The BFI Southbank is on a roll with its animation programming. Following its spotlight on Cartoon Saloon in January, London’s venerable cinematheque is currently honoring stop motion with a comprehensive season that ranges from major studios like LAIKA and Aardman to independent filmmakers such as Suzie Templeton and the Brothers Quay.
The word “magic” crops up often when describing these films, not least in the various post-screening talks held during the season — but the BFI also provides a helpful corrective to this framing of stop motion. LAIKA: Frame x Frame is an accompanying exhibition which displays over 700 items from the vaults of the great Portland studio (which is a headline partner on the season). While the artistry of these puppets, props and sets speaks for itself, the exhibition emphasizes the sheer effort that has gone into LAIKA’s five features to date, reminding us that the enchantment of stop motion rests on a bedrock of intense labor.
Moving chronologically through the studio’s filmography, Frame x Frame reveals how the studio’s various departments collaborate to create the final image. There are armatures, pieces of concept art, puppets and their arrays of replacement faces. Sliding drawers contain small props: axes, teapots, books. The Pullman Train interior set from Missing Link dominates one room, its roof incongruously open (animators reached the puppets that way). Captions explain LAIKA’s production processes, including its extensive integration of digital tools. The 881-part Moon Beast from Kubo and the Two Strings glowers from behind glass; we are told it was the studio’s first entirely 3D-printed puppet. Stop motion is magic, art, labor — but it is technology, too.
Travis Knight, LAIKA’s CEO and director of Kubo, uses other, more emotive words to describe the studio’s way of working. “It’s stupid. It’s madness. It really is the absolute worst way to make a movie,” he said, speaking onstage after a screening of Kubo. Knight spoke about the obsessive attention to detail and idiosyncratic workarounds that define LAIKA’s approach, confirming, for instance, that Monkey’s skin in the film was made from 243 pairs of Calvin Klein Hipster white underwear dyed purple. But when summarizing his love of stop motion, he resorted to a familiar word: “When I see these things brought to life by artists’ hands, I just think it’s absolutely magical.”
Knight is one of many stop-motion filmmakers who have spoken at the season. A screening of LAIKA’s ParaNorman was followed by a Q&A with its directors, Chris Butler (who also directed Missing Link) and Sam Fell. Like Knight, the pair are both proud of the grueling work of stop motion and self-deprecating about it. “This is what the stop-motion crew lives for,” said Butler. “[Making] millions of pieces of useless crap that no one will see unless you freeze-frame it. But, altogether, that frame will be beautiful because of it.”
Fell and Butler spoke in detail about the studio’s marriage of analog and digital techniques, explaining that “with a lot of our stuff, what we’ll start with is something practical”: visdev artists will sculpt a cloud out of tulle fabric, and this will be passed on to the VFX team as reference. Asked for their thoughts on CGI that apes the look of stop motion, Fell conceded that “it’s hard to spot the difference if someone is really trying to fool you.”
For him, the appeal of stop motion is more about the process than the result: the joy is that, during production, “you can see the film, it’s all around you. You can pick it up and touch it, you can smell it … I find that making movies on a screen is just really tiring and not much fun.” Butler added that what makers of stop-motion-like CGI are looking for “is that imperfection of reality … CG spends millions of dollars trying to find this imperfection. We get it for free.”
The process is also key for Henry Selick, who directed LAIKA’s debut feature Coraline — as well as its CG short Moongirl, released four years previously, before the studio had committed itself to stop motion. That experience put him off computer animation: “It was too much like when I was back at Disney doing in-betweens,” he told the BFI audience. “You’re sitting all day, you’re part of a pipeline, you don’t have much autonomy. I didn’t like the culture behind it. I didn’t like the CG team I was saddled with.”
For Coraline, Selick “purposely used the least amount of CG possible.” While acknowledging that digital tools have their uses in his filmmaking, he is unimpressed with the CG sector’s focus on technological novelty. “I remember every few years there’d be a huge breakthrough: ‘Oh, they can do liquids now, they can do hair.’ … We’ve had so many years of that, it doesn’t quite have the value [anymore].”
For Selick, stop motion is rooted in the earliest kinds of cinematic effect; it is too old to die. By way of conclusion, he said, “Stop motion is never going to be … the way to go. I think it will always be an outlier that comes back into focus, goes out, back into focus.” Then, disagreeing with Knight: “But I can’t think of a better way to make a film.”
BFI Southbank’s Stop Motion: Celebrating Hand-Crafted Animation on the Big Screen film season and the free exhibition LAIKA: Frame x Frame opened August 1 and run through October 9. Screening tickets and more information available at whatson.bfi.org.uk.
