- [Narrator] Stop-motion animated movies
have been around a long time,
but there's a Hollywood studio solely dedicated
to bringing the animation style into the 21st century.
Laika Studios is responsible for movies like "Coraline,"
"ParaNorman," "Kubo and the Two Strings,"
and most recently "Missing Link."
Creating each movie is more painstaking
than the last for the Oscar-nominated studio,
with "Missing Link" being its most ambitious to date.
- I think for me stop-motion is truly special
because it has a unique quality to it that almost go...
It speaks to your childhood, when you're a kid,
and you're playing with toys,
and you're imagining them coming to life.
- [Narrator] 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 15 years in the making.
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, frame by frame.
And though it's difficult, it's stood the test of time,
and few places are doing it better right now than Laika,
which was first founded in 2005
and continues to push the envelope
while remaining true to stop-motion roots.
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 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.
- If you think about a character jumping,
while its feet are on the ground,
you can manipulate that puppet.
But what do you do for the frames
when its feet are off the ground?
It can't mysteriously float,
so you have a rig attached to it
that will support its weight.
- [Narrator] Even with the support system,
this sequence was so complicated
that it took about a year to shoot.
- Even when I was writing that I thought,
"I shouldn't be writing this."
- [Narrator] Butler wanted the action to feel like something
you might see in a live-action movie.
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 Galifianakis.
- Well, that didn't go as planned.
- [Narrator] Frost is given an unlikely task:
helping unite Link with his long-lost ancestors.
"Missing Link" is the first Laika production
in which all the main protagonists are adults,
and it greatly shaped how the movie was designed.
- You base the scale of the movie
around the size of your main character.
- [Narrator] 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.
If you get smaller than that,
then you can't get the amount of mechanics
into the actual puppet that you require.
So that's a good size.
- [Narrator] Sir Lionel Frost hit the sweet spot
at about 13 inches tall.
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
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.
- I think the hardest character on "Missing Link"
was probably Link himself.
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 is the shape of an avocado.
He doesn't have a neck.
He's basically a big, cuddly lump.
- [Narrator] Fur might be the most difficult part
of the design of a given claymation character.
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.
So we went for this very intricate, sculpted tufting,
which was hand-sculpted in clay and then cast,
and eventually he became a silicone puppet.
- [Narrator] The world the characters
are given to inhabit is truly amazing.
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.
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.
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,
there will continue to be stories told.
I don't think it will ever really go away.
It just requires people to champion it.
Certainly at Laika, we love it.
We love the look of it. We love the feel of it.
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.
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.