[06:02] we love the artistry of it and I think as long as you can still move with the times, you can still use technology to help, but you can embrace stop motion for what's special about it.

[06:15] In the end for me what that means is it's real light on real objects and there is something about the imperfection of reality that is magical.