Elle Fanning The Boxtrolls

Cast: Isaac Hempstead-Wright, Elle Fanning, Ben Kingsley, Simon Pegg, Richard Ayoade, Nick Frost, Jared Harris, Tracy Morgan
Director: Anthony Stacchi, Graham Annable
Genre: Adventure, Animated, Comedy
Rated: PG
Running Time: 97 minutes

Synopsis: The Boxtrolls is a comedic fable that unfolds in Cheesebridge, a posh Victorian-era town obsessed with wealth, class and the stinkiest of fine cheeses. Beneath its charming cobblestone streets dwell the Boxtrolls, foul monsters who crawl out of the sewers at night and steal what the townspeople hold most dear: their children and their cheeses. At least that's the legend residents have always believed. In truth, the Boxtrolls are an underground cavern-dwelling community of quirky and lovable oddballs who wear recycled cardboard boxes the way turtles wear their shells. The Boxtrolls have raised an orphaned human boy, Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead-Wright), since infancy as one of their dumpster-diving and mechanical junk-collecting own. When the Boxtrolls are targeted by a villainous pest exterminator Archibald Snatcher (Acadamy Award winner Ben Kingsley) who is bent on eradicating them as his ticket to Cheesebridge society, the kind-hearted band of tinkerers must turn to their adopted charge and an adventurous rich girl Winnie (Elle Fanning) to bridge two worlds amidst the winds of change – and cheese.

The Boxtrolls
Release Date: September 18th, 2014
Website: http://www.theboxtrolls.com/

About the Production

How Stop-Motion Got Started

An art form that began at the dawn of the motion picture, the stop-motion animation process was, is, and always will be uniquely enthralling – one of the most magical aspects of a medium capable of flights of fancy.

Single frame by single frame (and there are 24 frames per second in a motion picture), animators subtly and painstakingly manipulate tangible objects (characters, props, sets, etc.) on a working stage. Each frame is photographed for the motion picture camera – twice, if the camera is a 3D one as on the movies that animation studio LAIKA makes. When the thousands of photographed frames are edited and projected together sequentially, the characters and environment come alive. Movie magic is created by hand.

The Boxtrolls producer and lead animator Travis Knight notes, 'Stop-motion animation is a very elementary process. You merely move an object and take a picture – simple. But, like most things that are simple, it's just about the hardest thing in the world to do well."

A stop-motion feature is comparable to a live-action feature in that there are physical sets that must be built and dressed; and performers who need to be properly coiffed, clothed, and lit – and given proper direction.

Cited as the very first example of cinematic stop-motion is the 1898 short The Humpty Dumpty Circus, in which British émigrés Albert E. Smith and James Stuart Blackton used the pioneering technique to bring a toy circus of animals and acrobats to life.

European animators were the first to use puppets and other objects to relate a coherent narrative, but it was California's Willis Harold O'Brien who made it more of an art form over decades of refinement. Willis Harold O'Brien's career spanned short films, the 1925 feature The Lost World, and (with sculptor Marcel Delgado) the original King Kong (1933). The ball-and-socket metal armatures created for the latter set a template that is still used today. Willis Harold O'Brien was honored with an Oscar for his work on Mighty Joe Young (1949).

One of Willis Harold O'Brien's apprentices on the latter film was Ray Harryhausen, who would build upon his mentor's techniques and whose 'Dynamation" would inspire generations of animators. Ray Harryhausen masterfully combined live-action and stop-motion animation to get humans and creatures interacting in such fantastical films as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

Hungarian animator George Pal (György Pál Marczincsák) had arrived in Hollywood in the early 1940s, where he produced a series of 'Puppetoons" short films for Paramount Pictures. Unlike O'Brien and Harryhausen's techniques, Pal's team used replacement animation, which required up to 9,000 individually hand-carved wooden puppets or parts, each slightly different, to be filmed frame-by-frame to convey the illusion of movement.

Several of George Pal's short films were nominated for Academy Awards, and Geroge Pal himself received an honorary Oscar in 1944. The director/producer continued to use puppet animation in such feature-length productions as The Great Rupert (1950), tom thumb (1958), and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962).

Millions of adults and children are well-acquainted with the work of Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass. Using a stop-motion puppet process they dubbed 'Animagic," Rankin/Bass gifted television viewers with such classic holiday specials as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1970). Bass directed the team's feature films, The Daydreamer (1966) and Mad Monster Party? (1967), which utilized the same process.

A few years later, the U.K.'s Aardman Animations was founded by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. Joined by Nick Park, the company would go on to set new standards with its Oscar-winning stop-motion/'claymation" animated short films, such as Creature Comforts and the Wallace & Gromit-toplined A Close Shave and The Wrong Trousers, before expanding into features to continuing success, most recently with the Oscar-nominated The Pirates!

In 1982, Disney conceptual artist Tim Burton made the short film Vincent Price with Disney animator Rick Heinrichs. Shot in expressionist black-and-white and narrated by Vincent Price, the picture was done in stop-motion.

A decade later, Tim Burton hand-picked a team of artists and animators to create what would become the groundbreaking stop-motion musical The Nightmare Before Christmas, from his original story, tapping his onetime California Institute of the Arts (a.k.a. CalArts) classmate and Disney colleague Henry Selick to direct the feature-length film.

The 21st century saw the founding of LAIKA, formed to present the artistry of award-winning filmmakers, designers, and animators in the field of animated entertainment. LAIKA is 550 people strong and has been acclaimed for its skill in storytelling and character performance in a variety of media, including 2D, CG, and stop-motion. Dedicated to creating bold, distinctive, entertaining and enduring works of art, the company is located just outside of Portland, Oregon.

While LAIKA earlier had a hand in the Oscar-nominated stop-motion feature Corpse Bride (2005), directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson, which was made in the U.K., it was in its own Oregon studios that LAIKA broke new ground with Coraline (2009). Directed by Henry Selick, the stop-motion feature was the first one to be conceived and photographed in stereoscopic 3D, and as such was unlike anything moviegoers had ever experienced before. Sparking a stop-motion resurgence in moviemaking, Coraline earned Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award, and BAFTA Award nominations for Best Animated Feature Film; was named one of the year's 10 Best Films by the American Film Institute (AFI); and won three Annie Awards, the animation community's Oscars equivalent.

LAIKA's second feature, ParaNorman, was also conceived and photographed in stereoscopic 3D. Directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler, the movie was cited as 2012's best animated feature film by more critics' groups than any other feature. The movie received Academy Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award, and BAFTA Award nominations for Best Animated Feature Film; was nominated for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Media Award for Outstanding Film; and won two Annie Awards.

While the traditional stop-motion process remains the bedrock of LAIKA, the company has continued to integrate new technology, specifically RP (Rapid Prototyping) and CG (Computer-Generated) advances, into its moviemaking. The Boxtrolls (2014), the company's third feature, was again conceived and photographed in stereoscopic 3D. Notably, it is also an example of hybridization: a stop-motion, hand-drawn, and CG hybrid which marries and celebrates the handmade tradition and the latest tools of the trade. Once more in Oregon, new ground is being broken in exploring and expanding a classic art form.

At LAIKA itself, Travis Knight notes, 'There is no shortage of interesting characters with wonderful stories; everywhere you look, there is inspiration."
Going Outside the Box

With the rollicking journey of self-discovery The Boxtrolls, the artisans at the LAIKA studios are once again immersing themselves in the painstaking creation of something fantastical; the real-world effort and creativity yields something otherworldly and transporting. LAIKA's movies take years to make, and are built to last for years to come.

Given that the people who work at LAIKA daily transform everyday materials into something greater than the sum of their parts, the concept of The Boxtrolls and its creative creatures held particular appeal for everybody.

Producer and lead animator Travis Knight marvels, 'The Boxtrolls is at its core, like all LAIKA movies, a moving and human story with timelessness and powerful emotional resonance.

'Every story we tell at LAIKA has an artful blend of darkness and light, of intensity and warmth, and real dynamism. We aspire to tell stories that are visually stunning, that have a patina of beauty, but more importantly have a reservoir of meaning. Our films are thought-provoking, keenly felt, progressive, and just a wee bit subversive. We tell stories that speak to us and that we hope connect in the same way with audiences all over the world."

Travis Knight adds, 'The Boxtrolls is different from our previous movies, Coraline and ParaNorman, in that those were contemporary American stories told with shadings of supernatural elements. This movie is a period piece – and is a mash-up of detective story, absurdist comedy, and steampunk adventure with visual splendor and a surprisingly wholesome heart. It's like Charles Dickens entwined with Roald Dahl and Monty Python."

Director Anthony Stacchi comments, 'How else could you get all that into a movie except through stop-motion? Also, you can't ask for better stop-motion characters than magical creatures who pop up in their own shell-like boxes. This story and this studio made for a perfect match.

'But even for LAIKA, this was a big step forward in terms of an epic family movie on a big scale, and beyond what had been done in stop-motion before; Travis Knight is always thinking about, -Where do we go to next?'"

Travis Knight notes, 'Since our studio is in constant evolution, this movie is our largest and most ambitious feature yet." A father of three, the president and CEO of LAIKA 'finds it a more meaningful moviegoing experience when there's much to discuss afterwards for both parents and children. Like Coraline and ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls is a coming-of-age adventure in which strong young people discover who they are, where they belong, and what they want to be, learning that those things that define us most are the choices we make and the people we touch.

'The world in which the kids live in is quite inhospitable to outsiders. But sometimes, society's uncaring barriers demand that we rethink our place within it. Eggs and Winnie are only 11 years old, but they make some highly-evolved decisions that ultimately reshape and redeem their society."

Producer David Bleiman Ichioka comments, 'At the heart of the story is the relationship between a boy and his adopted family. His love for them propels the story forward, changing the world they live in so that they can all survive and thrive."

Editor Edie Ichioka adds, 'It's a story about a journey to self-determination, and it's told through this wonderful, lovable family and these two brave kids who bridge two worlds."

Director Graham Annable says, 'The children find the courage to take control of their own destinies, and so do some of the other characters. This story is all about not judging a book – or, a box – by its cover."

A book was in fact the source material for the screenplay: Alan Snow's bestselling fantasy adventure Here Be Monsters, the first volume in the author's series of books, was adapted into The Boxtrolls. Travis Knight reveals, 'We have developed this movie for nearly a decade, starting around the same time as Coraline. That movie came together first, and then ParaNorman jumped into view, but now here we are with this long-nurtured project finally happening.

'Alan Snow's book evoked the fantastical, quirky stories that I loved growing up, like Roald Dahl's work. Out of the 500-page source material – which was enough for several different movies – we honed in on the Boxtrolls, and on exploring what constitutes a family. That is a powerful, universal theme; not all families are biological. This story has significance, as we explore that theme in a number of ways in The Boxtrolls."

Bleiman Ichioka adds, 'We felt we could also retain Snow's ideas about class struggle, and the putting-down of groups, even in terms of what motivates the villainous activities of Snatcher."

Anthony Stacchi, who is helming his first feature in the stop-motion arena after having previously co-directed the CG-animated Open Season, notes, 'I had read Alan Snow's book and the themes of fathers and sons resonated with me emotionally; I had had a son recently, and was still getting to know this new thing living in my house…Like Travis Knight, I felt that it shared DNA with the classic Disney films; specifically, to me, there was a Peter Pan/Lost Boys appeal to the story. Eggs has to come above ground to figure out where he fits in the world, and his friend and father figure Fish also has to decide where he fits in as well.
'When I heard that the studio taking it on was going to be LAIKA, I was keen to be a part of it; I'd spoken with friends and colleagues who had visited the LAIKA studios and came away deeply impressed."

Anthony Stacchi committed join the project, and development continued for a couple of years. Then, as it had on ParaNorman with Chris Butler, LAIKA called up a member of its own story department into the second director's chair; company veteran Annable first was a storyboard artist on Coraline and later on ParaNorman. As Anthony Stacchi remarks, 'Talk about good fortune: the core of the LAIKA story department has remained steady for all three movies."

Graham Annable adds, 'The story department is asked to weigh in on projects early on, and Travis Knight is always able to step back and look at the big picture – the continuing mission of the studio, but also what's best for the project."

The vote of confidence for Graham Annable to join Anthony Stacchi came 'because we already knew Graham Annable to be a superlative visual storyteller," says Travis Knight. 'He had impressed everyone on ParaNorman with his wit, humor, innate story sense, and adroit problem-solving skills."

Anthony Stacchi adds, 'Graham Annable immediately got what the Boxtrolls were about. I looked at his brilliant Grickle comic books and his short films, saw the sense of humour in them, and knew that he was the best person to be partnered with in directing this movie. I've often worked with co-directors on projects."

Graham Annable reflects, 'I was completely excited – and totally terrified. I felt like a guy who was really good at flying paper airplanes who was suddenly in the cockpit of a 747. By the time I was done with storyboarding and moving into the director role, a lot had shifted already with the project. What proved to be fantastic was getting to know the people within LAIKA that I didn't already know from the first two movies, and interacting with them daily while being given the chance to make something at this higher level.

'I welcomed having another pilot, and Tony Stacchi and I clicked from the beginning. Because I came from the story department, his directing experience was so helpful. The approach that I brought to him solidified what we both wanted to do on The Boxtrolls – and, with the Boxtrolls, since those were the characters that excited us the most, even though every page of Alan Snow's book had something wonderful on it."

Anthony Stacchi 'worked together with Graham Annabel to hone the story and simplify it; the book has a lot of characters and threads. It was about making this story work as a film with a central and emotional narrative – and as a big, picaresque movie."

Graham Annable adds, 'The core for us was telling a tale of boy raised by kind creatures who were being wrongly tagged as -monsters,' and the family connections that you have and that you make."

Animation veteran Bleiman Ichioka, who came on board as producer alongside Travis Knight in September 2011, adds, 'Tony also had good instincts for the look of the movie, which complemented Graham Annabel's storyboarding experience.

'I'd worked with several LAIKAns before they were making feature-length movies. LAIKA's individual department heads and overall staffs are so strong. The expanding capabilities that their research and development has yielded made me eager to revisit the stop-motion art form now that they've redefined it. Why do stop-motion? Because we love it. With this much passion going into making the movie, you're going to feel that much more passion coming across on-screen."

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'David's experience with every facet of stop-motion was invaluable to me since this was my first stop-motion feature."

Bleiman Ichioka muses, 'On a movie, everyone should be working together towards a common goal. On a stop-motion movie, the person called the producer doesn't produce anything without the help of everyone else who is producing something…"

In pre-production, art direction and storyboarding precede much else. The importance of storyboard illustrators in visualizing every scene and character is vital at this stage for all at LAIKA. As crucial as this might be for live-action movies, it is even more so for animated features. 'It's a chance to see how the movie plays," says Travis Knight. 'Also, character and set design can be tweaked at the building phase."

Anthony Stacchi offers, 'You -make' the movie several times in the storyboards – Graham Annabel and I did just that with the core 6-7 storyboard artists in LAIKA's story department – and then move on to actually doing the film itself, as co-directors. It becomes clear what is working and what isn't, and by then we have figured out everything we've needed to have in front of the camera – which is then designed and made from the ground up. The design process took a long time on this movie. At one point, we felt we loved the look of the movie but not yet the look of the characters. Travis Knight said, -Let's go back into these now, rather than trying to figure something out afterwards.'

'All the way through, it was essential that everything must serve the narrative and the characters. Eggs' journey registered strongly for Graham Annabel and myself, but we knew that the one scene which would hook the audience would be these quirky creatures being thrown for a loop by the appearance of a cute human baby in their midst."

The latter scene was the first one that was storyboarded and then tested out with preliminary visuals. 'Everything came together in that little sequence, from which we fleshed out the rest of the story," remembers Anthony Stacchi. Graham Annable adds, 'It was two Boxtrolls finding a baby and interacting with it, and we knew what we hoped to get out of the project as a whole."

Bleiman Ichioka notes, 'Part of what it showed was that the Boxtrolls are just so lovable; we knew we were also going to address worrying about something being scary, and how you can miss out on life experiences as a result."

Anthony Stacchi remarks, 'The Boxtrolls' journey in the story is going from timid to courageous. The Boxtrolls proves that if you can't fit in the world as yourself, then you have to change the world to fit you. The Boxtrolls and Eggs and Winnie show us how that can be done, and it's a very funny and emotional tale."

Graham Annable credits author Snow for 'coming up with captivating creatures – as my kids can vouch for. As written and illustrated by him, they appealed to me, but they also spoke to what I thought was real potential in stop-motion animation. I knew everyone at LAIKA was well-suited to tell this colorful, bright, funny, sweet story – and it's the lightest one we've done.

'From my time in the story department, I also knew that it is the phase of the production where you truly decide what the movie you are making will be – and every department then comes together, unified, to realise the dream."

Voice Box(es)

Portraying a character – whether human, animal, or other – in a LAIKA movie involves varying elements of performance. Actors' vocal performances are recorded first, often over a year in advance, and a character's animator(s) align their own performances with the voice work.

The Boxtrolls producer and lead animator Travis Knight notes, 'An animation performance is comprised of two parts: the vocal performance supplied by the actor, and the visual performance furnished by the animator. It's an unconventional collaboration that can span years. But it all starts with the perfect voice."

As on many a feature film, the production team begins brainstorming casting ideas, and once the directors make final selections the producers work to line up and confirm the actors. Character designs are tacked up while actors' voices are listened to as potential casting choices; the performers' traditional 'head shots" are of no use to a LAIKA production…

…but their existing vocal performances are; Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley was sought for the part of aspiring aristocrat and Boxtrolls hunter Archibald Snatcher once samples of his Sexy Beast and Oliver Twist dialogue readings were run opposite already-cast actors. This was so that they were 'reading together," a method that has been deployed to cast actors by LAIKA before.

Even so, this time the actor and the moviemakers were more attuned than expected. Director Anthony Stacchi marvels, 'We sent him the script and then suddenly we were on the phone with Sir Ben. He said, -Do you know the character of Don Logan [from Sexy Beast]? Well, I consider Snatcher to be like that.' We were thrilled, and we provided him with imagery and discussed the character further."

Ben Kingsley states, 'I liked the Dickensian elements of The Boxtrolls; there is no joyful resolution if there is not a dark side. Archibald Snatcher is obsessive, narcissistic, envious – all the qualities that are wonderful to play!"

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'He put in so much work and development in on his own. He said to us, -Snatcher has to be [performed] reclining, because he eats a lot and is a gluttonous man.' And that's how Sir Ben Kingsley did it in a studio."

Producer David Bleiman Ichioka reveals, 'That changed this amazing actor's voice performance – where it would come from within his body – and that in turn changed the way we were animating Snatcher and how his body and face would be moving. He took on a much more theatrical bent; he is always -on.'"

The actor found the voiceover recording sessions 'very releasing. I wasn't bound by physical behavior, costume, or even to a certain extent continuity. I'm quite intuitive, I think, and Snatcher's voice materialised on day one – I did it at home privately and then brought it to the recording session. It came out of his big gut."

Director Graham Annable confirms, 'Sir Ben Kingsley came in to that first recording session with a fully formed characterisation of Snatcher. When we brought it back to the LAIKA studios, the animators were clamoring to work on Snatcher's scenes because of the way Sir Ben Kingsley elongated words and sentences with a sarcastic, taunting tone. At that first session, he held syllables for longer, as was written out on the page – '

' – but by making a three-second -alllll' into a 10-second -alllllllllllllllllllllllllllll,' everyone – including Sir Ben Kinglsey – realised that he was going to be running with that from then on," marvels David Bleiman Ichioka. 'Yet he did not change a word of the dialogue."

Graham Annable comments, 'Snatcher is despicable in that he is manipulating Cheesebridge into fearing and hunting Boxtrolls, yet because of what Sir Ben Kinsley can do with a character's voice, there are moments where you understand why Snatcher is the way he is – and where you will feel for him."

David Bleiman Ichioka notes, 'Snatcher is a great, deluded character. He believes the world owes him something, and he will destroy anyone and anything to get it."

'Alan Snow had created the character so well for Here Be Monsters," says Anthony Stacchi. 'One can always understand wanting to be a member of a club that doesn't want you. That twists you up inside, and in Snatcher's case it has spread to his outside. He is the monster in this story, not the Boxtrolls."

Ben Kingsley offers, 'I go back to Shakespeare because his villains are extraordinary; they all have some wound in them that will never heal, and that always makes them angry and vengeful. Snatcher is socially very ambitious. He sows discord in order to make himself grander; that's like Iago [in Shakespeare's Othello].

'The Boxtrolls will enthrall audiences; families can sit and watch it together. Seeing Snatcher's need to remind people that there is a deadly enemy and that he is the only person to keep the town safe, parents might think of political echoes not that long ago…"

Since Ben Kingsley did not get to record with the actors voicing Snatcher's Red Hats gang, he studied those characters as well 'so I had some idea of where my cohorts were coming from."

However, Anthony Stacchi reports, 'Sir Ben Kingsley recorded with Isaac Hempstead Wright [voicing young hero Eggs], and was so nice to Isaac, even when doing scenes where their characters were screaming at each other. Which can't have been easy on Sir Ben Kingsley's throat – or on Isaac's throat, and he's a young actor who shows a willingness to do anything."

Hempstead Wright marvels, 'Sir Ben Kingsley just has this presence, and the tones and layers of his voice are phenomenal. His becoming Snatcher would help me get into character as well. I was a little bit nervous recording with such a brilliant actor, but he made me feel relaxed."

The young Game of Thrones star had auditioned for the role of Eggs – renamed from, in the Alan Snow book, Arthur – and his take on the role won everyone over. The teenaged actor, although British himself, 'took a very studied approach in conveying just which part of England this boy would be coming from," praises David Bleiman Ichioka. 'Isaac also brings a feral vulnerability to Eggs so you understand just how much out of his element the character is when he goes above ground. You also see right away how loving he is with his family.

'Eggs is a bit like Tarzan, raised by a community other than the human one, so the civilized world is one he just doesn't have any conception of. Isaac worked in imperfections in the way the character speaks, since Eggs has learned English very differently from the way anyone else has."

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'For Eggs, we asked Isaac to watch Ken Loach's beautiful movie Kes, which is also a story about defining what makes a family, and take his cues from David Bradley's unaffected performance; at the time, that young man who had never made a movie before. That performance was a reference for the character – and the puppet – even before we cast Isaac, and we felt that its innocence could carry over into Eggs. Isaac was willing to embrace the emotional components."

Graham Annable comments, 'Isaac brings so much to the character. There's a warmth to his voice even as he conveys how Eggs has been a rough-and-tumble kid – who has been raised as a Boxtroll – and a little bit scruffy."

Travis Knight adds, 'Outwardly, the initial impression will be that Eggs has been dealt a bad hand. But this story shows the strength of families in all shapes and sizes, and Eggs has a father/son bond with his Boxtroll mentor Fish. They communicate through music, and through compassion, with each other and members of their Boxtroll family.

'Eggs has been surrounded by love and acceptance from a caring family; they may appear to live amidst junk and squalor, but this is a family that is rich in what matters."

Hempstead Wright visited the LAIKA studios and stood alongside Knight while the latter animated a shot – 'and Travis let me have a go at it. I felt so lucky, and seeing a fully poseable Eggs maquette up close, and the LAIKA workshops bringing his experiences to life, helped me feel more at one with the character.

'Eggs goes above ground on a mission, but I think it's also about him discovering himself. He's happy with his Boxtrolls family – Fish has been a father figure for him from a very young age, and Shoe is like a brother who he mucks about with – but he now needs to know where he came from originally."

When Hempstead Wright and other actors recorded their dialogue, their sessions were also digitally photographed. These portrayals then became part of the LAIKA sculptors and animators' toolbox for work on the character puppets, as cues and inspiration were taken not only from line readings but also physical interpretations. Actors and animators likely never meet, yet they are both contributing to a character's portrayal.

Animation supervisor Brad Schiff, who worked in the same capacity on ParaNorman after being an animator on Coraline, reveals, 'Here's how it works for the animators: you sit and listen to the tracks over and over…and over! Listening to the subtlety and inflections of the voiceover helps us the animator figure out in their head just who these characters are.

'We do also make use of reference, live-action footage recorded of animators interpreting the characters. When you watch yourself, or your colleagues, that might alter your approach to the performance. How does Winnie walk? How might Eggs move, given that he's been raised as a Boxtroll? And so forth. We also get some really awkward stuff for behind-the-scenes videos…"

There are also the flashes of emotion that can, and do, set LAIKA's characters apart. Lead animator Jason Stalman, previously an animator on ParaNorman, muses, 'There is so much emotion in even a glance. You really want to get at what's in the eyes.

'As an animator, you're a character actor in a way. I find reference to be good for my work. It helps get animators into the physicality of a scene. We're already accessing our imaginations – and have been ever since we were children playing pretend – and it furthers that."

Brad Schiff notes, 'For the Boxtrolls, we studied a wide variety of animals and experimented in animation with how they would move. Many of the more animalistic approaches we played with made them feel kind of creepy, so we found ourselves going back to more familiar humanistic movements. They are supposed to be endearing and fun, so we didn't want to detract from that."

Children have long been welcomed through LAIKA's studio doors, whether as family members of LAIKAns or of the features' voice actors – or as actors themselves: over four years before she was cast to voice Winnifred Portley-Rind – better known as Winnie – in The Boxtrolls, Elle Fanning had first visited the studio workshop with her older sister Dakota Fanning, who was then voicing the title role in LAIKA's first feature Coraline. The Fanning family had been invited to take a peek at the animation process and screen selected scenes from the movie before it was completed, and Elle Fanning saw firsthand the creative excitement generated on-site. 'These extraordinary young actresses grew up and established their reputations in time with LAIKA's," marvels Knight.

Elle Fanning remembers that initial visit to LAIKA well: 'I was fascinated, seeing all the tiny strands of hair and watching the little sweaters being knitted for the puppets. It amazing to me was that it was a whole world in miniature form that looked so big on-screen.

'I had done voice work for animation before, when I was little. I remembered how meticulous the process was for my sister on Coraline, and I thought it would be fun to try it now with LAIKA at this age because I liked what the unique story of The Boxtrolls had to say. Also, like some of the characters, I love cheese!"

Graham Annable reveals, 'Winnie is another of the story's points on how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover; she's a girl who was born into a place of privilege and believes the scary stories about Boxtrolls. Then she starts to recognise how wrong her thinking has been in a lot of ways as she guides Eggs above ground. She is a firecracker who propels things along, and Elle Fanning gives strong voice to her mix of privilege and spunk."

Fanning, as she had on the independent feature Ginger & Rosa, impressed everyone with a pitch-perfect English accent. Bleiman Ichioka remembers, 'She worked with accent and vocal coaches – and very hard, too, even though she had just recently wrapped the other movie. She's so good and so natural, and she also imbued Winnie with likability when there was a danger of the character's spunkiness becoming bratty; not so with Elle's handling of her, because Elle brings out the qualities as written."

Elle Fanning offers, 'Winnie has a lot of spirit, and she's definitely very feisty – and I don't really show my sassy side, so I was excited to get away with talking like she does! Perfecting the accent meant having her be more on the posh side, but she's still a kid, and at the first session I was still being me too much. But at the second session I came in and the model for her was there, staring at me; I found Winnie's voice, and I loved being her. I do feel that, like her, I'm up for an adventure.

'When you first see Winnie, you might think she's spoiled. But you also see that she is trying to be heard, and that she needs a friend. Once she meets Eggs, she is able to help him realise who he is and is a good teacher with him – although she can get a little impatient sometimes."

Hempstead Wright muses, 'Their relationship turns from her looking down on him to their being on equal footing, and that's something he starts to recognise the importance of for his family as well. These concerns are one that we have in society today, too.

'Winnie and Eggs both have to find their dads, in different ways. They help each other throughout this adventure that they go on, and they become good friends – probably for life!"

To better establish the strengthening bond between Winnie and Eggs, Fanning joined Hempstead Wright in a Los Angeles recording studio for several scenes. Similarly, she recorded with Jared Harris to best channel the father/daughter dynamic – or lack of same – between Lord Portley-Rind and Winnie. Annable notes, 'She fills her parents with chagrin, but she is who she is. Her father is distracted by his social position with the White Hats, and is blind to what he should be paying attention to – at home and at the town meetings – although he's not an awful man at all."

Anthony Stacchi offers, 'What Winnie wants most of all is kindness and attention from her father, who is the leading authority figure in Cheesebridge. Graham and I have some sympathy for Lord Portley-Rind because, directing animation, you can get into the situation of being an absentee father. But he's distracted not so much by work as by cheeses!"

Jared Harris was, says David Bleiman Ichioka, 'the only actor we had in mind for the role of Winnie's father. He's so versatile, and at times in The Boxtrolls, he sounds like his own [real-life] father, Richard Harris."

Jared Harris muses, 'To my mind, this character's voice needed to have elements of Trevor Howard, George Sanders as Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, and the voiceover from the old ads in England for Mr. Kipling's Cakes.

'Lord Portley-Rind is a man who has pulled up the ladder and doesn't want to let anyone else in; he's a snob. He actually is fond of his daughter, and he may think he expresses that to Winnie but he doesn't. He's not a bad person, though."

David Bleiman Ichioka reveals, 'It was Jared Haris who came up with Lord Portley-Rind's term of endearment for Winnie, -Winnikins.' This showed how he wanted to bring dimension to the character."

Before beginning work on the movie, Harris took time to visit the LAIKA soundstages. 'That region of Oregon is so beautiful," he marvels. 'Then I went inside to the studio, and they were at the tail end of doing ParaNorman, so the sets were still up. I walked through -the town square' and felt like Godzilla!

'LAIKA's movies harken back to a different era of animation while also being incredibly progressive. The Boxtrolls is a fun story, but it also reminds us that children see the world in a good way that adults can easily forget how to."

The production landed an Academy Award nominee who, along with her daughter, is a major Coraline fan, to voice the role of Winnie's mother. Toni Collette remarks, 'Lady Portley-Rind is a little overwhelmed by her societal position; she's hoity-toity but I think she's got a sweet nature, actually. The only real link I have to her is that we share a love of cheese.

'I often play parts with an accent, and I believe there's something quite telling about working with just the voice. For me, there's a real satisfaction to the immediacy of the work on an animated picture when you try things out in the moment – and there's a real pressure, in that you don't want to screw up because so many have been making the movie for so long!"

David Bleiman Ichioka marvels, 'Toni Collette has the most expressive face I've ever seen from an actor. The footage we recorded of her performing was so helpful."

Whether individually or in tandem, the majority of the voiceover performances for The Boxtrolls were recorded in England, marking the first time that one of LAIKA's movies had a significant overseas stint for any part of the production and thereby necessitating the filmmakers' journeying 'across the pond." The directors had felt strongly that the story's setting called for English actors, and the producers concurred.

The lone accent exception was made for Red Hats member Mr. Gristle – who, as with all of Snatcher's Red Hats henchmen, is named after food; this was another Alan Snow invention retained by the filmmakers.

'Mr. Gristle was a character written to only be saying two words, -Very nice, very nice,' over and over again," notes David Bleiman Ichioka. 'Once Tracy Morgan was cast in the role, the idea of who this guy is changed and there developed this peculiar vocal quirk where Mr. Gristle -narrates' what he does or what's happening around him

'Whatever room he was working in, Tracy Morgan would crack everyone up. His is the only voice in the movie without an English accent and because of his performance, the role grew into more of a full-fledged character."

Graham Annable says, 'Tracy Morgan went left-field with the role, so you don't know where Mr. Gristle's head is at."

Tracy Morgan clarifies, 'My feeling is that Mr. Gristle turned evil, and crazy, because of something that made him that way. He's unlike any other character that I've ever done.

'It's also unlike any voice I've ever done; I strained a little bit on getting it right. The directors allowed me to explore the character and the voice, including the inflections."

Anthony Stacchi muses, 'The character is like the Terminator as a tiny Victorian thug. Mr. Gristle is off in his own space, and that changes up the dynamic among the Red Hats, even with Snatcher lording it over all of them."

Like Elle Fanning and several of the other actors, Tracy Morgan was shown pictures of the characters, and actual puppets, for inspiration. He notes, 'I love the texture of the characters. I've done voiceover work before, but stop-motion animation is cool.

'Kids are going to love this movie. The moral of The Boxtrolls is, never judge a book by its cover. Sometimes when we don't understand something, or we see it as different, we fear it."

Given that LAIKA movies provide atypical roles, actors need not worry about trying to look more like their characters – though the ones who deliver more physical performances might just find bits of themselves in their characters beyond the voiceover. Many actors find the work more of a workout than expected, as they no longer need to hit marks and can emote unconstrained at the microphone in the recording studio.

Travis Knight reflects, 'As in the character animation, we look for a particular naturalism in the voice work. Our films are not overly cartoony and that extends to the acting. The humor in our films derives from the believability of the characters. No matter how fantastical they are, they're authentic and true to their nature. We don't traffic in ephemeral pop-culture references and avoid the easy gag in favor of deeper, if subtler, character work."

In voicing five Boxtrolls between them, Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum spoke barely a trace of English in their recording sessions. Baker has long specialised in language studies, and he was soon joined by fellow voiceover veteran Steve Blum to work out the Boxtroll patois. What evolved followed a screen tradition encompassing everything from Minions (of Despicable Me) to Jawas (of Star Wars) to Klingons (of Star Trek).

Even so, Steve Blum admits, 'We know and love those films, but the direction from Tony Stacchi and Graham Annable was to be careful not to put the consonants, sounds, and vowels together to sound like those movie languages we already know. Ours became more sparse."

Dee Bradley Baker adds, 'We peppered in what sounded like an English word now and then. But we initially veered towards something more Eastern European, or Slavic. That was too dense, so we dialed it back for blocks of little words and grunts."

Words were written out for practice sessions, but they were then diverged from in favor of utterances. Anthony Stacchi muses, 'After months and months of working on the movie, we can actually hear what the Boxtrolls or saying – or maybe it just seems that way…"

The LAIKA animators glommed onto the phrase 'Jimmy Taco," even placing it on T-shirts. Graham Annable explains, 'This was because that sounds like what Specs, one of the Boxtrolls, is suggesting as an option for Winnie to get as clothing for Eggs."

He comments, 'What the Boxtrolls say is not truly defined by specific words or phrases, because it just felt right to leave things as more emotive. Our decision was that you would never quite be able to understand what the Boxtrolls are talking about, but the emotional intent would still come across; Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum were crucial to our learning how the Boxtrolls would express themselves as a whole. All of their past voice work – as aliens, animals, creatures, humans – led up to this, and we worked with them through a lot of different approaches.

'This was also another instance of how we would return to the original Alan Snow book for guidance. He had written phonetic dialogue which had a funny, gurgling sound to it, and then Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum helped us come up with consistent portions for our movie – recurring words and sounds. Tony and I would request unique sounds for the Boxtrolls, and Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum would run with ideas we would throw at them."

Brad Schiff admits, 'Our approach to animating the Boxtrolls in a more humanistic fashion didn't extend to the sounds Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum were coming up with for the Boxtrolls. So we concentrated on the accompanying gestures with their arms that would be unique within their species yet also understandable to audiences."

Gesturing went on in the recording sessions as well; as Dee Bradley Baker remarks, 'One of the wonderful things about voice acting is that you must give all. You can't hold any of it back; if you do, the performance can be muted, and it should be all about emotions. This movie is heartwarming, but it's also a hilarious, entertaining ride.

'I'm so glad that the great tradition of the artistry of this storytelling is thriving at LAIKA, and I thought this story was a positive one about taking care of each other – and overcoming barriers. Performing Fish came easily because I'm a dad myself, and his relationship with Eggs was a strong connection for me. Many of the Boxtrolls themselves are like kids."

Steve Blum adds, 'In fact, Shoe is like the slightly jealous brother who still has a good heart – he's older than Eggs, but I see him as the little brother to Fish. What was profound to me about the story is the sense of community that the Boxtrolls have and their having to fight for it, and how you see these little creatures with normal human emotions.

'Whether tinkering with things or working on voices, Dee Bradley Baker and I both dug in and made something viable, and we had the patience to do that. We knew that, on The Boxtrolls, the animation was going to be so beautifully and stylistically complete that every single nuance was going to be captured by the animators."

Anthony Stacchi reports, 'We could go for hours with these two in the recording studio off of something like, -Imagine you two have just found an eggbeater in the trash and are arguing over who's going to get to take it home.' After the sessions, we'd pick and choose our favorite bits and we would reuse words we liked and get Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum to repeat them subsequently.

'The idea was that it not be like anything you had heard before, although there are traces of English in there because the Boxtrolls have overheard some words – which they then mangle."

Travis Knight remarks, 'What we also kept in mind was how the Boxtrolls are surrogates for the kids in our audience. While they'll definitely be able to imagine themselves being brave and curious like Eggs and Winnie, they will also relate to these characters who grapple with being misunderstood – and who lack the proper words to explain themselves or articulate what it is they want. So the emotions really have to come through with the Boxtrolls, and they do – and, more so than with many of the adult humans."

The family dynamic of the Boxtrolls is already in place when we meet the community. Anthony Stacchi notes, 'Fish is a surrogate father to Eggs; having taken the unanticipated risk of bringing home a human baby, he's looked out for Eggs all these years. Shoe is like the older brother to Eggs, and he's very content with who he is as a Boxtroll."

Less content in his situation is 'The Man in the Iron Socks," imprisoned inventor Herbert Trubshaw. Anthony Stacchi comments, 'He's probably the only man in the history of Cheesebridge who understood Boxtrolls, knowing that they are not the monsters they're made out to be."

Simon Pegg signed on to voice Trubshaw. Graham Annable praises the actor for bringing 'a heart-rending quality to the long-kidnapped character's predicament – while still being funny, which for Simon Pegg comes naturally."

Simon Pegg remarks, 'I liked the story and the steampunk vibe of The Boxtrolls. The previous LAIKA movies showed imagination and vision, and it's people doing that who you want to get to work with. Also, I have a young child now and want to be able to say, -There's Daddy,' which I can't really do with some of my other movies because there's too much swearing. LAIKA's movies are ones that children can watch again and again, and adults can enjoy more than once; films that bear up to repeated viewing are very helpful to a parent.

'Herbert was a very fun character to play because I got to be nuts – he's been in captivity for a very long time, upside down and hairy and ranting – but I also loved playing the poignancy of the lovely moments when you see him come back. There's comedy in his madness, but as a father myself I was always thinking about the awful sadness in his heart."

Although Trubshaw briefly shares scenes with Mr. Trout, voiced by Nick Frost, best friends and longtime acting partners Pegg and Frost 'don't interact at all – this one time," reports Bleiman Ichioka. 'Late in their respective recording sessions, Nick and Simon each found out independently that the other was part of the cast; it hadn't come up in their conversations – I guess they're too polite to brag to each other…"

Pegg quips, 'We don't want to know about each other's -extramarital affairs!' Suddenly I read that Nick Frost was in The Boxtrolls, and I loved the fact that he was paired up with Richard Ayoade – what a fantastic duo."

David Bleiman Ichioka notes, 'It turned out to be very fruitful, getting Richard as Mr. Pickles together with Nick Frost as Mr. Trout. They worked up this great rapport because they truly played off of each other; it helped define their characters' relationship. The texture of Richard's voice is ideal for animators to work from – and for Nick, too, since they did a ton of improvising."

Graham Annable adds, 'Those two were so good at riffing. They would extrapolate some nuance and make things funnier – while still keeping to the characterisations we wanted."

Anthony Stacchi reports, 'Mr. Trout and Mr. Pickles were always conceived as a duo who are working for the villain, but who think they're good guys. Snatcher sells them on the ideal that they're being heroic in exterminating Boxtrolls – maybe all they really cared about was getting a beautiful Red Hat – but the truth is beginning to dawn on them, in particular Mr. Pickles.

'The first time we heard Nick Frost's voicing Mr. Trout, we thought, -You just like this guy.'" Everyone on the production grew so attached to the duo that moviegoers who stay through the end credits of The Boxtrolls will get an extra helping of Trout and Pickles – and of Ayoade's voice.

Schiff comments, 'Richard has the deadpan yet goofy delivery which really enhanced his character – and also affected the faces that we made for him. His posture affected the way that we animated Mr. Pickles, too."

Covering all the angles, the editorial staff and the directors will look at reference footage cut together and accompanied by voiceover. This must be done before a final take – to make and anticipate necessary adjustments with the animators. Given the careful planning with the long-completed storyboarding, everyone in all departments is kept informed of any modifications.

The ballroom sequence in The Boxtrolls would be the feature's most challenging for any and all departments. Schiff reports, 'It's the biggest hybridization of CG and stop-motion that we've done – that anybody's done. There are 150 people in there!"

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'In terms of the story work, the sequence was an ideal opportunity to put Eggs above ground in a fish-out-of-water situation; that's different from the story's Fish-out-of-water situations…

'Having never done a stop-motion feature before, I didn't realise just how difficult it would be to dance puppets around a set – and to have them dance with each other!"

David Bleiman Ichioka remarks, 'Add to those levels of difficulty storyboarding a shot from the inside of one dress out, with Eggs taking cover under one of the dresses, and there were more than enough reasons not to do the sequence. So of course we figured out how these things could possibly be pulled off, and we did it all."

Expert witnesses were called in, as local choreographers were invited to visit the LAIKA studios. They brought with them professional dancers who performed – and who were also recorded for reference. These included a young boy standing in for Eggs, and a young girl standing in for Winnie. The choreographers had the dancers vary their approaches, sometimes 'carrying" the additional weight of a well-fed Cheesebridgeian and/or shifting their bodies to mime older citizens' more measured moves.

Schiff, Stalman, director of photography John Ashlee Prat, and camera lead Mark Stewart worked together with the choreographers to map out the sequence and have it filmed in real time from every angle so that every dancer's movements could be tracked, with some motion-captured, so that the visual effects department and the animators would have everything available for studying. 'We even did handheld close-ups of the feet," notes Prat. 'We had to explore all aspects of camera language for this sequence."

Graham Annable comments, 'Tony Stacchi and I also went to a dance studio in Portland because we wanted to make the sequence authentic. We directed the dancers – and sometimes they directed us!"

The entire sequence was blocked out and recorded on video, on which it was then edited pegged to the existing storyboards for the sequence. The resulting preliminary piece endured through production as a template, with the live-action version gradually superseded by animated footage; the animators would often refer to the recorded staging of the dance sequence for both inspiration and accuracy, not least because the scene called for the dance steps to evolve.

Further getting the staging on point – though not en pointe – the movie's Academy Award-winning composer Dario Marianelli had followed his working method of writing music early on, so animators were able to time the movements even better than anticipated. 'It was a huge benefit for us," affirms Annable. 'Dario Marianelli started work when most of the movie was still in the story[board] phases, and he was able to ask for a few more seconds here and there to let his score breathe – and truly support key moments in The Boxtrolls. Later, he would also adapt the waltz that he wrote to fit finished shots."

David Bleiman Ichioka comments, 'Dario Marianelli got right into the spirit of the off-kilter period nature of the movie, but he also brought his wealth of classical influences to bear on the score. On the ballroom sequence, we required all of his many skills."

Anthony Stacchi remarks, 'This was the first animated movie that Dario Marianelli has scored; his daughters had enjoyed Coraline and ParaNorman, so he was quite enthusiastic.

'He came up with three pieces that, while differentiated, hold the movie together: music for the Boxtrolls' world in their cavern, music for the White Hats' world in Cheesebridge, and music for the Red Hats gang."

Graham Annable adds, 'The way Dario Marianelli works is to tie in to the emotional aspects of each sequence, rather than concentrate on specific themes for each character. He shares the LAIKA approach of doing what's best for propelling the story forward and conveying the full degrees of feeling."

'For the ballroom sequence, Dario Marianelli's percussive placement structured the waltz, and the dancing times out to the music and the music times out to the storytelling points of what the characters are going through; they are moving around the ballroom to do more than dance. It all flows together naturally, and with the full instrumentation in the finished movie it's quite beautiful."

Anthony Stacchi admits, 'There were definitely some sweaty moments wondering if this was ever going to work. Animator Jan Maas had been on both of LAIKA's earlier movies, and he wrapped his head around this particular challenge, including studying the choreography in detail. The sequence took him about a year to complete.

'Sometimes Graham Annabel and I would act out a shot for animators, and sometimes they would go off and come back with new footage of themselves doing a role. Either way, we'd discuss with them how they might perform it."

The animation world's comparatively new tradition of reference complements the time-honored animation tradition of the voiceover actors setting the tone for the characters. Travis Knight remarks, 'For the animators, actors' prerecorded vocal performances are something that we listen – and watch – carefully for little nuances that can give the character more of a personality. We then try to infuse the vocal performance into our physical portrayals of the character; maybe in the face, maybe in the body. The LAIKA animation style is a -skewed naturalism,' informed by well-observed and true-to-life details.

'A particular pleasure for the animators performing the Boxtrolls was the out-and-out slapstick scenes, as these lovable oddballs navigate everywhere from inside their boxes – sometimes comfortably, but increasingly with complications."

Adding to the comedic quotient while also bolstering the musical element was typically witty wordplay from Eric Idle; the multi-talented member of the storied Monty Python comedy troupe lent his songwriting skills to the production, penning the lyrics and composing the music for 'The Boxtrolls Song." David Bleiman Ichioka notes, 'Eric Idle has for decades been writing songs for movies and musicals. Everyone admires his aesthetic and his tone, and felt that his distinctive style would go so well with this project – especially given all the humor. We took a chance and contacted him, and he sparked to the idea."

Eric Idle comments, 'I do like telling a story in song. From the artwork that the production sent me, I saw that this movie would have fresh and original characters. In context, this would be a song that the people of Cheesebridge sort of knew, that the crowd Madame Frou Frou is playing to has heard every year. So the song had to have a catchy hook to anchor it as well as quite a strong chorus. I started writing, and playing on my guitar, and came up with something that aimed for a Kurt Weill feel."

Graham Annable elaborates, 'We first spoke on the phone with Eric Idle; he loved how the song would be for Madame Frou Frou in the context of that character's false agenda. He also responded to how the Boxtrolls have been unfairly tagged as monsters by Snatcher. Then, before we knew it, we were back on the phone with him enthusiastically singing the demo for us – in that voice we all know from years of watching Python.

'He just nailed it. When you hear the song, the devilish wit in the lyrics marks it as Eric Idle's work. Python was definitely an influence on The Boxtrolls, so we're thrilled to have one of the troupe be part of our movie."

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'The songs that Eric Idle has come up with for Python projects are ones that move the story forward while being entertaining. That was right in line with what we were striving to do, and he was able to key in to the politics and morality of just who is singing the song and why – since the song could also be called -The Sad Story of the Trubshaw Baby' – through a satirical tone."

EricIdle offers, 'I always enjoy comedy where the hypocrisy of what people say is being exposed. It was lovely to write a song in a character's -voice,' a narrative from someone who isn't telling the truth – sneaky!

'I was also able to do triple rhymes, which is nice for the ear – you don't often get those."

Anthony Stacchi adds, 'Here was another performer that we were excited to be in the same recording studio with. Eric did his own harmonies, and even stepped into the Madame Frou Frou character for a while."

Graham Annable concludes, 'I'm still astounded with who we got, and with what we got, for this movie. I've never seen – or heard –anything like it in stop-motion."

Boxtrolls Rolls

With 79 sets and over 20,000 handmade props, The Boxtrolls is the biggest production ever to be made in stop-motion animation; and is only the fourth stop-motion movie to be made in stereoscopic 3D following LAIKA's own Coraline (2009) and ParaNorman (2012) as well as Aardman's The Pirates! (2012).

While one's first instinct when hearing the word 'animation" may be to think of drawings or, these days, computers, at LAIKA the craftsmanship and artistry channel a little bit of everything into making movies by hand.

Lead animator and producer Travis Knight comments, 'Animation is a powerful visual medium bound only by the imaginations of its practitioners. We take it to new creative avenues by incorporating all forms of animation into our methodology. Since it's always the stop-motion art form that we seek to redefine, we're looking to what might enhance the process.

'I love the medium, and this art form, because it combines so many artistically wonderful elements: illustration, painting, photography, lighting, sculpting, and music."

He adds, 'Every single person at LAIKA brings something of themselves to the captivating stories we make – while expanding people's notions of what animation can be, with bold and innovative design. As a result, each frame is that much richer."

This is readily apparent in the most ambitious sequences in The Boxtrolls, as the enhancing CG effects generated in-house enable the camera to sweep around, completely mobile and in the thick of the unfolding action. 'We've expanded the LAIKA-verse," says Travis Knight. 'But we've done so without betraying our mandate."

Director Anthony Stacchi remarks, 'For this movie, we have opened up the scope – because LAIKA's skills set has itself grown. The studio was poised and ready to do a movie like this, in terms of the scale as well as the technology and design.

'There's a more visceral reality for this fantastical story which shows off everything that's great about stop-motion."

Because of the company's continuing expertise with Rapid Protoyping (RP) – which LAIKA was an early adopter of – the stop-motion art form has been elevated with each new movie. 'This movie is another big leap for us," says Annable. 'The amount of things we can achieve and the places we can go are more and more from one film to the next. The character nuance and humanistic detail we were able to pack in on The Boxtrolls is beyond even what audiences have come to anticipate from LAIKA."

Production on The Boxtrolls took place at the LAIKA Studios located in Hillsboro, Oregon, in a 151,140-square foot building space, and began in the fall of 2012. By the fall of 2013, with a peak on-site crew count of 340 talented designers, artists, animators and technicians, there were 50 separate shooting Units at work during the shoot, which wrapped in the spring of 2014.

'We started with an animator or two one fall, and at the production's peak one year later there were 30 animators working at once," says producer David Bleiman Ichioka. 'Between those times, assets are still being created and puppets are still being made. All told, principal photography was for 76 weeks."

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'After storyboarding, we sit with the animators and talk through what we think should happen in a particular shot. Seeing it on the set with the puppet, with 6-8 poses tested, new ideas start to come out."

For elements in frames of The Boxtrolls that are created and posed by human hands, it takes an entire week of production from the various stages around the studio to complete between 1-2 minutes of movie footage.

Travis Knight reminds, 'One single frame can easily take half an hour for an animator to make."

David Bleiman Ichioka adds, 'A good day means two seconds of usable footage." Even the fastest animators whose work yielded the highest output rate on the production have to remain 'in the zone" for hours at a time.

This is made both harder and easier because the tangible relationship in stop-motion animation between the artisans and the puppets and/or props at hand is one that other forms of animation cannot fully replicate.

Creative supervisor of character fabrication Georgina Hayns, encoring in her same capacity as on the two earlier LAIKA features, comments, 'It's like climbing Everest, but every week we see the end result of what we did up on the [in-house theatre] screen – and that makes a difference. LAIKA encourages artists and makes people aware of how much they, and the work they are doing, are appreciated. This company also affords the opportunity to experiment in a familial environment. One of the fun things we do is bring in people who have worked in miniatures in different industries and then teach them how animation works; it's shifting raw talent a few degrees in one direction.

'We are led by Travis Knight, who is as much involved in the animation as we are. He understands what everyone does, from a producer to a costume maker to a puppet maker, and how and why they love doing it – because he does as well."

Director Anthony Stacchi muses, 'I don't know how Travis Knight will wear all those hats in a given day, but he does so and he is always great to work with. We will often discuss animated film history and philosophies of animation because he is dedicated to the field.

'It was possible to, in the morning, be giving him notes on a shot that he was animator on, and then in the afternoon be pitching him a storyboard fix to approve."

Travis Knight, previously lead animator on LAIKA's first two movies, is joined on The Boxtrolls as lead animator not only by Jason Stalman but also by the latter's fellow ParaNorman animators Malcolm Lamont and Daniel Alderson; and by ParaNorman lead animator Jeff Riley, who was an animator on Coraline.

Who makes the call of matching up animators and characters? 'Animators are -cast' by directors," states Travis Knight. 'It's about finding the right person for the right character, because an animator is an actor who is giving a performance through a puppet. Sometimes, you're trying to coax a performance out of this inanimate assemblage of steel and silicone, and it physically won't come.

'Those are the times where you have to try something else, maybe something no one could have anticipated. For all the meticulous planning that goes into each shot, there's a wonderful spontaneity to the process."

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'The saying goes, -All directing is 90% casting.' Well, here that also entails which animator you are giving which sequence to."

Animation supervisor Brad Schiff reminds that 'there has to be clarity between what the directors want and what the animators are performing. This will sustain the style of the movie.

'I'm responsible for overseeing the development of the characters, and managing and supervising the team of animators, to make sure that the quality stays consistent – and that continuity is maintained throughout the production."

For The Boxtrolls, in addition to working closely with production designer Paul Lasaine and art director Curt Enderle – previously a set designer on ParaNorman – Schiff could often be found on the LAIKA studios floor trying to help animators figure out their next move(s).

Travis Knight adds, 'Animators are given individual responsibility for big chunks of the movie, so that they must know it backwards and forwards; every shot within a designated stop-motion sequence was brought to life by a single pair of hands.

'One innovation that we've brought to the process of stop-motion has been empowering animators to take ownership of their scenes."

Brad Schiff clarifies, 'Every animator has a different style. Our goal is to keep continuity in animation style throughout. We develop specific quirks for each character, and those get carried through the entire production regardless of who is animating any particular character. Individual style is negated, and a communal style created.

'We look at every animator's strengths; some are good at action, some at emotional sequences. You do want to give people the opportunity to go outside of boundaries, but the movie has to be cast correctly and so you want to place people on scenes that cater to their strengths."

Anthony Stacchi praises story artist Emanuela Cozzi, previously a story artist with director Graham Annable on ParaNorman, for 'nailing adventurous scenes. This was something we realized during the story phase, when we saw what she did with the waltz sequence. When we needed to get Eggs in over his head, we went to her!"

Travis Knight reveals, 'As an animator, I tend to gravitate towards really difficult scenes – ones that I don't necessarily want to be doing, but that I commit to because I feel that I can bring something special to them."

On The Boxtrolls, Travis Knight took on the first sequence that was ready to go from the story department. Anthony Stacchi notes, 'It's a crucial one that takes place on a foggy street in Cheesebridge. Travis Knight' performance as animator helped to establish how Eggs would move and how Winnie would move. He also came up with a bit of business for Snatcher to be doing in time with Sir Ben Kingsley's unique take on how Snatcher speaks, and this became a trait of Snatcher's throughout the whole movie."

Travis Knight comments, 'People think that animating in stop-motion requires patience, but it's more about being able to maintain intense focus for long periods of time. It can be physically taxing; you're standing on concrete floors and contorting your body into all sorts of weird positions. But it's mentally exhausting as well. If a character that you're animating is angry, you have to be able to get yourself into that state too so as to get the emotion you need for the performance. 'Do we make mistakes? All the time, and, more often than not, the mistakes are integrated into the work. In bringing something to life with your hands, there are always going to be imperfections. That's part of what gives stop-motion its spark of life – the very human quality of -not everything is perfect.'" Bleiman Ichioka muses, 'That focus and the ability to adapt are critical. -Change this in a hurry' means – a month and a half. Although we're carefully scheduled, time doesn't hold the usual meaning on a LAIKA shoot." One key sequence was completed in March 2013…with the exception of a particular shot that couldn't be gotten until a full12 months later.

On The Boxtrolls, Hayns' puppet department numbered over 60 people at the height of production. To physically construct just one of the puppets, multiple department members will work for 3-4 months. Hayns elaborates, 'We're among the earliest LAIKAns to start work on a project. All of our puppets are made up of silicone and foam latex and resin, and then inside they have their metal skeletons. Unlike marionette puppets – with whom everything is shot in real time – stop-motion puppets are moved frame by frame over long periods of time. These puppets need to be made to withstand lots of handling.

'What comes first is, the concept artist will design the look of a puppet. Before the fabrication department can start making the puppets, they need approved character designs. On this movie, those designs were rendered in silhouette by designer Mike Smith, who was previously a storyboard artist on ParaNorman. The silhouette designs blended well with the production designs' pen-and-ink quality. The Boxtrolls is set in a fantasy Dickensian world, and both these illustrative styles are in keeping with the time period."

Concept artist Michel Breton, returning to the LAIKA fold after being an illustrator of the concept art on Coraline, contributed what Annable praises as 'an inking style of amazingly loose lines. I know that the art department sometimes struggled with how to interpret Michel Breton's torqued, twisted elongations into actual physical objects, but it was a constant for designs of characters and sets alike. For me, it would always come down to a gut feeling of, -What is right for being in this frame?'"

Hayns adds, 'We fell in love with Michel Breton's drawings, which he did in a pen-and-ink style. The drawings' lines looked a little bit shaky, and we wanted to bring that into the puppets' faces and clothing. So we devised several techniques to reproduce the lines. This allows our puppets to live in the designed environment."

Facial animation supervisor Peg Serena praises 'Mike Brenton's hilarious drawings of the Boxtrolls. We wanted them to be funny and cute, and he showed the essence of how that would work."

Other inspirations took hold for the story's look, milieu, and denizens. A few tips of the hat – or, box – to Alan Snow's drawings in Here Be Monsters were layered in. For the Boxtrolls' tinkering, graphic artist Nicolas de Crécy's and sculptor Thomas McClure's works were influences, along with the films of director Terry Gilliam, particularly Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Also front-of-mind was David Lean's film version of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, since, as Hayns notes, 'Dickensian class systems are a key part of our movie's story.

'Once a puppet's look is approved, a sculptor turns that two-dimensional, or 2D, illustrated image into a three-dimensional maquette. This maquette becomes a tool for communication between the director and the fabrication team. There are character breakdown meetings where we discuss performance and special requirements before the puppets are built."

From The Boxtrolls, Hayns picks Mr. Pickles as her 'favorite character design. He translated so perfectly into a puppet, and he was the lowest-maintenance! His whimsical and charming puppet design shows off what I love about what we can do in stop-motion animation.

Each department at LAIKA has a movie's character lineup posted within easy view in an oblong format – the 'group shot" is a guide for everyone working on the movie, as well as a reminder of the unifying principles and visuals of the story being told.

Alongside the build of the puppet bodies, the fabrication department also needs to start work on the heads. As Hayns notes, 'At LAIKA, we use two different forms of facial animation: replacement and mechanical. The directors and Travis decide which build method they want for each puppet. Replacement animation allows for more expression, while mechanical animation lends itself to secondary and background puppets with limited facial performance.

'Mechanical heads are made with an internal mechanical skull which has a soft silicone skin attached over it. Replacement facial animation at LAIKA is groundbreaking; LAIKA was the first animation studio to use 3D printers to create the replacement mouth and brow of each character. On this movie, thousands of face parts were printed, which gives our lead characters an infinite amount of expression."

Hayns elaborates, 'Mechanical face animation is a bit like Swiss watch-making for the puppet head; the animator hand-manipulates the character's facial expressions through the silicone skin. Eyebrows, jaw, lips – they are all adjusted by hand. Our human background puppets in this movie all have mechanical heads. Some of the puppets with mechanical heads have gears that can be accessed through their ears!"

The LAIKA painters, notes Anthony Stacchi, will later 'provide variations of color that truly capture the looks of skin and flesh on a character, while also evoking emotions."

For the puppet build sculpt, Hayns notes that 'this entails having a T-pose of the character stripped down to a basic body shape, as hands and often legs are sculpted separately; the mold-maker then makes molds of all of those individual parts.

'A puppet for stop-motion animation has to have some kind of framework which will hold it up so that a human animator can manipulate the puppet and make it move – frame by frame on-screen. The puppet's framework usually has to be made out of metal – in the animation world, this is called an armature. It's been over 80 years since King Kong, but that hasn't changed; all of our puppets still have it. The armatures are specifically made for each character design, down to the wires in the fingers. All of the Boxtrolls have ball-and-socket armatures with wire fingers, and they are cast silicone over a carbon fiber shell."

Graham Annable says, 'For the Boxtrolls, we needed Georgina and her department to take all the movement range of a -normal' human puppet made at LAIKA – and add heads, arms, and legs that had to be able to pop out and retreat back into a box -shell' at varying speeds. They met every challenge."

Anthony Stacchi elaborates, 'For example: how do you show that the Boxtrolls are timid? This was a big part of setting up the plot, but it meant that they had to be able to completely retract into their boxes, or come out slowly and look around. It's easy enough to do it up in drawings, but then [head of armature] Jeremy Spake had to figure out how to hide armature in the box, and Georgina decided where to use replacement pieces, and so forth. After a month or two, they made it all work."

Hayns reports, 'On The Boxtrolls, we had the new challenge of building creatures who live in boxes. Initially, we were really excited for the box shape to hide all of our mechanics inside. But after the first director briefing, we discovered that the creatures had to retract all of their limbs and heads into the boxes! The armature team used a combination of gears and telescoping hinges to overcome this problem. With the Rapid Prototyping department's help, we made replacement heads to fit in the boxes and we made multiple replacement arms.

'Since Coraline, we have used our own CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine to engineer joints in-house. We try emulate the human body movement with the armature. But, seeing as we are building these for animation, we might have to over-exaggerate some expressions or movements."

As tangible and impressively featured as the puppets become, they cannot stand on their own; each has threaded inserts in their feet so that they can be screwed down to a surface. Hayns offers, 'You have to take into account that characters' poses will be held twice as long, given that they are photographed twice for each 3D frame."

More fragile body parts like hands have to be made many times over and kept at the ready. Hayns reports, 'Despite the little wires we layer into the hands, these are the first things to break on any puppet. Our hand department, which is about six people, will be making hands up to the very last day of filming.

'The first completed and approved puppet of each character is called the -hero' puppet. That's the birth, and then they're reproduced many times. All of the hero puppets in this movie have replacement faces." For the central character of Eggs, some two dozen puppets were made, accommodating for costume and hair changes as well as stage needs.

David Bleiman Ichioka elaborates, 'You have to plan that it's for the long haul in more ways than one. It's a concern unique to stop-motion moviemaking: how many of each character do you need to build, and when in the process do you do it? We didn't put all of our Eggs in one basket: making all of our Eggs puppets first to shoot his scenes early on wouldn't have worked. Some of his puppets were actually designated outright as stunt puppets."

To further move things forward on the production schedule, during rehearsals and setups on The Boxtrolls, the production made use of 'stand-ins" for puppets: scale-sized cardboard cutouts.

Brad Schiff notes, 'Not only did we have more characters this time, we had more complex characters. Take the Red Hats: not only do they each have their own unique shape but they also each have very distinct personalities and movements. Often an animator would have all three of them in a scene together with Snatcher. It was incredibly challenging."

Anthony Stacchi comments, 'The size and scale of every puppet is determined by your smallest one. On this movie, that was one of our Boxtrolls, Oilcan. So we had him and then it became, -All right, then [fellow Boxtroll] Fish is this size, and then moving up to Eggs, he is that size…'"

Hayns muses, 'One of the charms of stop-motion is that, although identical puppets are made for each character, there are still those little differences that seep in – whether it's through scuffing, sculpting, or molding…For The Boxtrolls, we made more puppets than on any previous movie."

Multiplicity continues apace in the costume department; as is the case for any major movie, duplicates of characters' outfits had to be kept handy. With thousands of handlings over a couple years' time, there were at least half a dozen duplicates of each costume. 'Costuming is the final layer for the puppets," says Hayns. 'But we have to think about that at the beginning of the process, taking into account designs; scale and texture; how something will read on-screen; and how costuming will mesh with the mechanics of the puppet. That's where our skilled costume makers come in.

'On The Boxtrolls, [costume designer] Deborah Cook has gone 10 steps beyond what we ever dreamed of for stop-motion – and I've been on board with it, encouraging her…"

Once again working closely with Hayns and the character fabrication team, Deborah Cook captained the costume department as she had on ParaNorman and Coraline. She says, 'I believe that the costuming for a movie offers a parallel narrative; they support the role of a character. It is a huge responsibility that the image of a character in-costume be believable, including to the animators who are performing the character and investing in the character emotionally."

She reflects, 'Our team members are very talented. We have animation professionals who have been with us for a while alongside some great newcomers. I also supervise a team of fabricators who help us realise and construct those costumes, and interpret from the designs. With the directors, I discuss how they see the characters and how they would like them to be defined.

'Each person brings a unique vocational talent to our group, with a broad spectrum beyond animation: ceramics, weaving, painting, filmmaking, sculpture, crochet, computer skills – and sometimes most if not all of the above!"

She explains her team's process as starting 'with images of regular clothing to see how we might want it to look. Then we research fabrics and do color and fabric tests. What works in the studio might not work on-camera, and this needs to be ascertained before a costume is approved for production. For example, some fabrics will have a little grain or weave on them, which would be fine but for the fact that a close-up on-screen would be distracting."

Another testing method is to have someone of comparable real-life height and stature to a character walk around in an outfit so Cook's department can see how key planned costumes hang and flow. 'We try to get the same movements out of the costumes as in life-sized, because it helps make our characters believable," comments Debroah Cook. 'We have to take into account whether it's an active character or a sedate character, so we also do tests with the puppets themselves.

'Usually, the puppets are still being built as we're making the costumes so we'll get a dressing dummy to work on. When we get the actual puppet, we can make final tweaks and adjustments. We coordinate with other departments to make sure they can access the armature or mechanisms underneath."

Since the Boxtrolls themselves had to be costumed, department members took a practical tack in their research. 'We had people walking around the studios in boxes," reveals Deborah Cook. 'We needed to test how arms could move around without having the box ride up and obscure faces. For the puppets, the box needed to hew close to them and not move when, say, their arms were rotated.

'Some members of the staff really took to this, and would wear boxes at lunchtime. People at LAIKA take such ideas and run with them; there's a real creative fascination with such challenges."

Further upping the ante, the character of Eggs became the first young LAIKA movie hero to have multiple costume changes outside of the/his box: his everyday sweater and pants, 'disguise" coat and hat, leather flight helmet with goggles, and the blue union suit made for him by Winnie to wear to the Cheesebridge ball. The latter, clarifies Deborah Cook, called for 'found items Winnie could have come by in the Boxtrolls' cavern.

'So the -buttons' are a melange of items including clock cogs and a poker chip; his -suit cuffs' are pewter jug spouts; lamp shades adorn his shoulders; and the -tail coat' is old chain-mail armor."

Buttons found their way on-screen not only for the Boxtrolls to make varying uses of, but also because Deborah Cook 'drew inspiration from the old East End tradition of families' using very shiny buttons to decorate their clothing.

'The clothes can't just be an illustration. There has to be some history in a character's clothing, which should look lived-in."

Hayns notes, 'In keeping with the Dickensian feel, the costume department's work on The Boxtrolls was even more highly detailed than usual."

The production's painters worked on Deborah Cook's group's costumes as and where needed, whether to 'age" them accordingly or provide detail on clothing. She notes, 'A lot of what we do is by way of traditional techniques, with wire and netting for example. Everything that is made by hand at LAIKA is then hand-dyed, hand-painted, or hand-patterened."

Even the aforementioned buttons on a costume are sculpted by hand and then painted. Deborah Cook points out, 'The buttons that you would regularly use for a costume would be the width of a puppet's arm, or as big as their eye; that's not what we need."

Everything done on-site is coordinated with the production's confirmed color palettes and visual directives; an in-studio sign reminds everyone that what is being created should be a 'literal translation of artwork." Enderle notes, 'It's not -kind of approximate.' It's, -That's what it's going to look like.' You have something to aim for."

Deborah Cook reveals, 'At the early stages, I initially worked in black-and-white and didn't add the color until later. This was so I could be conscious of the strong profiles from a sculpture and a structure standpoint. I did know what the colors were going to be, and the lead character of Eggs has his own color schemes to stand out both above and below ground.

'The color palette was influenced by Eugène Delacroix's painting -Liberty Leading the People,' commemorating the French revolution of 1830 and later loaned to the American people from France to celebrate Independence Day. So the painting also is, I feel, pertinent to our movie because it shows class interaction and rebellion."

The color red, while expressly identified with the villainous Snatcher and his gang in their capacities as the Men in Red Hats to engender a cautionary response, is eventually reclaimed by the lovable Boxtrolls in more saturated tones that stand out – daring to be different.

Tasked with bringing to life LAIKA's first period piece, all departments got into the spirit of accessing the Victorian-era details and feel. A 'style guide" was finalised internally before a frame of footage was shot, so that there would be a consistent look for everything from the hair to the sets. Even so, notes Deborah Cook, 'These are fantastical characters and the Boxtrolls' world is their own creation, so we exercised our creative license to pluck from different eras. We also dipped into French soldiers, Mexican dancers, English royalty, turn-of-the-century – a bit of mix-and-match, but the Cheesebridge people love to dress up and they're overly dramatic and theatrical."

With LAIKA based in Oregon, Deborah Cook says that her department 'always tries to source materials locally – we pillage the stores, here, really – but I'm looking out wherever I am; it's always in the back of my mind. So ultimately we end up with things from London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. When you see something that's in our scale sizes, you have to get it! I love bringing everything back into our own world.

'But the fabric textures and patterns are all created at our studios, using suitable fabrics as a base; what was called for by this movie and by these characters was not purchasable, so we added a lot ourselves. We try to keep abreast of developments in textile-making so that while using purchases for visual reference with our base fabrics, we can construct our own unique textiles for the story that we're telling. On The Boxtrolls, there wasn't a costume without a unique component that came from us."

Also in-house, set dresser Matthew Brooks' hobby of crafting miniature paper mache masks had never been capitalized on for a previous LAIKA movie but on The Boxtrolls it was, as they were needed for a Madame Frou Frou sequence.

Anthony Stacchi remarks, 'That kind of thing would happen all the time; we would need an out-of-the-ordinary contribution to the movie, and a LAIKAn would have that highly unique talent – and we would put it to use!"

Graham Annable notes, 'Combining that with the dress that Deborah Cook designed for her – which allowed for dance moves – and the shocking red hair, Madame Frou Frou looked extraordinary, very much the fashionable, stylish -woman from the continent' with a secret."

The character's secret led the actor voicing her to – as this actor has before on-screen – commit to a portrayal-within-the-portrayal that enhances the surprise. David Bleiman Ichioka confides, 'I can say that Eva Gabor was an inspiration for this actor's voice performance of Frou Frou."

Turning to a later influence, Deborah Cook says, 'I like the Frou Frou costume because it has a slight injection of the 1980s. I really wanted her costume to be zingier beyond the color palette we were using."

The costume department was, as per usual, surrounded by sketches and dotted with high-tech sewing machines. Eggs' sweater and pants were made not by knitting but rather with an embroidery sewing machine, utilising a technique that had been conceived in-house; accounting for duplicates, the sweater required 233 yards of different-weight threads hand-dyed in varying color tones. 'The textures of his clothes had to reflect his living as a Boxtroll below ground, rather than as a boy of Cheesebridge. I don't even see what we made as a fabric," says Deborah Cook. 'We're making our own creations – and making ones we can duplicate them ourselves – so we can have them ready right at the beginning of the process."

For the new movie, knitting activities did nonetheless spike and, notwithstanding the miniature sweater that was knit for toddler Eggs, Deborah Cook emphasizes that 'we've moved beyond the miniature knitting approach from back on Coraline. The process was done differently this time. For The Boxtrolls, it was about opening up our costume philosophy for a more varied and artistic approach. We now know the properties we need so well that we can create our own rather than always relying on ones that already exist."

The costume department will continue to apply lessons learned on past productions. As Deborah Cookand her team had found on the previous LAIKA movies, antique Victorian gloves offered the best and thinnest possible leather out of which to fabricate some of the puppets' shoes. 'Leather always looks best," she offers. 'We already know those gloves are durable, and they transfer nicely in scale on our puppets."

Given the setting of The Boxtrolls, some Victorian leather gloves material ended up on-screen as…Victorian leather gloves, albeit much smaller-scaled. 'We used opera gloves and dismantled them," Deborah Cook reveals. 'There's plenty of leather in those sleeves for us."

Like many a LAIKA department, Deborah Cook and her staff look to real people to inspire the stop-motion characters they work on. While the actors voicing the characters are not direct references for the department, their photos might be kept nearby as talismans. Film stills, pages, from books, and magazine pictures are tacked onto walls and 'inspiration boards." Among the departments' inspirations for the look and dress of Snatcher were veteran U.K. actor Timothy Spall; Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York; and the cult comedy classic Withnail & I.

Specific nods to past cinema icons came for Winnie, who recalls Shirley Temple; and Mr. Trout, whose dimensions were inspired by Fatty Arbuckle, thereby necessitating a bit of a girth challenge to the puppet fabrication department. Further Dickensian echoes have Eggs evincing traces of both Oliver and The Artful Dodger from the Oscar-winning Oliver!

The Cheesebridge aristocracy of White Hats were dressed in ornate costumes inspired by Alexandre Benois' mid-20th-century 'Ballet Russe," or Russian ballet, designs. 'They are at the top of the town, in more ways than one," notes Graham Annable.

Enderle adds, 'There was also a hierarchy of color. The White Hat aristocrats are vibrant and rich in color, but then as you go down the hill, Snatcher and his Red Hats are darker and dingier. The Boxtrolls are underground, so they're earthy to begin with.

'There was a color palette pyramid for the town, and one for the characters. Paul Lasaine was very subtle with the cools and warms, and we were excited to keep to the through line."

Further down the topographical and social scale, the Red Hats gang is meant to channel the Edwardian-era 'Teddy Boys" of London. Annable remembers, 'For the Men in Red Hats, Deborah looked at other elaborate gangs, including 1950s ones from Japan with pompadour hairdos."

Deborah Cook notes, 'The Red Hats have to look like a group, and that they've chosen to be in one; they look at each other and see a slight reflection, and it's comforting to them – at least at first."

Graham Annable adds, 'But there's also a rock-and-roll vibe in the costuming for White Hats and Red Hats, what with questions of class and rebellion in the story. Since we were able to make faces sharper and stronger, where do you go for inspiration? The Rolling Stones!"

With duplicates of every costume and puppet needing to be made, the Red Hats added an extra level of difficulty for Deborah Cook and Hayns' departments: since their garb is more 'grubby and floppy, they had to look slightly more disheveled – which in fact meant there had to be a lot more structure in their clothing," states Deborah Cook. 'A lot of wiring went underneath for that worn, crumpled look because it had to stay just that way for the animating. These clothes had far more engineering than the White Hats' straight, tight, clean-cut ones. The Red Hats' costumes were the first that we worked on."

Also early in the design process, each character design is sculpted to scale as a maquette – a puppet-sized detailed clay figure, though not a workable puppet. 'The character designs were realised into 3D by sculptor Kent Melton, who sculpts maquettes which are static 3D poses of the characters," says Hayns. 'The resulting maquettes are the puppet team's style guide throughout the build on the entire show."

Melton's three-dimensional sculptures are utilized early on by facial animation supervisor Peg Serena, another longtime LAIKAn who had worked in the same capacity on ParaNorman. She notes, 'Facial animation rests squarely between the animation department and the Rapid Prototyping department.

'There is in our department a concentration expressly on the animators' performing the face. Working from Kent's sculptures and the voiceover recordings, the 2D animation begins as animators listen to dialogue excerpts and start drawing to try to find the character. Brad Schiff coordinates with everyone at this stage. The animation is on paper and once the directors approve it, 3D computer facial animation begins as does building face kits. The face kits we create for the animators are to include every mouth shape possible while also being emotive."

Atop the puppets' heads, those that required hair got uniquely coiffed. Hayns reports, 'All the hair in The Boxtrolls is constructed with hemp, which is dyed, painted, and then styled. We add wires if needed, too! The aristocratic women have basket-weave wigs, in keeping with the opulent style of this time period.

'Each strand was edged with an opposing color or an offset color, so as to make the colors pop more. It was then dyed and combed through before being applied to the puppets' heads with glue." So while Winnie's red hair is distinctive on-screen, it is actually that much more so because of a touch of lime green on the edge; similarly, Eggs' dark brown hair has a blue streak layered in.

For many of the puppets, their hair, while in effect wigs to begin with, was doubled with yet more wigs; as Hayns notes, 'We had to make different stunt wigs – also from hemp – for the adventurous scenes. Our process for cleaning wigs is a little drop of alcohol and a gentle hand. Here's another trade secret: an eyebrow trimmer works well for treating the puppets' hair.

'Meanwhile, our silicone casters had to make sure there were no seam lines on the puppets' surfaces. We always have people on standby during shooting to repair a puppet whose silicone tears. They use magnifying glasses and get to work like a make-up artist."

Over in the costume department, tools of the trade range from Carmex lip balm to dental scrapers to paint thinner. Deborah Cook adds, 'We also make good use of needles, pins, and surgical tools like tweezers and syringes. The cotton buds we use are miniature. We have brushes that we dip into latex so that we can get tiny specks off of the characters' costumes without pulling the fabric; you often can't put your hands on there."

Hayns notes, 'All the hats on the human characters had elaborate appliqué cut-outs constructed, and that was done by way of the laser-cutting."

Deborah Cook adds, 'We control the depth to which the laser cutter cuts through, since it can scorch fabrics. So it became like a natural sepia tone, helping establish the aged appearance of the fabrics – and eliminating the need for further coloring treatments."

Some costumes, after having been designed in full, had to be painted on for the best effect in larger-scaled scenes; still others had to be etched onto the puppets. 'We laser-etched the Devoir Velvet fabric treatment to the scale of our puppets," reveals Hayns.

Not everything is as it seems: the seemingly slight petals at the hem of Winnie's dress were fashioned from metal for the adventure sequences. Deborah Cook marvels, 'Winnie leads quite an action-packed life."

Less adventurous for the characters but no less action-packed in the ballroom dancing sequence is how the dresses for the White Hat society ladies that Deborah Cook and her department fashioned crease, billow, and swirl with flourishes because of Rapid Prototyping (RP) work that made them more malleable. 'On the practical tip, we put threads on the inside of the skirts that could be rigged to an off-set mechanism that drew them back to sweep a bit. We were going for something on the order of Jezebel or Anna Karenina," smiles Deborah Cook.

'But for that classical hoop-skirt movement, one had to look to Gone with the Wind," notes Hayns. 'We watched one sequence from it a lot, and broke down what movements we needed to replicate mechanically. This was a great challenge for the armature department. The hooped crinolines were constructed with metal joints – including, under the skirts, an unseen -third leg' – which the animators could pose frame by frame; the skirts could twist, float up and down, and rock back and forth like a bell. The bottom edges of all of the skirts were wired to allow the animator to achieve subtle follow-through with the fabric."

Deborah Cook adds, 'We wanted to give the animators a little bit of extra help. When the puppet -steps' forward, the dress has a natural follow-through.

'8-10 metal hoops in each dress were linked together by concertina wire. That sounds appealing, but it's actually razor-sharp."

Further belying the on-screen lightness of movement, some of the garb was tethered to perforated steel on a magnetic base, for a gimbal effect that will not be perceived by moviegoers – but which was crucial for the animators maneuvering both male and female Cheesebridge society puppets wearing finery and all their accoutrements.

For the staffers at LAIKA, everything is happening among them simultaneously – departments coordinate efforts to keep a project progressing, rather than waiting for each other to finish work. All the while, sets are being built and dressed with props. Delivery schedules of which sets need to be on what stages and when dictate what gets created, in order of due dates.

Working from Lasaine and illustrators' and designers' specifications, Enderle and his staff generated 'the look that embodies the movie, manifesting it on-camera. Paul and that team provide the blueprint and lay out their vision.

'People may not ever notice it while watching the movie, but we pay attention to the environments behind the puppets. The Boxtrolls' underground cavern was meant to be a -Coney Island of junk.' Michel Breton's concept for the milieu above ground was that Cheesebridge – it was Ratbridge in the book – be a tired old city where the buildings are leaning against each other for support."

Set fabrication supervisor Jon Warren, previously a set fabrication supervisor on ParaNorman, remarks, 'My position is specific to our being a stop-motion animation studio. I'm the link among the production design and art direction team, and the set dressers, taking everything that's been drawn up – whether by pencil in 2D, by painting, or by computer – and figuring out how it can be tangibly made.

'We want to get as much physical, or practical, stuff on-camera as possible, and I'm involved in the -old school' approach. But by doing hybridization, the visual effects help us to broaden our world and go beyond space and time constraints. I feel we've set another standard on this movie."

Lead set dresser Kieron Thomas, previously a set dresser on the first two LAIKA movies, reports that 'our group is really the last leg of the art department. We often begin with an empty canvas. We have the wonderful props at hand – or at least a list of them at the ready – and we will -age' a set if needed. A key concern is making the sets believable for scenes from a scale standpoint. The 2D drawings have been done and the 3D models have been made, and we work from those to re-create that imagery in just the right proportions.

'We will meticulously look over each frame-by-frame image that we prepare to achieve a beautiful picture with proper composition, and we work very closely with the directors. The detail is so incredible that you want to show off – but you sometimes have to rein it in a bit to make sure that you're not distracting people from the characters and the story being told."

Graham Annable clarifies, 'Before production begins, we directors will be approving every fork and spoon and chair. However, at a certain point in the process that's just not feasible, so you really have to trust the art department to have a handle on the style of the movie – and carry everything through."

On The Boxtrolls, Thomas' department availed itself of 24 different types of weeds manufactured by greens artists, and the gardens in the movie were so dense that a supply shortfall one day left them waiting on what he remembers as '20 more cabbage leaves and 100 more ferns" to properly dress one scene. Still, as Thomas notes, 'We loved filling up spaces with the glorious foliage."

The cinematographer will light sets and shoot footage for the directors and the crew to look at, so that any adjustments and improvements can be made. Once everyone agrees that everything is right and in place, the animator will step in to ready the scene and the puppets' performances. While a stage may have a host of characters assembled for a scene, there is often just one animator – the one responsible for the overall sequence – who is on the set. The animator tends to each character, one at a time; when all is ready – which may be days later – only then can the shot(s) be taken.

The initial sequence introducing moviegoers to the Boxtrolls' underground cavernous home took over a month to complete, and that was after weeks of the lighting department readying everything; there was more illumination needed for this one scene than for the rest of the movie combined.

If a test set was on a smaller proportional scale, once it was approved by a director the measurements were locked and recorded so that the shooting set could be built to exact specifications. Though some test sets will never make it on camera, they are nonetheless retained and often checked for reference during production.

'Our mock-ups would often be made of foam-core yet full-size. Since we were pushing ourselves in terms of the physical size of things to bring scope and scale to this story, we would run out of space sometimes," reveals Enderle. 'The whole aesthetic was, stretching things out – and elongating sets skyward."

On a busy morning, there might be 15-20 stages to shoot on. For the directors and the camera department, motion control has transformed stop-motion, with the camera being able to move fluidly – as run by and with the Kuper systems' programming – through the environment that is being created. For the stationary 'locked-off" shots, the Dragon IOTA proprietary systems were used to run stereo slides.

Travis Knight notes, 'We take a lot of our cues from the stage world, especially in the way that we build our sets and how we shape and frame things." As in the stage world, sets are painted by hand and unexpected shadings are used to deepen the overall palette.

With inspiration encouraged from everyone and drawn from many artistic avenues, stop-motion is an art form that continues to thrive, and a craft that endures. While hewing to the long-established tenets and aesthetics of stop-motion animation – i.e., crafting and moving just about everything by hand – LAIKA is also comfortably yet firmly situated in the digital age.

Brian Van't Hul, visual effects supervisor on all three LAIKA features, notes, 'We worked hand in hand with all departments during the production process; for example, Deborah Cook's costumers would give us samples of the fabric that they would be using so that we could match the scale of the weave of it. There was a lot of intricate detail on The Boxtrolls costumes.

'As soon as a frame of footage comes off of a set, we were working on it. There was no waiting for a download; we are on the same internal network. Lighting, shooting, compositing – we did a little bit of everything, and certainly we're doing -the post [-production] work' even before the shoot was finished."

Given the ambitious hybridization nature of The Boxtrolls, Van't Hul was joined as visual effects supervisor by Steve Emerson, previously a compositing supervisor on ParaNorman and a 2D supervisor on Coraline. On the new movie, notes Emerson, 'In collaboration with Brian, I made sure that the vision of the directors and the performances of the animators were retained when visual effects were going to complement a given shot.

'Right out of the gate, we recognized that our work on The Boxtrolls was going to be primarily about enhancing environments and crowds – and expanding the worlds depicted by stop-motion in ways that had not been seen before: big, broad vistas above, around, and below the town of Cheesebridge."

Visual effects producer Annie Pomeranz adds, 'We wanted to create a dense, lively town for the puppets to exist in. The audience can then really believe in the areas that the characters are moving around in."

'We harness the computer to serve the process," Knight points out. 'It's a paradox; you now cannot really do a stop-motion feature without computers. At LAIKA, we have pioneered a lot of advancements in the technology. But it's still effectively unchanged from 100 years ago; an animator is still on a set with a puppet, coaxing a performance out of it a frame at a time. Certainly, we're still using a lot of the tools and techniques that the earliest filmmakers used.

'Character development is always something we work at, from how the puppet takes a step to how it breathes. Each has its own idiosyncrasies. You're availing yourself of everything that's been accrued up until that point; the storyboards, the vocal performances, the tests – it all helps the animator give greater vitality to their characters and their scenes."

David Bleiman Ichioka remarks, 'Computers began factoring into the art of stop-motion back in the 1980s, and digital frame grabbers began showing up around the time of The Nightmare Before Christmas [in 1993]. Then, a decade later came the digitally shot Corpse Bride [2005]. All of this became tools for animators."

Travis Knight says, 'We are embracing contemporary technology and fusing it with an art form that depends on being beautifully handcrafted."

Anthony Stacchi comments, 'I'd had experience working on visual effects for live-action films. I knew that The Boxtrolls afforded an opportunity to bring the textured reality of stop-motion together with the viscera of effects work. We have sequences in this movie which will be really surprising to people who know stop-motion."

Emerson reminds that the ballroom dancing sequence loomed as the movie's 'most daunting for, I think, every department and ours was no exception. There are practical – i.e., physical – puppets in those environments, yet these were being integrated with CG characters as well."

Van't Hul notes, 'The principal – or, in more ways than one, hero – characters are front and center, direct from Georgina's department. But, all around and behind them, and against the wall in the back? Well, it would have taken forever to animate 150 dancers, to say nothing of the rigging effort and the animators all crowding the stage together. As on a live-action movie, non-speaking -extras' avoid the lead characters – and that was up to us!"

In making The Boxtrolls in 3D with 56 digital cameras, each completed and digitally photographed frame was stored on a computer – and the animators could refer to a monitor and review their previous shots. After checking the model, animators would move the puppet and/or other elements infinitesimally for the next frame.

Travis Knight remarks, 'To move the stop-motion medium forward, we will take all the tools at our disposal – from the most cutting-edge technology to traditional hand-drawn techniques to the basic craft of stop-motion itself – and bring them together in a unique fusion. Coraline was one of the first movies to utilize 3D as an effective storytelling tool. Now, we do not do 3D as post-production [conversion] process after the fact. It's not a parenthetical glaze; it's baked into the filmmaking. We rigorously design every single shot with 3D composition in mind, shooting exhaustive tests and wedges to elicit the desired aesthetic and precise emotional response the narrative requires."

Stop-motion footage was lensed with Canon 5D cameras, while the visual effects department shot footage with a RED live-action camera and two Sony HD cameras.

Keeping an eye – or, lens – on the integration of the various cameras' many shots was cinematographer John Ashlee Prat. A stop-motion animation veteran who was previously lead lighting/camera on ParaNorman and lighting cameraman on Coraline, Prat reunited with his LAIKA colleagues as director of photography on The Boxtrolls. Bleiman Ichioka comments, 'On the previous movies, John was able to be responsible for the look of a shot out on a stage. He's been a good soldier and now we talked him into captaining the camera crew, all of whom are directors of photography on their own Units per se – LAIKA veterans like Chris Peterson and Mark Stewart. We're glad John stepped into the position because he had previously been a stop-motion animator, so he truly understands all parts of the process."

The cinematographer notes, 'You're always coming up with solutions on the soundstage, even once you've received all the components; you can have planned from back with the storyboards, and yet you'll still be figuring out how to make something work. But, necessity is the mother of invention!

'We had five different camera teams, referred to as lighting cameramen. I oversaw them as they tackled different sequences. Being able to have more technology to tell this story visually was exciting. The texture, colors, and atmosphere of doing a period piece were great avenues to explore."

As part of its continuing exploration of technology, LAIKA has built a process that allows it to translate computer-generated facial animation into the physical world of stop-motion. The 'real rendering" process first developed for Coraline, then advanced with ParaNorman, and now refined with The Boxtrolls is called Rapid Prototyping (RP). The RP process fused new technology with the frame-by-frame movement of stop-motion, all without losing the handmade look and feel of puppet animation.

LAIKA's RP process has adapted different 3D printing technologies for use in stop-motion filmmaking. Each 3D printing technology LAIKA adapted required designing and building a different set of pipeline tools and unique methods to combat how individual printers handled geometry, color, and their post-processing requirements in order to generate 3D-printed models that would withstand the scrutiny of feature film.

Prior to RP, in order to create facial replacements for a stop-motion character, filmmakers had to hand-sculpt different puppet faces, significantly limiting the range of emotional responses. With RP, thousands of facial expressions – each slightly different – are modeled, rigged, animated, texture-painted, and then printed. 21 years ago, the main character in The Nightmare Before Christmas had 800 possible facial expressions. In comparison, by utilizing RP, with its interchangeable faces, Coraline's title character had more than 207,000 possible expressions; and Norman from ParaNorman and Eggs from The Boxtrolls both had over 1.4 million unique expressions. The result is nothing shy of articulated and expressive facial animation.

Rapid Prototyping's unparalleled innovation has advanced animated feature production by marrying stop-motion with digital technology.

Reflecting the LAIKA ethos, the 50-person RP Department led by Director of Rapid Prototyping Brian McLean is staffed with computer geniuses, engineers, animators, sculptors, and painters who are working with cutting-edge 3D printing technology. They take all of their training from their different disciplines and come up with beautiful combinations. The RP process is an extremely powerful tool that allows artists to enhance their creative process.

As advanced as the new RP animation techniques employed on Coraline were, the team at LAIKA knew that they had just begun. The real game-changer, something that would undeniably change not only the look but also the performance of stop-motion animated characters forever, was still to come.

The fact remained that each 3D-printed expression had to be individually hand-painted, thus requiring very simple paint designs. For example, the character Coraline had only 10 freckles on her face. The facial performance and animation were exceptional, but the inherent simplicity of the main character's design was still reminiscent of early CG-animated films. In order to overcome what was clearly a sterile look, the RP team knew that they had to try something bold.

For ParaNorman, the next film following Coraline, the technical and artistic challenges continued: how could LAIKA continue to advance and enhance facial and character performance, complex character designs, and realistic-looking skin – all while maintaining the handmade quality that makes stop-motion a unique art form? 'That challenge led us to a difficult decision," remembers Knight. 'Would we continue to use our award-winning RP process created for Coraline, the same one rival studios were starting to implement, or take drastic steps to improve it and move in a completely different direction with no guarantee of success?"

In late 2009 LAIKA took the risk and the results, though not immediate, were nothing short of spectacular. The theory was that digitally painted faces could be sent directly to a 3D color printer where they could be reproduced en masse. But color 3D printers were designed to produce quick basic color prototypes of 3D objects, not to produce detailed, accurate, and repeatable colors necessary for use in stop-motion, leaving the RP team in a similar situation to the one they encountered on the Coraline production: betting on a technology and a process that had never before been attempted.

Unlike the plastic Polyjet 3D printers used on Coraline, renowned in the 3D printing industry for dimensional accuracy and precision, LAIKA's new Zprint color 3D printers were notorious for being inconsistent and unreliable. The color 3D printers use a plaster powder base material that is extremely susceptible to moisture and fluctuations in ambient room temperatures. If conditions were not exact from day to day, faces would come out in different sizes, shapes, and colors. McLean remembers, 'Even if we were able to control the humidity and temperature, we still were not able to get basic skin tones or maintain color accuracy."

By adapting traditional painting techniques such as cross-hatching and layering, the RP texture team eventually was able to 'trick" the printer into producing a far greater range of color and detail than even engineers of the 3D printer thought possible.

McLean explains, 'Once we started to get the paint jobs to a point where we felt the color was detailed enough for feature film, using 2D drawings as our guide, we started to animate in CG and print out animated sequences of faces. Suddenly we noticed that as you moved the face geometry around, thin areas were created and color from gums, teeth, and inner cheeks would start to -bleed' through the surface. We determined that the color 3D printer was actually printing color 1/16 of an inch into the surface of the face. If we could control the depth of color and the thickness of the material, we could get our 3D printed faces to have subsurface scattering like real skin.

'With ParaNorman, LAIKA's RP process succeeded in creating sophisticated characters that were not compromised in color or design. Along with The Boxtrolls, we believe they are the most beautiful and emotive characters ever produced in stop-motion animation."

On The Boxtrolls, McLean's team focused its efforts on taking the color 3D printing technology used on ParaNorman and refining it so they could continue the innovation with facial animation and sophisticated, theatrical character color.

He notes, 'Each character presented unique animation and design challenges. We wanted the humans, along with the Boxtrolls to have wrinkles, tension, musculature, and subtlety in their faces. From the Boxtrolls' unintelligible language to -Allergy Snatcher's' swollen cheeks and lips, this movie required that the RP department invent new ways of building animated replacement faces. Modeling, rigging, animation, texture painting, fabrication, and the post-processing procedures were all tasked with coming up with never-before-discovered solutions to very complex creative challenges that arose during shooting."

Serena notes, 'The RP department got the subtleties of emotions to be there for the choosing. You could combine a slightly sad brow with an endearing look for a character. One challenge on The Boxtrolls was getting Eggs' face both sweet and fierce at times. Frowns, pouts, and grumpy faces are easy, but getting a nice little intense smile is difficult!"

Some of the replacement faces are 'fused faces," where upper and lower parts are unified in a specific expression. More often than not, there is a bisecting horizontal line across faces' upper and lower replacement parts. For these 'split faces," the dividing seam, fully visible during production, is digitally erased in post-production so that audiences will never see it.

Tim Yates, who was lead face wrangler on ParaNorman and now lead face librarian on The Boxtrolls, notes that 'by splitting the face into two parts across that line, you get more versatility – and they can be reused. The human touch is never lacking in our characters; there is a tremendous amount of nuance that goes into these faces. Having thousands of replacement faces coming from the 3D printers, and kept in the face library that our facial animation department has built up, helps our stop-motion animators be able to give extra attention to the body movements. What all this is in the service of is that audiences connect with the characters and feel their emotions. LAIKA's movies are highly character-driven, and this range of expressions helps our characters come even more alive."

Travis Knight states, 'As an animator, it helps you get deeper into your characters. The greatly increased range of choices makes the work richer because you are breaking through previous limits on what you could achieve." LAIKA's face library currently numbers over 1,300 archival boxes of nearly 53,000 faces – and continues to grow, with RP Printers generating more and more on each new movie. Yates comments, 'It isn't a library of books, but there are racks and racks – of every expression you can imagine. The level of detail that's now being achieved here is wonderful.

'The work of the face library is both logistical and artistic. Before a face goes to a stop-motion animator for even a single frame, we test them rigorously and if there are any inconsistencies we fix those; faces do get dirty, colors don't match exactly between faces, or faces are slightly different sizes. Any unintentional inconsistency between replacement faces will produce distracting effects, or as we call it, chatter. We will fix a problem face with paint, glue, or most often with a make-up brush."

McLean adds, 'The unsung heroes on this movie were the RPQAs, or Rapid Prototype Quality Assurance, and our face librarians. These artists hand-sand thousands of faces, paying close attention to the form, tiny details, and slight color variations. If one of these elements doesn't match exactly, the face will produce unwanted chatter. It is amazing how much attention to detail and precision it takes to do those jobs well."

The librarians' on-site ingenuity for touching up faces has yielded one particularly reliable method: rubbing off conte-crayons onto a swatch of sandpaper, creating a fine powder that can be lifted up with a paintbrush and applied directly onto the face.

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'The technology as applied to the faces has engendered more subtlety in the design work. On previous movies, the heads were a little larger and the faces much simpler. Now the head-to-body ratios and proportions are more realistic, and the animators' work on facial expressions can be as well. The story itself benefits from all this progress."

Eggs' head was 'pushed to be almost human-proportioned," says Hayns. 'Or, to more boy-like proportions. We felt we just couldn't have it be over-scaled to his body."

Graham Annable adds, 'Overall, on this picture the idea was to try for something more realistic than in the other movies we've done at LAIKA. This meant smaller heads and more delicate faces. On this movie, cheek compression became something we were determined to manipulate effectively with RP, and make really read on-camera."

In turning that other cheek on The Boxtrolls, everyone was particularly proud of the RP-engendered ability to put the evil Snatcher through discomfiting allergic reactions to cheese, complete with discoloration and distention in his cheeks – and dire consequences for his already unappetizing teeth. With a badly swelling tongue and lips going wildly awry also among the highly visual complications called for, the work went well beyond LAIKA's previous 'squash-and-stretch" achievements on ParaNorman. McLean reveals, 'For the swollen weirdness, we tackled every single one of the shots as its own unique animation. The faces were so big that we were only able to print one per hour, as opposed to the usual 10-13."

Serena notes, 'This is an extreme character who can really be flailing around. We had to go back to the 2D animators for more detailed references; [2D facial animator] David Vandervoort and his group did an amazing job with what had to happen to the cheese and Snatcher's mouth." RPQAs, facial librarians, and CG animators all worked together to make the sequences memorable.

Working from this progress, creative supervisor of animation rigging Oliver Jones – another veteran of both previous LAIKA movies – reports that his eight-person unit 'can now test out shapes that RP delivers us. 'The rigging department is responsible for supplying and making everything in-house, from the hand-cranked apparatus that moves a puppet around to mechanical scaffolding to materials that look like one thing on-screen but are actually something else. One of the directors will tell us exactly what they want, and we have to problem-solve and brainstorm on our team. Our motto, coined by one of our own, is -Rig Hard.'"

Jones is quick to add that 'there has to be coordinating with other departments, specifically the lighting group. Once on the set doing the preliminary work, we invite the animator to have a say in how things will be rigged, trying to keep our handiwork under the set or out of frame. As the final person that delivers the puppet to the animator before the performance, you are helping the animator control what they need to in order to get the shot – and giving them the freedom to achieve that. We're always trying to defy gravity.

'Most of the time, our work is invisible. When we leave a little trail behind, the visual effects department will come in with a -clean plate,' shot before or after the action, and work from that to erase any trace rigging from the shot."

Brad Schiff remarks, 'Our rigging department is fantastic. In many shots characters are on rigs. The rigs Ollie's department builds are so advanced and easy to use, you'd never know the puppets were rigged because the animation feels so natural."

To make viable the most complex sets and props, the riggers' design has to incorporate a system of sliders, dials, motors, winches, levers, and needles with gauge marks. This allows the animators to know how far to move the multiple elements for the necessary one-frame-at-a-time shooting. 'Tie-downs" are built into sets, props, and/or costumes not only for these objects themselves but also so that the puppet(s) can be anchored with rods during the animation process, even for a single frame; elevated wooden platforms allow the rods to be drilled in to secure the characters' feet, and the animators can work from over, under, and above sets that are built and situated on the raised platforms. This also allows riggers to launch some props and characters into 'stunt" sequences – just like on a live-action movie, albeit often tethered with piano wire rather than a full-scale harness or rig.

Stunt dairy was called for in a sequence in The Boxtrolls wherein the giant 'Briehemoth" cheese gets rolling. An oversized hamster wheel was encased in a rubber-made cheese skin; was further filled with copper BB pellets to approximate a heavy, soggy 'bottom;" and was then moved through its scenes inch by inch, by the hands of animators.

The movie's smallest prop was a tiny sewing thread and needle, while a vinyl record created by Thomas' department was approximately 2" across with its label being approximately 0.25". 'I had to shave the fibers of the label paper and pinch its edges to go onto the record," notes Thomas.

On the other end of the spectrum, Jones remarks that 'with the hybridization opening up the scope of what we do, this movie was bigger and bolder in every way: more challenges, more puppets and bigger puppets! Some of the props were like puppets, only we were providing the -armatures' and the art department was providing the -costumes.'"

With crazy contraptions and madcap mechanisms at the heart of the self-made world which the Boxtrolls inhabit, the rigging department was in constant motion developing and implementing props and materials. Many of these had to be deliberately a bit 'off," reflecting the Boxtrolls' own improvised cobbling-together style while also striking the right balance between functional and enthusiastic.

The biggest prop created – and the biggest stop-motion puppet rig yet created – was the Mecha-Drill. Stacchi reports, 'From a design standpoint, what you see on-screen is a fusion of Nicolas de Crécy's sketches, Tom McClure's architectural illustrations, and Michel Breton's concepts. For story reasons, it had to be made along the lines of the Boxtrolls' own found-objects tinkering, as it's been forcibly commissioned by Snatcher as something comparable that can invade their sanctuary."

Once the design was approved, the hard work really began. The near-identical working incarnations of the device stood approximately five feet tall and weighed over 75 pounds – and were controlled by animators equipped with encoders. Of the eight made, two were missing some elements for logistical production reasons, while another stood ready for reference and 'didn't move and couldn't be animated," says Bleiman Ichioka.

The work was overseen by Jones with stop-motion rigger Gerald Svoboda and model builder Raul Martinez; after months of welding and gluing, over 600 pieces of metal, plastic, and steel together made up each of the five full drills. For a finishing touch, modern digital technology was applied in an analog way: the special effect of the flames burning in the furnace of the Mecha-Drill was achieved through placing a working iPad displaying a loop video inside the 'mouth" of the device. The actual video of the 'fire" was a stop-motion loop created by Jones.

Svoboda built the 'internal workings that made the Mecha-Drill move and pose. I saw this as a big puppet for which I needed to come up with mechanical movements, but it was clear that we could not use our typical puppet-making techniques on a bigger scale. I rigged it so that animators could do subtle adjustments for a scene with knobs, rather than having to move parts on the Mecha-Drill itself; we went for gear movements, not the usual friction movements." The only times the animators had to forego the knobs were to move the Mecha-Drill's 'arms" and Snatcher himself, riding herd over his weapon of destruction.

Martinez adds, 'Anything on the outside of the Mecha-Drill, aesthetically and sculpturally, was done by myself and the model makers crew. If something needed to be fixed later – and an -arm' did get twisted off by an animator one time – it would usually be at my desk, -the Mecha-Drill Hospital.' When we got into doing the ones after the first one, we had a very elaborate model kit so it became somewhat of an assembly-line process."

Jones clarifies, 'The first one took six months to make. Once we had that in place, the next seven took -only' one month each."

The visual effects department added 'black smoke pumping out, and sparks flying," notes Van't Hul. 'We also replicated some of the machine's -limbs' in CG for a couple of brief shots."

Warren offers, 'All of us approached The Boxtrolls with a lot of confidence when it came to vehicles because of what we had been able to achieve on ParaNorman with the van and the station wagon. But the Mecha-Drill was a strange animal – we would say that the animators would be on the soundstages wrestling that thing!

'We definitely used some of our biggest motion-control rigs to move it up and down the Cheesebridge streets."

Anthony Stacchi notes, 'Even after we had everything ready, Brad Schiff took a while to work with the animators on how the Mecha-Drill would move. We didn't want to anthropomorphize it into an animal's style. Ger's rigging helped us get to the solution: something powerful and creepy, but with a tinge of stupidity – since it's a Snatcher plan."

Less complex and less creepy, at least initially, was the glassy, reflective floor that had been created for the ballroom sequence. But this initially pristine area gradually became a scuffed-up mess after being subjected to drilling and 'tie-downs." Emerson notes, 'The surface and the reflections had to be rebuilt even before integrating all the CG components. The unsung heroes of the visual effects department are the people who do the painting and the rotoscoping.

'There is a close-up shot of Winnie's and Eggs' feet as she is teaching him to dance, and after the animation on that was completed the floor had gotten so bad that one of the animators wrote an apology note. He then put it on the floor but also photographed and scanned it, and sent it to us.

'It took over a week to clean that floor up so we could work on it fresh, and then we took the same note and wrote -You're welcome' on it and photographed and scanned it, and sent it back!"

Other notable visual effects that were integrated into The Boxtrolls unobtrusively include characters interacting in fog and rain; broader and deeper landscapes that extended Cheesebridge topography; silhouetting; and 3D match-moves. The latter entails taking an existing puppet, with whom scenes have already been shot, for scanning into a computer so that a CG animator can put the puppet into sequences as and where needed.

Emerson also points with pride to something that audiences will process immediately as part of the reality of a particularly mayhem-filled sequence underground: 'dust hits," those particles that rise up after a characters and objects crash down onto something.

He notes, 'Between the dust and the fog – which we were determined to make look as if it were made from cheesecloth – we had our hands full from early on. At the onset of these productions, you have all the time in the world. We'll be in the meetings early on where the art department is deciding on creating the environments or where Georgina's department is setting creating the puppets.

'We therefore know what we'll be creating digital versions of, building our own characters based on the physical designs. The idea is to augment shots with work that's representative of what would actually have been built."

Pomeranz elaborates, 'We don't want our colleagues at LAIKA to feel limited as to how high they can go, or how many puppets can be in a scene. For a long while, stop-motion had self-imposed limits, always getting everything practical and in-camera. We are combining individual departments' creative minds and strengths, and utilizing them all to tell the best stories to a worldwide audience of both kids and adults."

Whether a complex tableau with multiple puppets or a simple close-up of a replacement face, once a desired shot has been captured – and/or cleaned up – the footage goes to the data wranglers, where it is coded and marked by manager of media services Martin Pelham and his team. This way, anyone at LAIKA can call up footage on their computers at work for reference.

'Easter eggs" will often surprise LAIKAns well into the process; Bleiman Ichioka laughs, 'Nobody tells the producer about these, for fear that I might remove them!" Most appreciated was the delightful integration of a crew member's newborn – one of several LAIKAn families' 'Boxtroll Babies" births recorded during production – in a crowd scene.

For those familiar with the original source material, Enderle reveals that 'people with sharp eyes might be able to spot signs on some buildings that reference things in Alan Snow's book."

On The Boxtrolls, Enderle and his team also spent time cultivating cheese-related puns at any and all opportunities. He notes, 'We filled the cheese tables that the White Hats enjoy to overflowing, creating 55 different types as props.'"

Graham Annable notes, 'Working on this movie, I learned a lot of cheese names that I hadn't heard before. Cheese was a big part of the book, and we certainly retained that for the movie."

Anthony Stacchi adds, 'Since it's a funny word, we made sure to have -gorgonzola' said in the movie. Since we were making the movie in Oregon, we had a Lord and Lady Tillamook in it for a while, but they ended up on the cutting-room floor." With that local reference out of the picture, 'A Gouda Place to Live," touting Cheesebridge's quality of life, resonated most with the crew, although the cheese shop named 'Here Be Muensters" was a sentimental favorite.

Whether embedded puns are present or not, the various departments have access to binders itemizing each and every shot. However, given the now-data-heavy nature of the stop-motion process, LAIKA utilizes Shotgun Software to 'manage visual effects work and modernize some of the processes we were doing manually," notes the production technology department's Jeff Stringer. 'With Shotgun, we can organize approved artwork and relate it to the shots; everyone can now be sure that they're looking at exactly the same piece of artwork."

Crew members can also access, on their computers, each catalogued frame that has been successfully photographed as well as – for individual characters – specs on which replacement faces or parts were used for the shot. This is especially crucial for the animators maintaining consistency, whether from shot to shot or scene to scene. If an actor has recorded dialogue for a character, the sound bite (or, byte) can be called up as well.

Hayns remarks, 'Shotgun is a wonderful program to have up on our computers. For my department, being able to see the shots that we're doing or the tests of the puppets that we're making is frequently a revelation."

Graham Annable confides, 'The saying goes, don't take your work home with you; well, whenever I bring a puppet or a maquette home, my children can't wait to hear about what we did all day with it!

'I'm often asked who my favorite Boxtroll is; I've spent a lot of time with all of them so I love them all. But I'd have to say Fish is my favorite, because he is the most responsible and because of the moments in the movie where he is raising Eggs as a toddler."

He reflects, 'Maybe that speaks to me personally. I feel that all art you make, you should be fully invested in it so there's pieces of you that are part of it. I've put as much of myself into The Boxtrolls as possible."

Here Be LAIKAns

950 miles away from Hollywood, art and technology fuse to bring a technique as old as film itself into the 21st century – and it is all being done by hand, by a diverse collective of LAIKAns with varied skills and backgrounds. The company's president and CEO Travis Knight remarks, 'LAIKA remains a stop-motion animation-oriented company. That isn't changing. But so much else is.

'We are able to learn from, and progress with, technological innovations – especially our own – and harness them to the engine of stop-motion artistry, thereby continuing to introduce the process to new fans and admirers."

At LAIKA, one finds a nexus of stagecraft, laboratory work, computer brain trusts, and the-sky's-the-limit inventiveness. Knight notes, 'Luddites work side by side with futurists, and steely-eyed pragmatists collaborate with starry-eyed dreamers. Everyone has gathered together to affirm the power of telling resonant stories to moviegoers.

'Portland and the neighboring regions of Oregon have become a big part of the creativity at LAIKA. Its own diversity and spirit of innovation help influence our art, engendering unique sensibilities and forging a culture that is all LAIKA's own."

Visual effects supervisor Steve Emerson notes, 'It's well-known that there's been chaos in the visual effects industry recently. LAIKA has given me a place where I can be part of something that's much bigger than one single movie.

'It's also meant that I can be part of a family – and that I can raise my own family in Portland. These same themes of family and acceptance are in The Boxtrolls."

Director Graham Annable adds, 'In stop-motion, you've often been like a gypsy, moving from one place to the next depending on where the work is. This studio has had dozens and dozens of people together for three movies in a row. Travis has recruited talent from New Zealand, Denmark, and Italy, among other places.

'Portland is a great city, one where everything is inherently artistic yet also has a down-to-earth feel at the same time."

Director of photography John Ashlee Prat comments, 'I have lived in Portland for over 27 years. There is a wonderful creative community, not only in terms of stop-motion but also in terms of music and food and more."

Director Anthony Stacchi remarks, 'The movies that LAIKA is making in Oregon are the equivalent of artisanal, or free-range, especially as compared to other studios.

'England has a rich history of stop-motion, and a number of LAIKAns are from England originally. Aside from the calling of practicing the craft, the Oregon weather can be comparable…"

Producer David Bleiman Ichioka reports, 'During production of The Boxtrolls, we had to close the studio down for two days because of snow. Is that a first for an animated movie, I wonder?"

Just outside Portland, at LAIKA's Hillsboro studios, dozens of different stages and their nearby offices, workshops, and storage areas span 2.5 acres within building space. After creating its in-house visual effects unit, the company added additional space – just across the road – for the department while also basing administrative and human resources staffers there. This has in turn engendered more of a campus feel for the everyday activities. 'Having worked together for so long, we all know that -the people across the street' can get each other through almost anything, no matter how challenging a scene or task seems," comments Emerson.

At the original building, development and story work can be found percolating upstairs. On the ground floor, the more tangible efforts are taking shape – and, taking shapes.

To a child, the workshops would seem to be the largest arts-and-crafts classes imaginable, making use of everything from butter knives to wing nuts. Yet, what looks like a tool kit instead holds an array of RP Color Printer-generated replacement faces that have been painted and finished by hand, with each upper or lower portion – generally speaking, 'mouth" or 'brow" – nestled in its own compartment.

'Frown kits," with mouth corners down, or 'smile kits," with mouth corners up, contain variations on those respective facial expressions and are whisked over to the stages for a close-up that an animator is working on. There are several hundred options for each, and animators can request that they be pre-arranged in the kits by name or number, or both. That way, animators can reach for them instinctually as a shooting day progresses.

In the ground floor workshops, everyone is working at once mere steps away from each other, albeit sometimes traversing the length of a football field indoors. Replacement parts and/or costumes are everywhere. Swatches for costumes are kept handy as well.

Beautifully crafted objects are arranged like artifacts, except they await their turn at being lifted by hand into camera range so as to be part of the fabric for a scene. What someone is preparing at a given moment could be needed on a stage a few feet away, a few minutes later. Everything is carefully labeled, from the 'Town Cobble" to the earmarked-for-adjacency 'Town Sidewalk," and from 'Boxtroll Metal" to 'Market Square Metal."

Elevated work stations find LAIKAns perched atop rolling chairs as they perfect, repair, and/or distress elements of a puppet or a prop. Whether it's a 'Double Ball Joint" or 'Swivel Blocks & Pins" that are needed, boxes of those and more are close at hand – for use by hand.

One might be put in mind of a science lab, though assemblage is the priority rather than dissection. Great care is taken with what is being painted and crafted; powder-free latex gloves and hand sanitizer are within easy reach. Batteries are as well, by the fistful, as if a Boxtroll had collected them to create an invention.

Per LAIKA tradition, if someone drops an object and it makes a noise on the floor while landing intact, there is a round of applause; if the object breaks, then there is silence.

Even that silence can be broken by music playing; with all the activity going on, musical accompaniment is sometimes seen as necessary to maintain work momentum. Disagreements over musical selections have been known to occur, so the solution is often to alternate playlist days.

Lunch break is from 1:00-2:00 PM. Practical lighting engineer Richard Malinowski is particularly popular at this time because of eggs. This is not so much because of his work on The Boxtrolls' Eggs but rather because of the local organically grown eggs that he has access to, which his colleagues can't get enough of.

Eggs himself, or rather the character's voice performer Isaac Hempstead Wright, sent a present one day; instead of the eggs that might have been anticipated, there was a massive wheel of rare cheese from England. Stacchi reports, 'The whole studio was able to share it. I'm sure it slipped through customs unpasteurized, because it was so tasty."

Other popular lunch choices – some dairy, some not – wound up in The Boxtrolls among the 'Easter eggs," as menu items.

Eight-feet tall color-coded scheduling boards – maintained by hand – line the heavily trafficked office hallways en route to and from the LAIKA stages, tracking progress of scenes in various stages of 'Review," 'Rehearse," or 'Shooting;" and quantifying whether 'Reframe Dress" or 'Light Dress" are needed. Crew Units are tracked as well, with assistant directors responsible for providing updates on the various Units named Blue, Blue 2, and so forth. So complex was The Boxtrolls that, for the first time, space on both sides of the hallways was needed to accommodate the boards. 'Those boards never slept," sighs Stacchi.

Production charts break down shots, as would be the case on any live-action movie; also broken down, though, is a scene's dialogue – phonetically, so that replacement faces can precisely match the syllables being spoken by the actors.

The stages themselves are clustered as a hive of activity. Stacchi reminds, 'Stop-motion animation is different from every other form of animation because of the amount of work and craftsmanship – you have this big floor space of people building sets, animators animating, and so forth. It's like being on a live-action movie shoot."

Visual effects supervisor Brian Van't Hul reveals, 'Different stages may have variations on the same set; with multiples, we can be shooting in the same location at the same time for elements of a scene."

Heavy and yards-high curtains discreetly close off, and curtail outside light from, the entrances to the dozens of sets of varying dimensions. Call sheets that have been producer-approved early in the morning are affixed to the curtains, indicating who is working on what, including the directors. The latter are constantly on the move, making 15-minute stops to evaluate the progress of one Unit after another and often divvying up oversight of the sequences so as to divide and conquer the day's many decisions to be made. 'On this shoot, sometimes there were not enough hours in the day for our two directors," says Bleiman Ichioka.

Annable reports, 'Tony and I would get to the studio around 7:15 in the morning. We'd always have, first thing, a briefing to go over the schedule for the day and take a look at dailies. The main thing is to -keep the floor going' so that no one is standing around waiting for the next task. There were two editorial rooms, and each of us would sit in one."

Stacchi clarifies, 'Editorial is really the hub of the job directing, so we would go over shots that are being launched during the day and what we were looking for from them, plus what we needed from the art department and so on. You may imagine something a certain way, but each director must also be open to the ideas from the crew: the story is set, the animator's performance is jelling, and the voice work has been recorded – and there are still many decisions to be made."

Annable notes, 'Animators would come in and show us one of their first passes at a scene: either the block [short for 'blocking"] or, having moved along, the rehearsal. We would give them notes and then they'd go back out for a final shoot."

Stacchi adds, 'That's where it's especially helpful to have another person who's up to speed on it all. Graham and I had worked on the story for so long that we were in sync. We would split up during the day but reconvene at different points including at the end of the day to go over everything that we've done – and to lay the groundwork to start up again the next morning."

A 'Hot Set" sign signals for extra caution when proceeding through the curtains to the sets; a red light outside a stage indicates that it is currently in active use. Even after entering, the sets are located a few extra feet further inside so that the animators can better concentrate on the work at hand. There is a constant hum of activity as workers are on the move from one set to another. Once through the curtains, they move among artwork and standing props that are of museum-display quality, so detailed are the characters and creations.

A set may be active for weeks at a time, depending on the challenges of a particular sequence, since directors and crew have to walk from set to set rather than settling in on just one. Even the puppets might be called away because they are needed for another scene elsewhere on the floor, necessitating a Unit to wait for its return. Stacchi notes, 'Sometimes it was, you can have such-and-such but he can't sit down."

Some of the 'Hot Sets" do in fact need to be cooled off, with portable air conditioners. This is so the characters and/or sets will not melt under the hot lights – and so the animators won't get overheated while working.

Checking the other side of thermometer, 'I hadn't realized that stop-motion animation work is also a battle against the elements," muses Stacchi. 'The floors get cold at night and the sets actually move. It can even happen during the summer months. If a set is mounted not on metal but on wood, the wood can swell.

'What is the worst sound to hear in a stop-motion studio? Something falling over."

To protect the animators from injury as they move up and down and all around in contorting positions, tennis balls are impaled onto the ends of protruding poles. For everyone's safety's sake, lights and rigs are secured with sandbags.

On The Boxtrolls, some sets reached new heights for stop-motion – quite literally, as the hand-constructed works on-site maxed out the parameters of the LAIKA soundstages. Van't Hul and Emerson oversaw visual effects work of set extensions – both vertically and horizontally – to enhance the existing imagery and achieve the desired on-screen impact without breaking through walls and ceilings at the studios.

To that end, one particularly striking sequence – a particular coup for the visual effects department – follows the heroes' precarious rush across the shingles of roofs, and then along a downward leap of faith, to escape their pursuers; the characters, the roofs, and the shingles are all sculpted puppets and built props, respectively, while the rest is CG. The seamless overall effect sweeps the audience along in the excitement of the scene.

Annable notes, 'The style and design are from stop-motion: actual, practical cloth and fabric that Curt Enderle and the art department would craft. The willingness to then embrace the CG gives such shots a greater sense of scale."

Stacchi adds, 'As a result, the worlds of our characters could be big and expansive when they need to be. These extensions removed any constraints to the story."

Prat says, 'They also allowed us to focus more on the animators' performances, rather than on concerns of scale and building capabilities. The environments we're exploring have grown as our stories have become bigger."

Emerson remarks, 'We concentrate on delivering the story points we need to through the shots that are in place – without being intrusive on-screen; something we've come up with might look cool, but if it takes the viewer away from the purpose of the shot then we won't do it. We will explore both the new-technology way and the practical way, and try to combine them."

So it was that the sewer set which was painstakingly built for one seconds-long shot, of Eggs ascending a ladder to go above ground, would ultimately require one lone visual effects enhancement, to a shaft of light creating a shadow. While many viewers will presume that the river running through the scene was also a visual effect, the reflecting water was in fact handmade by LAIKA artisans; the stop-motion ethos of practical effects captured in-camera is always the starting point. In a typically unique brainstorm by LAIKAns, a rig holding a 4'x2' pane of shower glass passed over a mélange of white aluminum fishing-line wire, tiny pieces of mirror and mylar, and colored masking tape that cohered to perfect the illusion of a watery surface. This creation of the rippling liquid without actual liquid followed two weeks of lighting preparations as well as earlier beta-testing.

For the finishing touch of the reflective effect on the sewer walls, LEDs were deployed with spinning panes of shower glass. LEDs were also used more extensively in the movie as Boxtrolls' glowing eyes, though the latter were sometimes effected with more basic light bulbs.

Stacchi marvels, 'It seems that Ollie Jones and the guys in the rigging department look for these impossible tasks. But that's just part of everyday production at LAIKA. When I would say, -I don't know if we can do this,' Travis would respond, -That's what we do here.'"

Jones' group's glass version of water was also appropriated for another scene, where Fish takes a plunge; Jones notes, 'The shot where there's a splash is a mix of that version of water with a visual effect of simulated water. So, within that one shot you can see the hybridization, or harmonization, of practical effects and CG effects."

'If needed, we matched what was done in practical form already," states Van't Hul. Practical effects can encompass tricks of the eye and perspective; the leaves on trees seen in autumnal colors in The Boxtrolls are made from paper. Such atmospheric touches are part of the uniqueness of stop-motion.

Costume designer Deborah Cook reports, 'In my department, we now have the ability to help the visual effects department work out their engineering to recreate our textiles. We will see what they have prepared and review it all. It's now pretty seamless, the comparison between the practical textures and the VFX -builds.'"

When seen side by side, ideally LAIKA's practical and visual effects cannot be told apart by even the most discerning eye. 'Whether it's a puppet or a building, the tactile qualities and the textured details must appear identical," says visual effects producer Annie Pomeranz. 'We are building puppets and sets from early on in the production, just as other departments are. We get the same references and materials that the rest of the production is using. Our animators will study and coordinate with the stop-motion animators' work, and Brad Schiff is our department's animation supervisor as well."

Here, too, animators can be 'cast;" as Van't Hul notes, 'With input from Brad, if we saw that one of our animators was good at doing Boxtrolls, then we'd give him more shots with them. But because of time factors, it was usually everyone on everything."

When everything is deemed ready for a shot to be done, using a rig comprised of a single 3D camera the exact same frame is shot twice on a stage before the crew moves on to the next frame. Motion-controlled for every single shot in the feature, the camera is programmed to shift left and right on a slider, shooting separate frames for each eye (the left and the right). The programmed moves can be repeated if and when additional effects work is called for later during production. 'We've generated a library of camera moves," notes Prat.

The two images are photographed by the same lens of the same camera. However, cameras had to be replaced during the lengthy shoot of The Boxtrolls, requiring multiples just like so much else in the production – and therefore increasing the ultimate total of cameras deployed during the shoot to 56.

Prat states, 'The Boxtrolls has such incredible paint work in the detail of the sets and the textures that I hope moviegoers will try to experience it in 3D. We minimized the gimmicks but retain the depth cues that will allow audiences to enjoy the 3D. There are a few -wow!' moments but they're not gratuitous and they help to tell the story while maybe making a funny point."

With recent advances in 3D and near-uniform digital lensing in the movie industry, cameras are no longer unduly big and heavy, affording LAIKAns greater flexibility with the crane's camera moves as well as the freedom to move three-dimensionally around subjects – including handheld work, which Prat pressed for. He says, 'This enhances our storytelling, allowing for both a more expansive way of filming our movie as well as a more immersive one."

Annable notes, 'We would map out what and where we wanted handheld. Everyone on stage would have the information and plan their movements accordingly, particularly the animators."

Animators might be joined at a Unit by Brad Schiff or facial animation supervisor Peg Serena. She notes, 'If a stage animator or a facial animator needs mentoring, we'll come down to the soundstage.

'Sometimes things look quite subtle on the computer, and then you get everything on the stage and it's too much. Not unlike make-up when you look at in a mirror and then away from that it looks different…We allow for this by packing extras into a faces kit that is being readied for a Unit."

Crew members remain in contact through a communications system as camera moves are ordered up and acknowledged. If a director feels that an animator has missed something in a scene, it must be addressed soonest given that the work must progress for a scene in particular and the production as a whole.

'Ultimately, when all the assets from the camera and art departments make their way over to the visual effects department, we want to deliver what the director has in his head," says Emerson. 'We'll also be on the sets with the camera teams to make sure everything that's needed is being gotten for a shot to be executed successfully.

'Our big advantage is -stopping time.' We will tuck things in behind something that's practical; since stop-motion is frame by frame, we can get everything to blend in. If we are using the typical visual effects tool of -green screens' in a shot, there is absolutely no green light contamination on the characters because we have access to the hero lighting templates. That in turn saves us time later in cleaning up stray things that need to be removed from an image."

Van't Hul adds, 'By painting out with computers rigs that are used to hold the puppets, we help the animators stay in the moment with their performances. In the past, they would have to take time to hide things from the camera and worry about wires showing.

'Compositing software brings everything together, unifying everyone's accomplishments – particularly the animators' performances."

Schiff says, 'What's rewarding is, at the end of a day where you've spent 10 hours on your feet mentally fixating on a puppet, you're able to step back, press a button, and see the life you've created that day – our own little species.

'The coolest moments are on Fridays when you go to our new theater [the recently renovated screening room on-site] with everybody, and you see all the finalized shots with people reacting. That's goosebumps time."

Van't Hul says, 'What stands out about LAIKA's movies is the tactile quality. You can see little flaws, but that is part of the character and charm of the stories being told."

Annable offers, 'There are so many tactile materials being used in any given scene – wood, metal, stone – that you always want to make the most of them, which is part of what's great about stop-motion."

Cook muses, 'It draws on all your resources, and each film is a new adventure on which you try to push boundaries. I love what I do, and I have gotten used to working on this smaller scale. To go back to anything larger-scale – would I be able to put in this much detail?"

Emerson adds, 'Stop-motion has more personality. We are animating -on 1s," which means that each and every one of the 24 frames per second is being individually worked on, rather than animating -on 2s' or -on 3s,' where you duplicate frames – skipping individually working on one or two.

'Animating -on 1s' as we do gives our puppets a more lifelike feel, and makes the animators' performances feel much more real. It draws viewers right into the story and gives them an emotional connection. On The Boxtrolls, I'd sit in our theater and look at the incredible design of Snatcher, or the animators' performances on the hilarious toddler incarnation of Eggs – especially remembering my children at that age – and I'd just think, -They nailed it!'"

Bleiman Ichioka notes, 'From a day-to-day perspective, you're having fun creating at this place and you get to say, -Look what we've done.'"

Prat states, 'I couldn't be luckier, getting to collaborate with the most amazing artists and technicians."

Jones comments, 'What we build is bigger than the sum of its parts. We're constantly having discussions and solving things as groups. It's unique how we work as a collective."

Knight muses, 'LAIKAns and Boxtrolls must be cousins, because everyone at LAIKA tinkers in cavernous spaces for hours to create things – and often surfaces only at night to forage!"

Art director Curt Enderle adds, 'We scavenge things, bring them together, and build and create stuff that's pretty cool. We've made our own little world here in Portland, so I'd say there's a Boxtroll in all of us."

Wrapping Up

The editor of The Boxtrolls is producer David Bleiman Ichioka's wife of 20 years, Edie Ichioka. Her editing expertise spans stop-motion and live-action, 'and she gave her input before a single frame was shot," he notes. 'She started on The Boxtrolls two weeks after I did in 2011, and has continued working all the way through the production process."

Such is par for the course, as that is when editing on LAIKA's movies in fact begins. Storyboards and temporary dialogue – recorded by crew members, before the voice cast is set – approximate what is going to be filmed, and scenes can be removed or rearranged; 'going back to get that shot" can happen before the start of principal photography since the storyboard artists can make the desired changes for directors, editors, and animators.

Edie Ichioka notes, 'The frame by frame process that is the nature of stop-motion animation imposes an economy that you have to adhere to in your editing, which always has to be in service of the story. You start in a much more frontloaded manner, helping to determine what does or doesn't work on a script level, and working with the story department to audition ideas for the directors. Everything is refined, reboarded, and recut.

'The animation is being done frame by frame, but there is so much else coming in, such as previsualization from the visual effects department or test footage. Different sources are edited into one shot, like putting pieces into a puzzle."

Rough cuts of the movie are interim 'animatic" versions which run still images and storyboards accompanied by the already-recorded dialogue tracks. It is here that the movie's final edit takes shape, all while filming is still ongoing.

Once shooting progresses, the storyboards are removed and animation is put in. The template of drawings blossoms into the full-bodied three-dimensional imagery from the many hands crafting the work. 'At this point, you're also something of a script supervisor," Ichioka explains. 'You're looking at a sequence and weighing continuity and emotional concerns. The rhythms ultimately need to be dictated by the characters' emotions.

'What we're often most proud of are the things that people don't notice. That said, on The Boxtrolls we were on the sequence with Eggs and the music machine for months on end, and we really made it work for the story."

Final phases of editing go that much smoother than for an average movie because of the head start from years prior. 'You're then in the traditional post-production process," notes Bleiman Ichioka. 'But you don't have -coverage' [alternate, varying takes and angles] to sift through like you do in live-action movies."

With the movie being lensed digitally, the editorial department can 'reposition angles, within limits, to accommodate different ways of seeing the frame, or we can create a handheld look, among other moves," notes Ichioka. 'For this movie, [cinematographer] John Ashlee Prat gave us a lot of emotion-driven shots to work with, enhancing the subjective reality."

The directors make all final editorial decisions together. Director Anthony Stacchi notes, 'When you have voice actors like the ones on The Boxtrolls, it can be hard to choose one line delivery over another."

While the original score by Academy Award winner Dario Marianelli was composed early on, music continued to be a vital and surprising part of the movie well into the post-production process. Supervising sound designers Ren Klyce – an Academy Award nominee for his collaborations with David Fincher – and Tom Myers oversaw the department's crafting of the Boxtrolls' own kind of music created with everyday items such as bean cans, light bulbs, saws, and washboards. 'For those who say -More cowbell,' well, we've got that in there too," reveals Bleiman Ichioka. 'It's part of the hybridization on this project, because that thing is both a musical instrument and an everyday object."

The celebrated 'Cheese Shop" sketch from Eric Idle's fellow Monty Python members kept crossing everyone's minds until the end of principal photography, when food was brought into the studios for a communal celebration at the wrap party. The main platters that were wheeled in were laden with – but of course! – a world of fine cheeses, some stinky and some not.

Even after a wrap party is held, LAIKAns work to see a project through to its worldwide release to millions of filmgoers, and even those whose efforts were geared towards earlier in the process stay close to the progress. Concept artist Michel Breton's drawings of backgrounds and settings were retrieved to go on-screen alongside The Boxtrolls end credits, which are carefully timed during the final editorial process. While many a 3D movie will cease its 3D for the end credits, with a final assist from the visual effects department LAIKA always adds in a little extra art and artistry for the closing moments of the full feature. After all, making the movie took a village of LAIKAns, and it is their names that are scrolling past.

Visual effects producer Annie Pomeranz notes, 'Whether it's CG or whether it's practical doesn't matter to us. The hybridization for this movie has gone beyond what was once thought able to be accomplished. It is all part of the art of, and in, the movie itself."

Bleiman Ichioka states, 'The people at LAIKA are at the top of their game, and having worked in stop-motion for so many years it is a pleasure to be part of having the craft now done to the ultimate degree.

'I hope that people watching The Boxtrolls take a little bit of the Boxtrolls' heart home with them."

Stacchi reflects, 'Every day of production, we were able to see something that just amazed us all. Hopefully, audiences will feel the same way in every moment of The Boxtrolls."

Director Graham Annable muses, 'You plan, and you storyboard, and you make all these decisions, but when it is all executed into final shots…on The Boxtrolls, the detail and sophisticated imagery is more than I expected in every frame. It's been a great journey."

Producer and lead animator Travis Knight comments, 'We hope that audiences will go on the journey with our characters, connecting with them and being inspired by them on an emotional level.

'When people respond to LAIKAns' work in a positive way, it is deeply gratifying to all of us."

The Boxtrolls
Release Date: September 18th, 2014