One of the toughest aspect’s of award season is reminding voters about impressive works that came out at the beginning of the year. There is a natural tendancy to just focus on the release that have peppered your brain for the last few months and it often takes something special to break through that haze. In the Animated Feature Film race, one contender that deserves a second look is Chris Butler’s beautiful stop-motion animated feature, “Missing Link.”
READ MORE: “Missing Link” is a well crafted tale [Review]
Released in April, the LAIKA production is set in the late 1800s and finds Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman) on a mission to help a North American Sasquatch (Zach Galifianakis) reunite with his long lost relatives, the Yetis, in the Himalayas. Frost’s former girlfriend and progressive adventurer, Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana), eventually joins them on their quest. The film got solid reviews, but its Butler’s desire to push the limits of stop-motion animation and Nelson Lowry’s stellar production design that make it stand out.
Butler, who also directed the beloved “ParaNorman,” sat down to discuss “Missing Link” in the Q&A below which also features an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at what went into fashioning the film’s pattern-filled production design.
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The Playlist: Where did the idea for this story come from?
Chris Butler: I think that I’ve been working on it on and off for more than 15 years. And I think a long, long time ago I thought I would like to see an action-adventure movie, done in stop motion. But back then I don’t think it would have been possible. Certainly not in the scope and scale of what we eventually achieved. So, I had this idea, which was kind of a mix between Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes and Ray Harryhausen creatures. And I kept picking at it over the years. I’d go back and I’d write a little bit more. After I finished “ParaNorman,” I sat with [LAIKA CEO Travis Knight] and he said, “What do you want to do next?” And I had three projects, I think, that I brought before him. And I think we both agreed that this felt like it was the right idea for us as a studio and for me creatively as well. It felt like it was a step in a different direction. That was five years ago. So yeah, I just started working on the idea: What would happen if Big Foot was lonely and read about Yetis. So that was the other idea. And then when it came time to, when we were greenlit and we were starting pre-production, I sat with all the heads of department and I said, “In terms of ambition, I want this to be if David Lean made ‘Around the world in 80 days’ starring Laurel and Hardy.”
That’s a good comparison. I see that actually.
Good. We succeeded.
You succeeded. I’ve been up to Laika a number of times. I understand how stop motion works, but there are two sequences in particular that are just clearly so difficult or that seems too difficult to pull off, because of what they’re trying to do. The first one is the scene where Hugh Jackman and Zoe’s character are in a ship cabin and it’s rocking back and forth due to rough seas. Things are dramatically sliding back and forth around them. There’s such a natural hesitation when you’re on a boat or things are floating. How did your team make it seem so natural in stop motion animation?
That was a pretty intimate conversation scene. But to me, it was all about the character dynamics. And so every time these characters try to communicate, they are on shaky ground, literally. So they’re in the stagecoach, which is very bumpy. They’re on the ship, which is rolling with the waves. So, I seized hold of it, because it would have been very easy to say, “This is going to be too difficult. Let’s just, I don’t know, set it in a room, in a hotel somewhere. I don’t know.” But it was important to me in terms of mise en scene and the narrative that we really utilized the settings for them in the best way possible. Once we’d committed to it, you have those initial conversations about how are we actually going to get this done. And for most of the ship scenes, because the sets were just so big, we couldn’t really motion-control them. So, we had to move the camera instead. So, rather than moving the sets, we’re moving the camera to emulate the motion of the ocean.
Right.
We actually developed a script of which way the boat was moving at from shot to shot. Mark and I went through and we mapped out, like I said, “Well, I want the light to be shining in Lionel’s face when, when Adelina says this line, because it’s accusatory, so it’s almost like an interrogation. So I want the ship to be going that direction. Then when she advances on him, he’s on his back foot so he falls backward.” And we had to pick out all the beats that were important narratively, and then work them into a mechanical motion that we could control with the cameras. So, we created a script where the boat needed to be when. That basically is the foundation for the scene. But then on top of that, because you’re not moving the set itself, it’s up to the animator to conjure up the motion in their head, which is very, very difficult.
Then there’s a sequence that’s pretty close right where Hugh’s character is running down a hallway. It’s also moving and there’s all sorts of different, unique action going. Am I assuming correctly that was tough to pull off as well?
You are dead right. That was incredibly difficult. And again, because of the size of the sets, we were moving the camera, so it was up to the animator to create that sense of imbalance. You know, with characters running on walls and whatever it was. So yeah, huge undertaking.
What else might have been so difficult that it might not have been obvious to an audience or even an industry professional?
I think the big thing on this movie was the scope of it, the scale of it. 10 years ago, I don’t think we would’ve been able to do this. It’s because of our use of, the way our technology has advanced at the studio. We’re always pushing the boundaries of what stop motion can do. And we utilized digital technology wherever possible, to accentuate this age old art form. So ordinarily, in the past stop motion movies have been on a much smaller scale. It’s like a few characters in a house, or a few characters in, at most, a village, but you don’t get a stop motion movie that travels across the world. I think we had 97 unique locations and all of those have to be built. That’s the thing on this movie is that the characters rarely go back to a location. There’s only a couple that we see more than once in the movie because they’re continually moving forward on this quest. So we have to build those sets, hook them up in a unit, have an animator work on them, and then get them down so we can get another set up. Just in terms of scheduling, it was a logistical nightmare, but because of our digital technology we were able to do very expansive locations [like] the Himalayas. And I think would be wrong to say that digital technology was doing the work for us. For example, in the Himalayas, we would have the art department physically build or sculpt a mountain range in miniature. I know everything we do is in miniature but even more miniature.
Right.
And then we would give that to the digital department. They would scan it and create it, and being able to place it and composite it within the movie and make it fit. So there was an awful lot of that just in terms of set extensions. We had more on this movie than we’ve ever had before. And of course a lot of those locations have characters. We had background characters in the thousands and not just in one country. We had different ethnicities and a lot of that was because of what we developed in previous movies with our digital background characters. But even they are informed by practical builds. We will have our costume designer come up with fabrics that are scanned so that everything fits this tactile world. So I think the scope and scale definitely was the biggest challenge on this movie.
Then just from sequence to sequence, we did some pretty major action sequences. The scene on the ice bridge, with that collapsing. I mean, we were shooting that for the whole production schedule. Two years worth of shooting on that and we had to build so many different versions of that to work with the puppets. We had a full scale broken bridge. We had a miniature scale full bridge. We had a digital bridge for when it’s collapsing. We even had miniature puppets, and it’s the first time that we’ve ever done that because our puppets are standard size, 13 inches. If we make miniature ones, they often don’t hold up on camera.
Every Laika Film seems to have its own unique look, even if the idea of the stop motion is there are familiar things in terms of how you guys do your characters and stuff. But I feel like with the work that production designer Nelson Lowry did on this film sort of took it to another level. And what was the idea behind that?
I am so pleased that you spotted that. At the very start of the production, before anyone’s involved, really, except me, I make a look book. And there’s maybe eight different chapters, which is just a collage of things that I want to influence the movie. And one of the big things for me was patterning and I didn’t want to repeat what I’d done before with “ParaNorman.” So I was looking for something that wasn’t reliant on asymmetry. “Paranorman” was all about asymmetry and for this, I wanted something that was almost too symmetrical. So I was looking at geometric shapes, and the patterning was a way of getting that order into the natural world. I was looking at Richard Williams’ “The Thief and The Cobbler,” which was designed by Errol Le Cain, a very prolific illustrator. And a lot of his work is very much based on dense patterning. And also it felt right because in the Victorian age, the Victorians were nuts about patterning. They put pattern on everything. You look at their wallpapers, even just old brick buildings and tiled roofs, it’s like you couldn’t get away from the patterning. And so my thought was, what if we could pull that off? That almost too much look, where everything has got this order to it. And we instilled it everywhere. We put it into clouds. Nelson created a whole library of patterns that I used throughout the movie. So the same pattern that you see in the floorboards, for example, is exactly the same pattern that is used in crosshatching in smoke. You may not see it, but you might feel it. It is there.
Stop motion has always danced in the shadows if you like. And I have done that myself. We’ve done “Coraline,” certainly “ParaNorman,” “Box Trolls” – a lot of it’s underground – “Kubo and the Two Strings” takes place at night. So there was so much room to explore a vibrant color palette. Stepping out of the shadows, I wanted something that was bold and vibrant, and the patterning allowed us to do that in a really beautiful way, I think.
Can you say what you’re working on next?
Not so much. I am doing a bit of writing at the moment and that is for the studio, but I can’t really talk about it. There is work going on at the studio as always.
So secretive.
Yes. Unfortunately it is. I would tell you if I could. And I mean to be honest, I feel like I haven’t had much time to blink. You know, when you start these things and you think, yes, we’re moving and then it’s five years of nothing but moving. So, this year I’ve finally managed to have a little bit of a break. But I’m doing the publicity stuff at the moment, which is great because I love it when I talk to someone and they got what we were trying to sell. That’s just the most rewarding thing is when I hear people say they got it.
“Missing Link” is available for digital download on all major outlets.