![]() ![]() To bring Kubo to life, it took 358 pounds of Sculpey clay 36 pounds of liquid rubber, 358 gallons of resin 789 cans of spray paint 4,392 English beading needles 26 gallons of Rit dye 177,187 cotton swabs 215 feet of gooseneck tubing and 2 Classic Atari 2600 joysticks - and that just barely scratches the surface of the materials list. It wasn’t just paper that came in at epic proportions, though. And even that number pales in comparison to the total amount of kraft paper used, which clocks in at 26,300 square feet. That’s roughly the equivalent of 11.5 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of one another. In total, the production of Kubo used 16,725 feet of Tyvek paper. “You can rest assured with making puppets, there’s always going to be a material out there - you don’t know what it is, it might take awhile to find it - but there’s always something that fits the needs of what you need to do,” said Hayns. Crucially, it stands up to abuse without losing the appearance and essential foldability of paper. The solution: Tyvek, a material commonly used for housewrap in construction and disposable protective apparel. But in building the prototype puppets for origami characters like the 2-inch tall Little Hanzo, Hayns and her team quickly found that actual paper wasn’t going to stand up to the demands of animation, which requires a lot of movement. “We build it up, we get all of the right information, and we eventually end up with this fully articulated, tension-able, posable skeleton that is inside the puppet,” Georgina Hayns, the film’s Puppet Fabrication Supervisor, said.īecause elements of Kubo were inspired and influenced by origami, the appearance and texture of paper was central to the aesthetic of the film. They come together in several parts, with costumes and body parts, internal armatures, and skin that’s made with soft materials like latexes and polyurethanes. Puppet Fabrication Supervisor Georgina Hayns with several of the origami puppets Megan Logan / LAIKAĪs the heroes and central characters of these stories, the puppets are crucial. The entire production of Kubo and the Two Strings took 94 weeks and one hell of a shopping list. So, of course, an epic story meant an epic build. Instead of studio backlots, detailed sets are built in miniature. Instead of actors, there are posable puppets. The vast majority of the elements in stop motion films are designed and built in the physical world. More environments, more effects, lots of crowds.” “It was beyond anything we’d ever done previously here at LAIKA. “We were looking at a story that was epic,” Visual Effects Supervisor Steve Emerson told Inverse. The world that Kubo and companions Monkey (Charlize Theron) and Beetle (Matthew McConaughey) traverse is full of forests, oceans, icy wastelands, and grand, mysterious structures like the Hall of Bones. The story of Kubo’s (Art Parkinson) quest through a fantastical Japan to unravel the mystery of his legacy and save his family, Kubo and the Two Strings moves through a number of big, expansive locations. Kubo and the Two Strings is LAIKA’s biggest undertaking to date. The technique is full of challenges and inherent limitations, but with an army of creatives and a unique hybrid method that blends visual effects and traditional tactile stop motion animation, LAIKA embraces those challenges and removes limitations with some ingenuity and a lot of Tyvek. At LAIKA, though, the art of stop motion animation is very much alive. Once Pixar burst on to the scene with 1995’s Toy Story, computer animation quickly dominated the field - it was faster, cheaper, and more creatively freeing than anything that came before it. Earlier this summer, Inverse visited the set of LAIKA’s next film, Kubo and the Two Strings (in theaters August 19), to take a close look at the process and talk to the creative team that brought to life the studio’s biggest film yet. In the age of computer animation, the Oregon-based studio has produced several of the best and most beloved animated films of the last ten years: 2009’s Coraline, 2012’s ParaNorman, and most recently, 2014’s The Boxtrolls. ![]() LAIKA Studios has spent the last decade not only fighting to keep stop motion animation relevant, but also working to take the old school art form to new technical heights - one frame at a time. ![]()
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