Your backgrounds cover a wide variety of animation styles, including CGI movies and video games. Was the opportunity to have a more hands-on approach your motivation for joining Laika?
Anthony Stacchi Yes, definitely. I kept having these
run-ins with stop-motion films, working on James and the Giant Peach a little
bit and other studios that used stop-motion for TV commercials and stuff, but
it never seemed to come together for a feature. So when I went to visit Laika
and met Travis [Laika CEO Travis Knight] and had the opportunity to work on
this, it was definitely something to jump at.
Graham Annable For me honestly, I was always aware of
stop-motion but wasn't an obsessive fan of it or anything. I'd worked in
hand-drawn and CG animation. I was excited because Henry [Coraline director
Henry Selick] gave me the opportunity to get back into storyboarding, because
I'd been an animator for a lot longer than I had anticipated. Earlier in my
career I had done some storyboarding for Chuck Jones, in the early '90s when
they were trying to revitalise theatre shorts. I got to board out a whole
seven-minute theatre short, I got to work with Chuck Jones for a week, and I
came out of it thinking 'Man, I really want to be a storyboarder, that's exactly
what I'm going to do'. Then I spent 15 years animating in video games [laughs]. So I really wanted to get back to it and Henry had seen a bunch of independent
comics I'd been doing on the side when he was gathering a story crew, and he
asked me to come up and work on Coraline. When I went up there I was just
excited to storyboard a feature film, and it wasn't until the first days when
the sets and puppets were all up and I got a chance to sneak down and look at
the stages. I was just like [makes an awestruck face], because I mean,
animation is amazing in all its forms, but nothing competes with the physical
object and how magical that is, to see everything built and minituarised in
front of you.
All animation is time-consuming and labour-intensive, but
that seems to be especially true of stop-motion. Do you need a particular kind
of personality to work in this field?
AS The animators say it's not so much patience as focus.
There's a lot of stuff going on around you on the sets and you're
working with the lighting crew and the camera crew, so you really have to focus
your mind on the puppet, remember what you just did and what you intend to do. So
that's why animators talk about focus, but they love being out there posing the
puppets with their headphones on, that's when they're really happy.
GA I think other forms of animation tend to feel more private.
You can squirrel away in the corner and work on your drawings for a week and
nobody will bother you, but with stop-motion, while you are alone on the stage
a lot, you always have the camera crews and lighting crews coming in, and it's
a very public spectacle animating in front of everyone. It does have to be a
weird combination of personality to get into stop-motion, yeah.
And as directors, you really have to marshal a whole army of
people to get something like this made.
AS I mean, they all exist in every form of animation, but
it feels more like a live-action shoot. A slow-motion live-action shoot, anyway. The
crew is there and the set is being built, and people are coming out to repair
the puppets and their costumes. If you're working in CG animation you're in a
dark room staring at a glowing screen, and if any problems happen another
department downloads the problem somewhere else and takes care of it. It is
true that the tactile quality of these things, the fact that these things are
handmade and really exist, I think the audience – consciously or subconsciously
– can feel that these are different to CG films. CG films have a look that we've
gotten really used to now, but I can remember when Toy Story came out what was
amazing was that they had this 3D dimensionality. You could put really complex
textures on them, and they may look like a 2D drawn character but you could do
things that you could never do in hand-drawn films because you couldn't track
those shapes, and the audience could tell something was different. Maybe it's like
Graham says, we're so old-fashioned we're kind of new again. People can look at
it and say there's something different about it even if they have no comprehension
of what stop-motion is.
It is an old-fashioned style and you mentioned working on James
and the Giant Peach, which was almost 20 years ago. Has the technique changed a
lot in that time or is it essentially the same approach at heart?
AS In a fundamental way it has changed for the people who
do it. The Nightmare Before Christmas, which I worked a little bit on, had
replacement heads and that's not dissimilar to what we do with these printed
faces. [Anthony removes the face from one of his puppets] These are printed by
the thousands so we can replace them with minute changes to the expression and
mouth shape, and then animate it. Nightmare had replacement heads for Jack
Skellington and those characters, but James and the Giant Peach had mostly
mechanical heads with some replacement faces, and they were silicone and rubber
and underneath had little paddles that moved. So those were two pretty
old-fashioned forms of animation. What Travis has done at Laika is pull in
these high-tech elements. We have a state-of-the-art VFX department
that could work at any animation studio, CGI or special effects, and we have
this technology here that they started on Coraline. So that has really changed
the quality of the performance and the level of expression that we can get is
so much greater nowadays. The animation has a quality that it has never had
before.
One thing that always fascinates me about animation, and
particularly stop-motion, is the art of timing. So many of your sequences
depend on perfect timing; for example missing a comic beat by just a tiny
amount can be the difference between a gag working or not. How do you manage
that when you're putting sequences together in this slow, incremental way?
AS One of the days when we were recording Sir Ben Kingsley
in Oxford, he was listening to one of the sequences involving himself that we
had animated. He couldn't understand how we could record Richard Ayoade, Nick
Frost and him months apart from each other and cut it together so we have him
having a conversation with Richard Ayoade, and Nick Frost is making a small
comment, and it's all about the timing. It was funny to get those questions
from somebody who had been in films so much and understood editing and all
those things, but in animation you make the film before you make the film. A
lot of people think storyboarding is where you draw the scenes and figure out
where you're going to place the camera, but in animation storyboarding is about
the performance of the character. So you're drawing all these poses and figuring
out that if Mr Pickles and Mr Trout are talking, they're posed like this and
then they're posed like that, and then we cut. Then we do temp voices, so we
had a guy from the lighting department playing Trout and a guy from the puppet
fabrication department playing Pickles, and we cut their dialogue before we get
Richard Ayoade and Nick Frost to record it. If we can record them together then
you get the benefit of them doing the timing ourselves, or we just sit with
Edie our editor to cut their dialogue to the story reel to get that timing.
Both of us are in the editing room with Edie and then we play it for the whole crew
a few times, so we get to hone that timing. All that stuff gets figured out
first while we're still just dealing with drawings. When we launch the
animation they have to preserve that timing.
GA We have an exposure sheet that delineates exactly what
frame the punchline is going to hit so they can work to that.
AS The weird part of it is that you direct the performance
three times. When you talk to the storyboard artist you direct them to draw it,
then that defines how you're going to direct the voice artist when they're
recording it, and the last part is the animator who actually does the
performance. A live-action director would be on set and talk to his actor once
and then get as many takes as he wants to get it, whereas we do it three times
and months apart.
GA You get an incredible amount of time to overthink your jokes [laughs].
I guess that's the real challenge. Through all this preparation
and thinking time, you still need to maintain a feeling of spontaneity. It
can't feel too fussed-over.
GA That is one of the hardest things. This my first time I've
been in this role directing, and man, you spend so many years planning these
situations and putting everything in place, it's so hard to let go of it when three
years down the road as you're at the moment of launching the shot, suddenly a
better idea floats up. You've got to be open and flexible enough to say, that
is a better idea, and I know three years in a row we've planned this but
actually that would be a little bit better. It's so hard to stay open to that.
AS It's true. There are other times when you have to say,
'Look, you've heard this joke for two years. It's funny, it's still funny, the
audience hasn't heard it so leave this one alone'. Sometimes the animators will
do what they call a 'lab' where they will shoot themselves on a phone or camera
setup acting out their bit, and then they'll bring that to us. There's one scene
in the movie where Pickles and Trout are trying to figure out if they're the
good guys or bad guys, and when Winnie says they are evil henchman Pickles
turns and points and says 'I knew...I knew that's what people thought of us.'
That little hesitation in his arm movement was never boarded and it wasn't in Richard Ayoade's
performance, but the animator came up with that little bit, and while it
doesn't seem like a lot, it's such a great Pickles moment, he's such a nice guy
he can't even poke Trout without hesitating. That just came up at the last
minute but he needed extra frames, we needed to add it into the animation and
open it up, so that was one of those moments where you had to be ready and just
trust the animator and add it. That's sometimes why animated movies can sometimes
feel over-plotted and full of coincidences and too perfect.
GA They've had all the life wrung out of it.
AS They don't have those little expressive moments of
inspiration.
So when you go out and record the actors, does their
performance ever change your conception of the character that you have been
working on for so long?
GA Yeah, it's just another component of getting along the
road to the final result.
AS Pickles and Trout were always big roles, but they got
much bigger when we recorded Nick Frost and Richard Ayoade because they were so
much fun, they kept pushing themselves into the movie more. When we met Sir Ben
Kingsley we had a lot of conversations and he'd read the script, but he
definitely had his own concept of Snatcher when he came in.
GA He contributed a part of the character that added up to
a new villain that none of us would have predicted, a combination of all these
factors.
AS When you first go into record these guys you're totally
over-prepared and you want to tell Nick Frost exactly how to play Trout and
give him line readings, instead of allowing the recording session to be
free-flowing and see what you come up with. We got Nick Frost because of his
voice, but when he was looking at the character he said 'I've got a broken nose
and I'm a big softie but I look like a thug', and he came up with that voice
and of course we were shocked!
GA For six months we had imagined this voice! Why are you
making a new voice? [laughs]
AS Also, when Richard Ayoade came in we had no idea if
Richard Ayoade really talked like the characters he played. We were afraid he'd
come in and say [very deep voice] 'Hello, how are you doing?' But that persona
is very much him, and that was great because we didn't have to have the awkward
thing of asking an actor to do something he's done before.
I did love those two characters. Just the idea of having a
couple of characters in a kids' movie walking around discussing the duality of
good and evil made me laugh.
AS We liked it and it was there in a nutshell, and the storyboard
artists said we should play it up more. Then the writers – you know, it's a
very writerly joke – they loved the idea of breaking the fourth wall and stuff.
One of the writers we worked with Adam Pava loved it, and occasionally when we
would do roundtables with storyboard artists and writers to get some new ideas
we got tons of Pickles and Trout stuff. We'd tell them we need more Boxtrolls jokes,
but everyone just gravitated to those characters. The thing about it is that you
don't want to write two characters that the adults get but the kids don't, so
there was always this balancing act with them having the discussion about good
and evil but Pickles ending the discussion with 'We are the good guys', so
you're not losing the kids. It was always a bit of a balancing act.
That balancing act is really interesting in terms of how
much darkness you put into a family movie. There's a real element of the
grotesque about the film and these are quite unappealing characters.
GA Oh thanks! [laughs]
I didn't mean to insult the characters you've spent years of
your life on! But with the broken noses and teeth and later the swollen body
parts, there is an ugliness and darkness that's quite notable in a film like
this. Is there any hesitation about putting these elements into a film aimed at
children?
AS There was no hesitation, certainly none coming from
Travis. I think that he wouldn't articulate it as a company style or anything
like that, but he has a desire to go places that no other studio would go.
We're not part of a huge conglomerate, we're really independent filmmakers and
that's kind of the brand of Laika, the willingness to go to these slightly
darker places. But really, the kernel of everything is in Alan Snow's book. It's
very Dickensian and when you read Dickens that's what you remember; you remember
Bill Sykes and you remember Fagin. There's a lot of really good people in those
stories too, he loves to show every strata of society, but it's the grotesques
that you remember, and Alan loves that.
GA It tied into the tone too. We always pitched the project
as very Monty Python-esque, Terry Gilliam, it had that kind of sensibility to
it, Jeunet and Caro. They are totally willing to go to those places too.
AS We told Travis that Coraline was an art film for kids,
ParaNorman was a horror film for kids, and this was a Dickensian period drama
for kids.
Snatcher is a great Dickensian villain but he's also a
tragic figure because the one thing he desires will ultimately destroy him.
AS Alan Snow's book is really complicated and has so many
characters, so when we honed in on the idea of a surrogate family of Boxtrolls
that all felt great, but what it was missing was these dynamic duos of Eggs and
Snatcher and Eggs and Winnie. There's this little boy trying to figure out
where he belongs in the world, and this adult man destroying himself to try and
force himself into some place that doesn't want him. People always gravitate
towards a great villain and I think a lot of us who worked on the film found we
could relate to him.
GA Yeah, I much prefer when you can find empathy for the
villain and understand his motivations rather than just have a one-dimensional
bad guy.
AS Travis definitely didn't want that. Even if nothing else
was working, we were happy with Snatcher, he was never just this moustache-twirling
villain who wanted world domination.
You mentioned having to cut down Alan Snow's very
complicated book, so what was your process for adapting it? Did it take a long
time to discover the film in there?
[Both in unison] A long time!
Because there are so many creatures in it, and I guess on
one level that must be such a tantalising prospect for a animators and you'd want to
include them all.
AS That's why people love the book. When I first when to
visit Laika they gave me the book and said 'Here, take a look and see what you
think. We haven't been able to crack the story but we love the tone of it'. I
was so glad when they said they loved the tone, because a lot of studios would just look at a book like that and say, 'Oh, what a great bunch of crazy characters!
Cabbageheads, Trotting Badgers, Sea Cows and all these other characters – that makes
it appropriate for animation'. First of all, you're not going to be able to
afford to build all these characters, but secondly, that doesn't give you a
story. It just makes it feel like Alice in Wonderland, which is notoriously
difficult to adapt. So it took us a long time to whittle it down, and for so
many people their favourite characters were the Cabbageheads or the Rat
Pirates.
GA Yeah, there's so much packed into the book it felt like
everybody at the studio had a different part of it that they loved. It was
tricky to find the unanimous piece of it that worked for everybody and made
sense as a film. One of the things that's so appealing about the book is that
Alan creates new characters on every page to get the old characters out of
their situation [laughs]. That really works as a book and it's really fun, but
it's at a frenetic pace all the way through the book and we knew that we
couldn't do that as a film. The problem we faced is that when you started to
remove one or two groups or specific characters it really started to unravel because
you needed to provide context for the remaining ones. Alan never needed to or bothered
to do that in the book; he never needed to explain why the Rat Pirates spoke
English and ran a Laundromat in the middle of the city, because the pace
allowed him to keep introducing new things. We couldn't do that.
AS We tried. It's not like we knew that from day one, but
when I pitched it to the story department I'd get to like page 35 and say
'...and then we meet these Rat Pirates' and you'd see them just go 'Oh God!'
[laughs] They were trying to wrap their heads around this world, but then the
world starts to not have a clear set of laws and that's a disaster. You know,
you've got about 10 or 15 minutes to loosely figure out the rules of this world,
and if you keep breaking them deeper and deeper into the movie I think people
get tired, no matter how gorgeous your world might be.
GA There's a disconnect that happens after a while, because
nothing is working within parameters that they can figure out.
I just want to finish by asking a more general question about
Laika and what it's like to be part of that company. You've both worked at other
animation studios, and I wonder if you feel a major difference having a CEO who
is also an animator himself?
AS Everybody who has worked at a big studio – and I've
worked at a lot – you can feel like you're part of a big machine. A lot of the
times the executives that you deal with are en route to somewhere else, you
know, they're punching their card in animation but they have dreams of
live-action, or they have dreams of three films coming out of this one book,
and it's definitely not coming from a deep love or total understanding of animation.
For me it was just like having one of your animation pals suddenly running the
company, somebody who loves animation as much as you and goes to see every
animated film, talks about them endlessly and has grown up with them. So having
that as your CEO and the one executive you have to interact with, and no focus
groups, I've just never been in a situation like that before. That and the
culture that Travis has built at the company allows for the films to have the
tone that they have, because ultimately it's the director's decision but it's
inside Travis's vision for the whole company too.
And while the three films all have distinct
personalities I feel that you can see them all emerging from the same
philosophy of storytelling and the same passion.
AS He definitely has that passion, but it can be a
double-edged sword because he's a really good animator. He really understands
it and consequently he has really strong opinions on the style of animation
too. I've had quite a few CEOs who have said 'They don't care about the style'.
GA In some ways that can be difficult for the animation
department because the bar is set so high in terms of quality, and that's the
one department that doesn't get any easy rides. Travis has a laser focus on
what he wants out of a movie. Sometimes in the back of your head you're saying
'Well, if you're so smart why don't you do it?' but he literally could do it
better than you! [laughs]
The Boxtrolls will be released on DVD + Blu-ray on January 26th
The Boxtrolls will be released on DVD + Blu-ray on January 26th
