Miss­ing Link

The past decade has seen a steady rise in sophis­ti­cat­ed, adult-skewed stop-motion film­mak­ing, from Adam Elliot’s Mary & Max to Claude Bar­ras’ My Life as a Cour­gette to Duke John­son and Char­lie Kaufman’s Anom­al­isa to Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. Not that younger view­ers have been miss­ing out: Aard­man Ani­ma­tions con­tin­ues to plug away with its home­spun brand of eccen­tri­cal­ly British clay­ma­tion, while across the pond a rel­a­tive upstart has tak­en the art­form to daz­zling new heights.

We are in a gold­en age of stop-motion ani­ma­tion and, since the release of Cora­line in 2009, Lai­ka has been at the cut­ting edge of the indus­try, putting out on aver­age one new fea­ture every few years to wide­spread crit­i­cal acclaim. The stu­dio keeps upping its tech­ni­cal game, too, with Para­Nor­man, The Box­trolls and Kubo and the Two Strings hav­ing suc­ces­sive­ly utilised advances in 3D print­ing and CG soft­ware to pro­duce ever more nat­u­ral­is­tic facial ani­ma­tion. So how does Miss­ing Link mea­sure up?

This fish-out-of-water sto­ry begins with a mon­ster in a lake. Charis­mat­ic, ego­cen­tric adven­tur­er Sir Lionel Frost (voiced by Hugh Jack­man) and his long-suf­fer­ing assis­tant, Mr Lint (David Wal­liams), are on the hunt for a myth­i­cal beast in the Scot­tish High­lands. Ini­tial­ly it seems like a wild goose chase, until a pre­his­toric giant emerges from the murky depths, tow­er­ing over the pair’s dinky wood­en row boat.

Fol­low­ing a brief alter­ca­tion, Frost cap­tures irrefutable proof of the famous­ly cam­era-shy Loch Ness Mon­ster, only to see it destroy his pho­to­graph­ic equip­ment. Thanks for noth­ing, Nessie. Fail­ure, it tran­spires, is a recur­ring theme for Frost. Upon return­ing to Lon­don emp­ty-hand­ed he is ridiculed by the mem­bers of an elit­ist explor­ers club he des­per­ate­ly wish­es to join. The truth is he doesn’t real­ly fit in, but he is nonethe­less deter­mined to make his name and win the respect of his peers. So Frost decides to go west.

Not long after arriv­ing in the Pacif­ic North­west (Lai­ka is based in Ore­gon) our sea­soned ​“myths and mon­sters inves­ti­ga­tor” makes a dis­cov­ery so strange, so utter­ly con­found­ing, even he is at a loss to explain it. Eight feet tall, 630 pounds, cov­ered in thick rust-coloured fur and with a remark­ably good grasp of the Eng­lish lan­guage, the crea­ture Frost encoun­ters is not quite the leg­end he had in mind.

Indeed, the sup­pos­ed­ly fear­some, prim­i­tive Sasquatch (Zach Gal­i­fi­anakis) reveals itself to be a gen­tle and intel­li­gent being who longs to be with oth­ers of its kind – to final­ly under­stand its place in the world. Frost prompt­ly dubs his ape-like acquain­tance ​“Mr Link” after his afore­men­tioned (now for­mer) assis­tant, and togeth­er they chart a course for a lost par­adise deep with­in the Himalayas known as Shangri-La, where an ancient tribe of Yeti are said to live in bliss­ful solitude.

As these unlike­ly trav­el­ling com­pan­ions make their way east via New York City and the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent, all while attempt­ing to evade a cut-throat boun­ty hunter who has been hired to thwart Frost, the fran­tic, shag­gy plot set­tles into a more relaxed rhythm. This is one of those films where the des­ti­na­tion is much less impor­tant than the jour­ney, and the slow­er pac­ing of the sec­ond and third acts allows us to savour the stun­ning vis­tas that estab­lish each new setting.

Writer/​director Chris But­ler and his crew of ani­ma­tors, VFX artists, mod­el mak­ers and graph­ic design­ers cre­at­ed a stag­ger­ing 110 sets with 65 unique loca­tions over the course of the pro­duc­tion. Yet for all the love, care and craft that has evi­dent­ly gone into round­ing out the world of the film, the char­ac­ters who occu­py it are con­spic­u­ous­ly two-dimensional.

This swash­buck­ling stop-motion adven­ture is a lot of fun, but its car­toon­ish pro­tag­o­nists are eas­i­ly for­got­ten (Zoe Saldana’s feisty hero­ine, Adeli­na Fort­night, feels espe­cial­ly super­flu­ous), and although the emo­tion­al finale takes place in the high­est moun­tain range on earth, the film arguably reach­es its dra­mat­ic peak dur­ing that breath­less open­ing set-piece. On a visu­al lev­el, though, Miss­ing Link is a rare and won­der­ful specimen.