A new exhi­bi­tion shows off the invis­i­ble process­es behind stop motion

A lot of Frame x Frame, a new exhi­bi­tion at the BFI South­bank about and fund­ed by LAI­KA Stu­dios, is about the moment between shots – what we don’t see on screen when the pup­pets or mechan­ics move, whether that’s the mech­a­nisms under the sur­face or the var­i­ous rigs kept just out of view of the cam­era (or erased in post-pro­duc­tion). It’s part of the BFI’s Stop Motion sea­son, which doesn’t just fea­ture LAI­KA but a wealth of mas­ters of the form: Ray Har­ry­hausen, Jan Švankma­jer, The Broth­ers Quay and Nick Park being just a few of the names mentioned.

Dan Pas­call, LAIKA’s Event & Pro­duc­tion Mar­ket­ing Senior Man­ag­er, broke Frame x Frame down as a show­case of the many depart­ments feed­ing into their approach to stop motion: ​“It’s [about] what hap­pens before [the pup­pet moves]. The ani­ma­tors mov­ing the pup­pet – there’s 10 to 15 to 20 peo­ple that have had the prop or the pup­pet before it gets to the ani­ma­tor to make it work. So, it was real­ly about show­cas­ing that process as well and what goes on fur­ther upstream and what it takes. Everything’s planned, everything’s fab­ri­cat­ed, and it’s gone in a sec­ond on the screen.”

Those scores of peo­ple being made vis­i­ble gets at the appeal of one of the small things I’ve enjoyed when watch­ing LAIKA’s films: the inclu­sion of lit­tle behind-the-scenes time-laps­es dur­ing the end cred­its, ded­i­cat­ed to the mak­ing of a par­tic­u­lar sequence. Part of the joy of watch­ing stop motion is the knowl­edge of its very mak­ing – per­haps not a sense of arti­fice, but, in Hen­ry Selick’s words in a recent inter­view for Sight & Sound, the recog­ni­tion that the film in front of you was ​“touched by a real per­son”, the acknowl­edge­ment of the invis­i­ble hands mov­ing things mil­lime­tre by mil­lime­tre, that ​“noth­ing is by acci­dent”, as said on one of the exhibition’s displays.

The exhi­bi­tion space itself is cute and com­pact, its entrance styled after the oth­er­world­ly liv­ing gar­den in Cora­line – a theme that bleeds a lit­tle into the rest of the gallery space as it car­ries on a small-scale repli­ca­tion of the scene fea­tur­ing the pray­ing man­tis trac­tor. At the back of the room, a small cor­ner with a video dis­play teas­ing the studio’s next film Wildwood.

The rest is divid­ed by film; a series of large cas­es dis­play­ing pup­pets, ear­ly maque­tte tests (basi­cal­ly, pre­lim­i­nary pup­pet builds), props at vary­ing scales, key art and pieces of the set. The whole space is designed to show off the var­i­ous lev­els of con­struc­tion, fab­ri­ca­tion and devel­op­ment of stop-motion. As Pas­call puts it: ​“So much of what we do it’s assumed [that] it’s done in the com­put­er, [but] it’s clos­er to a live-action film. They are real, tac­tile pup­pets. They’re real sets. They’re real shad­ows, real light­ing. Every mate­r­i­al that we pull out, we test under light­ing con­di­tions on the stage. So, it’s real­ly about get­ting that across, that this is a phys­i­cal, tac­tile thing.”

There’s a sur­pris­ing amount of mate­r­i­al – right down to dif­fer­ent tests for cos­tume fab­rics and tex­tures for sets on dis­play in pull­out draw­ers – fit into the space. It’s well-organ­ised too, giv­ing each film a focus which high­lights a part of LAIKA’s process for ani­ma­tion. Coraline’s seg­ment is a sort of intro­duc­to­ry seg­ment to high­light the num­ber of teams and process­es involved. It talks through every­thing from rapid pro­to­type and ear­ly tests to cos­tume design as well as the spe­cif­ic design ideas dri­ving Cora­line itself, a high­light for me being a draw­er that showed pup­pets depict­ing the var­i­ous stages of trans­for­ma­tion of the film’s spooky par­al­lel uni­verse mon­ster with but­tons for eyes: ​“Oth­er Mother”.

Mean­while, the area for Para­Nor­man shows off pup­pet builds, break­ing down the inan­i­mate per­form­ers into their var­i­ous parts – the most mem­o­rable of which was Norm him­self, basi­cal­ly explod­ed into his basic parts, show­ing the arma­ture skele­ton under­neath – this is where the exhi­bi­tion lit­er­al­ly got more under the sur­face into the process­es that, by their words, are ​“felt but not seen”. The Box­trolls area fur­ther high­lights the studio’s mod­el shop, while Miss­ing Link’s seg­ment exam­ines set build­ing, both in terms of the mod­u­lar sets the stu­dio uses as well as the choic­es made in styling the film’s landscape.

Miss­ing Link may not be the best film from the stu­dio (that would be Cora­line, and it’s not close) but its seg­ment is a fun walk­through of how the stu­dio builds sets to com­ple­ment their block­ing. It’s also, like much of the oth­er seg­ments, about mate­r­i­al, with stud­ies of dif­fer­ent cac­ti, rocks and boul­ders and tests of wild­flow­ers tak­ing up just as much space as the char­ac­ters. That focus on mate­r­i­al was a key take­away, high­light­ing that stop motion isn’t just sig­nif­i­cant for the fact that it’s pup­pets being moved one pho­to at a time, but also that there’s a require­ment for the build­ing of phys­i­cal sets, and the con­sid­er­a­tions that go into such.

One area, revolv­ing around Kubo and the Two Strings, went into a dif­fer­ent toolk­it, as it broke down the studio’s use of VFX and dig­i­tal ani­ma­tion and how it works in con­cert with stop motion. The Kubo & the Two Strings seg­ment leads with a descrip­tion of the dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies used; it also notes their use of scan­ning pup­pets for 3D mod­els used in some crowd scenes, the gen­er­al use seem­ing to be to aid with an expan­sion of scale. Pas­call explains, ​“Visu­al effects have always been obvi­ous­ly a part of every sin­gle movie, start­ing from Cora­line. And it’s evolved as we’ve gone on, show by show, as the stu­dio has.” As not­ed in this seg­ment of the exhi­bi­tion, Pas­call under­lines that ​“it allows us to expand our worlds. And obvi­ous­ly, when we first were giv­en the script for Kubo, it was very appar­ent that the world had expand­ed quite sig­nif­i­cant­ly.” He adds, ​“There’s so many huge wide vis­tas. We’re build­ing prac­ti­cal char­ac­ters, prac­ti­cal pup­pets, prac­ti­cal sets, so all of a sud­den, our giant stu­dio in Ore­gon feels like a shoebox.”

For the dis­plays scenes from Kubo & the Two Strings are bro­ken down into sto­ry­board­ing, prop and pup­pet design and com­pos­ite, demon­strat­ing how dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies affect­ed each of these process­es. One exam­ple looked at an ear­ly crowd scene, where the major­i­ty of the mod­els are cre­at­ed dig­i­tal­ly, scanned from pup­pets then com­pos­it­ed into the final shot.

“As the envi­ron­ments grow, so do the shots and so do the size of the crowds”, says Pas­call. He con­tin­ues, ​“When you’ve got Kubo walk­ing down the main street and you’ve got 50, 60 back­ground char­ac­ters, there would’ve been a time where we would’ve poten­tial­ly tried to build 50 or 60 back­ground char­ac­ters, and as a result, we built few­er back­ground char­ac­ters imprac­ti­cal­ly.” Pas­call empha­sised the col­lab­o­ra­tion between the depart­ments and the VFX crew, not­ing that ​“any­one that has got a line of dia­logue, a hero char­ac­ter obvi­ous­ly, or any hero action is an in-cam­era pup­pet. And then what VFX will do is, they’ll work with those depart­ments that we men­tioned before, and they’ll build a library of heads, hair types, body types, cos­tumes. And they’ll be able to build larg­er crowds, so the ani­ma­tor can real­ly focus on the five or six key char­ac­ter pup­pets in the fore­ground. And then the back­ground will be tak­en over by VFX.”

There are stick­ing points, like one issue that Selick has returned to. In the Sight & Sound inter­view, the Cora­line direc­tor spoke about imper­fec­tion and its place in stop motion, with ref­er­ence to the vis­i­ble face replace­ment seams on the pup­pets’ faces in Wen­dell & Wild, evi­dence of a ​“human touch”. He then says that it’s some­thing he want­ed to do in Cora­line before the inter­ven­tion of the studio’s own­er Phil Knight (as in the own­er of Nike, or Ben Affleck in Air), who appar­ent­ly felt uncom­fort­able with the idea and pushed for touch-ups to remove them, which Selick calls ​“an unnec­es­sary expense”.

Dig­i­tal VFX is, obvi­ous­ly, not sim­ply just a bad new thing and has many pur­pos­es in ani­ma­tion, even in stop-motion. It makes sense to find a way to incor­po­rate new tools. Not to men­tion, in a sense, it’s also made by an artist’s hand. And Selick is no Lud­dite – far from it, hav­ing shown a will­ing­ness to work with new tech­nolo­gies with Cora­line both in its own use of VFX, but espe­cial­ly its rather ground­break­ing use of 3D print­ing for replace­ment limbs and faces for the pup­pets. Not only that, but the use of 3D pro­jec­tion in the pre­sen­ta­tion of the film itself – but he has a point. Its use can feel like a dou­ble-edged sword, because while it allows for more expan­sive scenery in Kubo & the Two Strings, the inter­ven­tion of CG ani­ma­tion and dig­i­tal VFX can def­i­nite­ly be felt, and in places, it still feels too smooth. It reminds me of a piece from the newslet­ter Ani­ma­tion Obses­sive, which last Sep­tem­ber pub­lished a piece titled ​“The Art of Imper­fec­tion”, which speaks about the temp­ta­tion of touch-ups allowed by ani­ma­tion work in the dig­i­tal era, and how some­times the rough edges add more character.

The arti­cle con­sid­ers how the abil­i­ty to per­fect things through con­stant revi­sion and iter­a­tion calls into ques­tion how a lot of the visu­al joys of ani­ma­tion also derive from its lim­i­ta­tions. These are the blem­ish­es that Selick also speaks of in his inter­view, say­ing ​“When you can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between stop motion and CG, why are you doing it? That’s the main thing: I still want to feel that this was touched by a real per­son. Jan Švankmajer’s ideas are so strong that the exe­cu­tion of the ani­ma­tion didn’t need to be per­fect. It would have been hurt if it was too per­fect”. From my per­spec­tive, these aren’t so much fears of dig­i­tal ani­ma­tion tak­ing over, as some con­cerns with how it’s used.

There are reas­sur­ances from Pas­call regard­ing such lim­i­ta­tions, as he spoke about how the VFX depart­ments try to pre­serve a sense of tac­til­i­ty: ​“Any visu­al effects, char­ac­ter or set exten­sion, is always based on a phys­i­cal asset, whether that be a test piece, a test pup­pet or a test minia­ture mock-up set. They’ll shoot and they’ll scan. It’s nev­er VFX just going off to build their own things. [So] they can also build in the same lim­i­ta­tions that a phys­i­cal pup­pet would have as well, so it feels of the world.” He con­tin­ues to note the col­lab­o­ra­tion with oth­er depart­ments, say­ing ​“the pup­pet depart­ment and the art depart­ment and the art direc­tor still work very, very close­ly with visu­al effects, but it’s a tool that allows us to not be lim­it­ed by our build­ing space.” So on one hand, it’s about remov­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of set build­ing space, on the oth­er, there’s con­sid­er­a­tion of the lim­its of phys­i­cal pup­pets – per­haps a dou­ble-edged sword.

A sim­i­lar sen­ti­ment was reit­er­at­ed at the pre­mière of Coraline’s 15^th-anniver­sary restora­tion (in 3D!) at the BFI South­bank, in a post-film fea­turette detailed a process of ​“Rebuild­ing Cora­line”, revis­it­ing the char­ac­ter from a con­tem­po­rary posi­tion, not­ing what has changed in the studio’s method­ol­o­gy in the time since. The behind-the-scenes video has lines from the artists which are rather can­did about their own hes­i­ta­tions, but also note that it allows them to get even more gran­u­lar in oth­er places, stress­ing that the use of the tech­nol­o­gy isn’t about tak­ing shortcuts.

This inspired some con­fi­dence, but dig­i­tal effects’ place in stop-motion is some­thing I’m still in two minds about. Regard­less, the exhi­bi­tion itself is full of love­ly sam­ples of the in-cam­era craft, even as it espous­es the studio’s embrace of new tech­nolo­gies. Frame x Frame is well-curat­ed, max­imis­ing the use of small space and show­ing off a pret­ty impres­sive array of detail and organ­is­ing it well. The mar­ket­ing aspect of it can be strong­ly felt, a nat­ur­al result of LAI­KA being the ones con­trol­ling their own nar­ra­tive here. But it’s also an inter­est­ing peek behind the cur­tain as well as a con­sid­er­a­tion of how those process­es are con­tin­u­al­ly changing.

LAI­KA: Frame x Frame runs until 1 Octo­ber 2024 at BFI South­bank. Tick­ets are free but must be pre-booked.