Inside How ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’ Put Together Biggest Stop-Motion Movie Ever

Director Travis Knight and his team talk about the painstaking path to “a stop-motion David Lean epic”

The challenge I set for the team was to do a stop-motion David Lean film, a Kurosawian myth in miniature,” said Travis Knight, the director of film and the CEO of Laika, the Portland-based stop-motion animation studio that has scored Oscar nominations for “Coraline,” “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls.

“The idea of making a small-scale film look like a large-scale epic that’s shot on a sweeping, endless vista was kind of absurd on its face,” said Knight, who works with a staff composed of many who’ve been at Laika for a decade.

“Typically, we start with a kernel of inspiration to get our film off the ground,” said assistant art director Phil Brotherton.

Using that look as a jumping-off place, Laika’s art department — which consists of a model shop, a carpentry shop, a greens department and a parts department — began to experiment with paints and textures, and then to create locations.

Costume designer Deborah Cook researched fabrics and techniques to create a mixture of “an earlier, mythological era of Japan” with more modern looks.

“We take wood blocks and weaves and origami and modern Japanese artists who are working with traditions, and take what they do apart to use elements of it to reflect the unique brilliance of their culture and history,” she said.

The cloak of Rooney Mara’s evil spirit sisters, above, is made of 183 separate feathers, tiny laser-cut metal plates held in place with fishing wire and styrene.

For the beetle character voiced by Matthew McConaughey, above, the designers used a computer to help them map armature that contained between 30 and 40 different ball-and-socket joints, hinges and swivels (compared to 17 or 18 for human characters).

“There’s a lot of sophisticated engineering that goes on inside a character’s face that the audience never sees,” said Brian McLean, director of rapid prototyping at Laika.

The department designs heads that allow the animators to minutely control facial expressions down to the eyelids — and then they use different techniques to produce facial expressions for all the characters.

[...] for Monkey, Beetle and the Moon Monster, three of the key characters in “Kubo and the Two Strings,” they worked with a color plastic printer still in beta testing, writing their own software to allow levels of sophistication never before attempted.

While a 3-foot version was used for many shots, the full-sized version was needed for scenes in which Kubo, Beetle and Monkey are all simultaneously fighting the monster, which sat on one hydraulic rig and had a second rig to control its head movements.

Jaw, finger, hand and arm movements were controlled by an animator, with the monster “essentially hanging from the ceiling,” production manager Dan Pascall said.