![]() ![]() They set up and photograph, puppets, props, and Snatcher’s Trucks then move them, and take another photograph. The exhibit drives home that point if you take the time to read the panels explaining stop-motion animation. “So there’s a lot of energy that goes into making sure that these complicated machines look believable, and that they have their own life.” The “Coraline Tunnel” at the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture’s LAIKA exhibition. “I think it’s absolutely adorable,” says Oliver Jones, LAIKA’s Director of Practical Effects, admitting that it was also a huge undertaking to animate making sure the umbrella placed precariously on top would bounce, the netting would swish, the tubes coming out of the furnace would burble. “If you do nothing else, look at any sketches or drawings and try to imagine, ‘If I had to make that, how would I do it?’” Consider the Snatcher’s Truck from The Boxtrolls, a fantastic creation - essentially a malevolent tricycle - that perfectly embodies the film’s steampunk aesthetic. In a sense, the exhibit is a display of ingenious solutions, of how “so many clever people solve pretty challenging technical and creative problems,” says Nelson Lowry, LAIKA’s production Designer. And LAIKA fashioned the feathery cloaks that Kubo’s evil sisters wear from 861 laser-etched 3D-printed “feathers” they patterned the sisters themselves after female samurai warrior Tomoe Gozen. Note the numerous folds in the kimono worn by Kubo’s mother, which they fabricated from more than 2000 laser-cut pieces of weighted lining, so it would hang from the armature realistically. LAIKA made the costumes with equal care study the intricacies of the patterns of the costumes worn in Kubo, inspired by the history Japanese fashion, and the art of origami. There’s a row of such spooky faces from Coraline, the first feature-length film to use 3D printing for the process, with the face first printed out on white plastic, then layered with gray primer and paints for skin tone, and lips and eye color (McClean says 20,000 faces were printed for the film). You see a few of the thousands of faces created for the puppets, which enable them to have a range of facial expressions and speak dialogue. Underneath the costumes, the bodies are bare metallic skeletons called an armature (“They kind of look like the Terminator,” says Brian McLean, Director of Rapid Prototype). (all photos courtesy of MoPop).Īnd then you delve into their secrets. LAIKA’s skeleton monster puppet from Kubo and the Two Strings. Coraline looks somewhat fragile standing alone in her display case, and even the fearsome Beetle warrior in Kubo gives off a friendlier, Buzz Lightyear kind of vibe. Seeing these characters, which looked so larger than life on the big screen, shifts your perspective. Most of the puppets you’ve seen in the LAIKA films turn out to less than 12 inches tall (the exception being the giant skeleton from Kubo and the Two Strings at 16 feet, it’s the largest stop motion puppet ever built). In The Boxtrolls room, you can watch film clips on a screen set atop a pile of Victorian-era faux wooden boxes with vintage labels for things like baking powder in the Missing Link room, faux blocks of ice surround the clips. After exploring the world of Coraline, you have to go through a tunnel emulating the same passage Coraline goes through to reach the “Other World” in order to access the other rooms in the exhibit. It’s the largest exhibit LAIKA has ever done, spanning 7500 square feet of the museum, taking you chronologically through their history of feature-length films, creating a different visual setting for each, “in order to get people into the action a bit more,” in the words of Jacob McMurray, MoPop’s Head of Curatorial, livening up the dry museum experience. “Hidden Worlds: The Films of LAIKA” is like taking a stroll through the animation company’s workshop, revealing the staggering amount of work that goes into making these movies. Now, a new exhibit at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture ( MoPop) takes you inside the creation of these modern-day fairytales. Missing Link(2019) takes a Sasquatch from his Pacific Northwest home to track down his Yeti relatives in the Himalayas. In The Boxtrolls (2014), the intrepid boy Eggs fights to defend the titular trolls from being slandered as evil-doers. In Coraline (2009), a young girl discovers a hidden door in her apartment that leads to a parallel universe populated by creepy doppelgangers. The stop-motion animated films of Portland, Oregon-based LAIKA studios create magical, surreal environments for the tales they tell.
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