The BFI Southbank is turning its first floor into a celebration of all things Laika. We spoke to both companies about their new team-up…
“My department gives me a lot of grief about this,” Laika marketing production manager Dan Pascall says, thoughtfully. “But I love the little frog that peeks out of the pitcher plant in Coraline.”
That frog is safely behind a glass case a few feet away. It has buttons for eyes, obviously, and seems wholly unconcerned by the carnivorous fauna it finds itself in. “I’ve always loved it,” Pascall shrugs, by way of explanation. “It’s vibrant, and it’s just fun.”
In fairness, I think I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks differently. Of all the mediums of film, stop-motion seems to be the one we’ve collectively agreed is “a good thing”. As Laika: Frame By Frame – a new exhibition opening this weekend at the BFI Southbank – proves, at the very least the by-product of each movie is a load of astonishingly beautiful puppets.
The frog is one of over 700 pieces which make up Laika: Frame By Frame, a new exhibition at the BFI Southbank celebrating 15 years since the the Oregon stop-motion giant’s debut feature.
Tucked away on the first floor of the BFI’s flagship London venue, the exhibition coincides with Laika’s support of the institute’s Stop-Motion season. For lead programmer Justin Johnson, it’s a project a long time in the making.
“We’ve been trying to bring in more animation seasons into the program over the last three or four years,” Johnson says. “And it just happened that our plans for the stop motion season tied in with some conversations we were already having with Laika.”
“They had an ambition, I think, to bring a new exhibition over to London at some point, and so we ended up being the kind of destination for the first iteration of this new exhibition.”
As you Laika
Stop-motion has come a long way since Morph, and there are few studios which typify that quite like Laika. Founded in 2005 just outside Portland, Oregon, it quickly established itself as the slick new kid on the Claymation block.
Laika’s first film – Henry Selick’s 2009 Neil Gaiman adaptation, Coraline – became a nightmare-fuelling cult classic almost immediately after its release. It was also, on a technical front, the first stop-motion film to make replacement face parts using a 3D-printer, a couple of which can be seen in the exhibition. It’s an attitude towards technological innovation that would power the studio through the next 15 years.
“I’ve been at Laika since 2007, and you would think pretty much nothing could surprise you,” Pascall says. But [every film] brings a new list of things we’ve got to learn as well. We’re always chasing a new material or a new technique or a way to solve a new problem that we hadn’t faced before.”
These problems and techniques are each examined in Frame By Frame by attaching them to a single still from each of the studio’s five feature films to date (their sixth, Wildwood, is scheduled for a US release next year). A treasure trove of puppets, concept art and behind-the-scenes videos walk audiences through the stop-motion process, from the first sketch to the silicone finish.
Kubo And The Two Strings, for example, uses the film’s market stall scene to show off the studio’s approach to visual effects.
Laika, after all, is one of the few major stop-motion studios new enough to have emerged in a post-VFX world, and has perhaps proved more accepting of the technology than its peers.
“[VFX] is a very important tool that really allows us to expand our horizons,” Pascall says. “Even on Coraline, there was a seam across the puppet’s face that Visual Effects would go in and paint out on every single frame…
“When the stories became bigger and bigger, and it became apparent that we didn’t have the physical space to build these massive, expansive vistas, visual effects became a really handy tool.”
To the future
Laika’s place as the BFI’s partner for its stop-motion season, of course, feels like a seal of approval for the near-unique place the studio occupies in the industry. Unlike contemporaries like Aardman and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio animator ShadowMachine, Laika rejects the industry-standard practice of ‘twos’ – animating one puppet movement every two frames, rather than one.
The result is a smoother, cleaner look which belies the medium’s traditional shed-built feel. It’s also a lot of extra work for the animators, and therefore an artistic commitment that feels particularly welcome in an animation industry keen to cut costs – especially when stop-motion is pretty expensive to do in the first place.
“There have been times where it felt like it might kind of fall out [of use] completely,” Johnson says. But the future of the delightfully old-fashioned method of storytelling still looks bright. “You’ve got these auteurs like Wes Anderson or Guillermo del Toro or Tim Burton, who make this kind of commitment, and that almost reactivates people,” Johnson adds.
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“It’s a brilliant year for stop motion. There’s a new Claude Barras film, who [directed] My Life As A Courgette; there’s a new Adam Elliot film, who did Mary And Max; there’s a new Quay Brothers film. You know, there’s some really good stuff coming out.”
There’s also, if you’ll recall, a certain button-eyed frog. If you’ve come this far looking for a picture… I’m afraid you’ll just have to go and take one yourself.
Laika: Frame By Frame is open at the BFI Southbank from 12th August until 1st October. Entry is free, and you can get tickets here.
