Stop-motion Animation History With LAIKA Studios

Holly recently got to visit the set of LAIKA's new film "Missing Link," and the production team there agreed to be part of an episode about the history of stop-motion animation. This made for a supersized episode with a regular discussion of the topic, plus interviews with four members of the LAIKA team. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and Tracy as you know, back in late February,
I was lucky enough to get invited to visit the

(00:22):
set of the like a film Missing Link, which is
coming out this week. We don't usually cover current film
releases on the show, which any of our regular listeners
would know, but I have been wanting to talk a
bit about the history of stop motion animation for a while. Um.
As you may recall, I had a show last year
that was ran for a season called Drawn, which is
about animation, and we were thinking, if we do more seasons,

(00:44):
we would get to stop motion, and we didn't end
up doing more seasons, so it's just been lurking there
in my head. Uh. And Missing Link is kind of
a perfect fit because it is a historical film essentially,
it's it's a period piece, still very fun. Um. In
case you don't know, they are the people that did
Coraline and Box Trolls and Para Norman and Cuba and

(01:06):
The Two Strings, and now this is their fifth film,
So I reached out to them since this had some
some potential in the history realm, and I asked if
they would be willing to be part of an episode
about stop motion and talk about their film in a
historical context. They were all super game, So I headed
out to their studios just outside of Portland had the
time of my life getting to ugle all of the

(01:28):
incredible artistry that goes into making one of their films.
It was absolute heaven for me. That's like, uh, some
sort of paradise. It was just beautiful and everyone there
is super fun, so it was super beautiful. So, uh,
that's what led to this episode. And here's how it's
going to play out. So first you'll have a fairly
normal episode of history class, Tracy and I are gonna

(01:49):
give a brief history of stop motion, and then at
the end there are for short interviews with people from
the team at like talking as I said, about their film,
both in the context of history, uh, in terms of
stop motions history and in context of the history that
they are recreating on the screen, but in a stylized way.
So that means you are getting a supersized episode today. Yep,

(02:12):
if you're one of those people that use their show
to run because you're like, they're always about thirty to
thirty five minutes, it will run long, and that in mind,
you're running and going where am I? I don't recognize
these houses at all? Where do I live? So just
in case you're like, stop motion refresh my memory. That

(02:35):
is made by taking still photographs of objects and then
shifting the poses of those objects just ever so slightly
for each frame, and then when you run those frames
together and play them sequentially, it creates the illusion of movement.
So you can string a whole whole bunch of these
together and you get a film. This is a painstaking process,

(02:56):
and even today, with lots of technology available to make
this more efficient, you still only get about three seconds
of film for a day's work on it. Yeah, I
think that's why I like. It's a very unique type
of artists that is drawn to this as their their work.
And it is often kind of difficult to pinpoint the
exact moment when any new art form or concept is

(03:17):
truly born, and that holds true for stop motion. But
there is one particularly charming legend about it. The story
goes that while looking at a piece of film, that
he had shot. George Melliers noted that there was a
point where the film had gotten stuck moving through the camera,
and as a result, there was an illusion that the
people and the vehicles on screen had just teleported across

(03:37):
the frame. You may remember Malias from our two parter
on the Lumiar Brothers, and from this point he was
just so fascinated with the idea of stopping the camera,
manipulating the scene, and then picking up filming to achieve
some similar effects on purpose. And we will be talking
more about his most famous entry into this whole genre
in a little bit. But Malias was not the only

(03:59):
person testing the limits of what a film camera could do.
This was, after all, a fairly new technology, so plenty
of ingenious and creative people were toying with it. Thomas
Edison developed the kinetoscope in eighteen ninety and the Lumierres
created their cinematograph in so this was really the dawn
of a new era in storytelling. And while the story

(04:20):
of the French filmmaker stumbling onto the idea of stop
motion is fun, other people were kind of having their
own Eureka moments as they played with what a film
camera could do. The Humpty Dumpty Circus as credited as
being the first true stop motion animation film. This was
created by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton. Regular

(04:40):
listeners may recall Blackton's name for our windsor mackay episodes.
This is one of those episodes that just ties together
so much in our archive into one episode. He was
the photography supervisor on McKay's first cartoon, which took the
character of Little Nemo from comics into film, and The
Humpty Dumpty Circus used children's toys to tell a short
full story about the circus. But the film itself is

(05:03):
lost to time, there are still images from it. Maybe
the animated short was named for the play set that
the animators used for the action that was a product
of the Show and Hut company. So there has been
some debate about whether, particularly the image that's often used
as an example of a frame from the film is
actually just a promotional photo from the company that they

(05:24):
were using to market their toys. And blacked In collaborated
with Edison to make the enchanted drawing. That's the first
time animation was captured on standard film. This was the
predecessor to his nine six film Humorous Phases of Funny
Faces and The Enchanted Drawing. The shot includes the animator.
He's featured in almost full figure as the main character,

(05:47):
and then stop motion is used as he creates a
drawing on a large sketch pad. This is essentially a
capture of the Vaudeville lightning sketch act that we talked
about in our Windsor Mackay episode, but there are elements
that are played up for humor using stop motion as well.
And then in Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, the screen
is filled entirely by the chalkboard and only the artist

(06:09):
hands are seen as he draws the characters, which then
come to life on their own and engage in all
manner of antics. Humorous Phases uses a lot more stop
motion than The Enchanted Drawing. Blackton continued to explore the
medium and in nineteen o nine made a five minute
film called Princess Nicotine or the Smoke Ferry, which featured
an early example of product placement was sweet corporal cigarettes

(06:34):
that were used in the picture and the boxes on
the screen with fairies kind of flitting about it. Yeah, yeah,
we'll talk about it again, uh in a moment, but
early animation was not for children. Um In two director
Edwin Porter, working for Thomas Edison and Edison, I should
point out, was kind of involved in a lot of

(06:54):
these different projects, made a short film titled Fun in
a Bakery Shop and this is also a mix of
live action and stop motion, and in it, a baker
throws a large wad of dough at a rat as
it climbs up a wall and it traps the roadent.
But then the baker uses the dough to sculpture what
he has then created this mass on the wall into

(07:15):
various faces, adding more and more as he goes, until
two other bakers arrive and they dump him into a
barrel of flour. It's short, it only runs about ninety seconds,
but it was touted by the Edison company in their
catalog as a quote side splitter. It's cute. I don't
know that, I split my sides laughing. That same year
that Fun in a Bakery Shop was made, a much

(07:37):
more well known entry was made into stop motion, and
that was La Voyage Dlalun, which is a trip to
the Moon. This was George Malia's film that most people
think of when they think of early stop motion animation,
and really, when they think of him, you can probably
conjure up the image of the face of the moon
with a rocket slammed into one of the eyes. Yeah,

(07:58):
Millia has played with this forever oath in using things
that were not humans and using humans in stop motion
pretty much from that point on. The Cameraman's Revenge was
made in nineteen twelve by Polish animator Ladies Lastovich, and
the opening intertitle of it reads quote Mr and Mrs
Beatle have to calm a home life. Mr Beatle is

(08:20):
restless and makes frequent trips to the city. Again clearly
not for children. Yeah. Mr Beatle's favorite hang out in
the city is a nightclub and it's called the Gay Dragonfly.
He has a favorite dancer there, and things unspool very dramatically.
Mr Beatle and the Dragonfly dancer are romantically involved, but

(08:40):
Miss Dragonfly also has another would be suitor in the
form of a grasshopper. The grasshopper is also a cameraman
who films this pair when they're together to later show
at the cinema. And then it turns out that Mrs
Beatle also has her own paramore, The beatles marriage seems
pretty complicated. It really does. Uh. The entire plot is

(09:03):
played out using not puppets, but insects, and that is
because Uh. Starovich was the director of a Museum of
Natural History, and he had initially developed a technique to
animate insects in order to recreate things like the drama
of two stag beetles fighting, and then he realized he
could film fictional narratives with his insect puppets, and the

(09:24):
work that he did was really intricate and groundbreaking. He
would recreate their legs with wire and then carefully connect
them to the insect bodies in ways that looked true
to life if you knew how insects bodies worked. But
it also allowed for manipulation from shot to shots, so
they could kind of be transmogrified into more human activities.
Starovitch went on to direct dozens of stop motion shorts,

(09:46):
including a nineteen thirty film called The Tail of the Fox,
which became the first feature length film starring puppets, and
Starovitch's nineteen thirty three film titled The Mascot Toys Come
to Life and a Little Girl's Plush Dog Goes on
Adventure and a quest to get her an orange and
that's something that she dearly wants but that our mother
can't afford. Sounds a little like toy story, and that's

(10:08):
a valid comparison. It even includes harrowing traffic scenes where
the toys in peril. It's also a little creepy and
disturbing and has some adult situations in it. Uh stare
if it should be an interesting episode on his own
and could be one day. Yeah, he's on my list
for sure. Uh yes, some of the toys behaving very
grown up waste, it's all to say. The nineteen teens

(10:32):
featured early use of claymation, as Helena Smith Dayton, a
New York sculptor, began to explore the medium of stop motion,
and she actually ran an evening of shorts at the
Strand Theater on March nine, seventeen titled Animated Sculpture. And
while Dayton contributed to a completely new avenue of technique
and animation using these clay figures that could be manipulated

(10:55):
from shot to shot, her work is rarely discussed in
depth because there don't here to be any surviving copies
of her films. In the mid nineteen twenties came the
first feature length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Ahmed
by previous podcast subject Lata Rehineger. As we discussed in
that too, part her work was cut out animation done

(11:15):
in a silhouette style. And this cut out animation is
still a form of stop motion, but of course it
uses flat paper instead of armatured puppetry. And we're about
to touch on a very influential innovator in stop motion.
But before we do, we're going to take a quick
break and hear from one of the sponsors that keep
stuff you missed in history class going in. One of

(11:42):
the great names in stop motion pioneering emerged with the
film The Lost World, which was adapted from the novel
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and that was animated by
Willis O'Brien. The film was directed by Harry o Hoyt,
but O'Brien created the mind blowing for the time dinosaur sequences.
O'Brien had been working in short films before The Lost World,

(12:03):
including a series for Thomas Edison, marked his entry into
feature films, and that continued into the nineteen sixties. His
work includes the nineteen thirty three version of King Kong,
the nineteen forty nine Mighty Joe Young, and even model
work on the nineteen sixty remake of The Lost World.
O'Brien's influence reaches far beyond his own films. However, he

(12:24):
mentored another of the biggest names in stop motion history,
and that is Ray harry Housen. After seeing O'Brien's work
in King Kong, harry Housen was inspired and connected with
the special effects man through a mutual friend. The teenage
harry Housen was encouraged by O'Brien to take art classes
and really develop his skills in the fine arts in
order to translate them into creating models for stop motion.

(12:47):
Harry Housen got work on a project called Puppetoons in
the nineteen forties and developed his skills. Eventually, he was
hired by Willis O'Brien to work with him on feature films,
including Mighty Joe Young. A few years after Mighty Joe Young,
Harry Housen made a film called The Beast from twenty
Thousand Fathoms that was in nineteen fifty three, and it
was one of the first films that featured giant creatures

(13:09):
attacking big cities and effect that he pioneered by using
rear projection to create this illusion of monsters and the
shots that was eventually named dynamation. The opening advertising line
for the Beast from twenty thousand Fathoms was are we
delving into mysteries we weren't meant to know? And it
promised audiences, you'll see it tear a city apart. It

(13:29):
was all thanks to the work of Ray Harry Housen,
and Harry Housen went on to create some of the
seminal works of stop motion animation, the Mythological Creatures of
nineteen fifty eight, the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and the
Skeleton Fight in nineteen sixty three is Jason and the
Argonauts are often cited by film fans and animators alike
as favorites. I think that Jason and the Argonauts sequence

(13:51):
is kind of another one of those that people think
of when they say stop motion, like you immediately see
the skeletons coming out to have a fight. Yeah, I
love it. We mentioned puppetuns a moment ago, and those
were the creation of a man named George Pale. Pal's
name doesn't come up as often as O'Brien's or Harry
Housings when it comes to stop motion, but he was

(14:11):
responsible for developing some really interesting techniques. Pal was Hungarian
and he started making puppet based animation in his studio
in three He had initially intended to work in two
D animation, but he had a hard time finding the
right cameras for two D filming, so he started to
experiment with stop motion. One of the techniques that Pal
developed was something called replacement animation. Rather than using just

(14:36):
one puppet that required manipulation from one shot to the next,
Pal would build a series of slightly different puppets so
he could just switch out the star of the shot
for each frame, and that's sped things along a little bit.
And this idea has continued to be refined over the years.
Now specific pieces of puppets get switched out, and current
animators will switch out just face plates for even the

(14:56):
most subtle of expression changes. That's something that you're going
to hear talked about in the interviews that are coming
up at the end. Puppatoons were born in the studio
that Pal set up in Los Angeles after he fled
the Nazi occupation of Poland and ninety nine. It was
the first dedicated puppet studio in the US, and George
Pile produced films for Paramount. One of the films he

(15:17):
made after moving to the US was called Tulips Shall Grow,
and it tells the tale of a couple's lives turned
upside down when their country is invaded by enemies called Screwballs.
They're fairly obvious stand in for goose stepping Nazis. Their
village is bombed and is burned to the ground. Their
windmill home is destroyed by tanks. But it is ultimately

(15:39):
a hopeful film. Yeah, and that is all told with puppets.
In the nineteen forties, Czechoslovakian animator Yuri Trinka made the
move from two D animation into puppet based stop motion,
and a lot of his work is rooted in folk tales,
initially from the Czech tradition, but eventually he branched out
into other cultures, shared stories in lore, as well as
adapting Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream into stop motion. Trinko was

(16:03):
constantly at odds with the world in which he was creating.
He was funded by a communist government, but that meant
that some of the films were banned for religious content.
Was an area that he wanted to explore as a
source of cultural storytelling, and he also struggled with the
balance of wanting to make art and needing to attract
an audience. In nineteen sixty five, he made his last

(16:24):
film called The Hand, which features an artist trying to
create his own sculpture, but a large hand keeps showing
up and intervening to change the work into something else.
It's a clear commentary on his own frustrations as an artist.
Trinco what said quote, A puppet is not a miniature human.
He has his own world. Yeah that that film. Unlike

(16:45):
the George Powell film that sounds very scary and ends
pretty on a pretty up note, this film does not
end on an up note, so just know if you
go looking for it online. It starts out a little
bit funnier and then gets quite dark. Moving into the
nineteen fifties, we start to see some of the stop
my characters that have endured to present day, including Gumby,
created in nineteen fifty five by Art Cloaky and first

(17:06):
appearing in an experimental film called Gumbaja. Cloaky was signed
by twentieth Century Fox to create a TV series based
on Gumbaja, and then Gumby made his transition from experimental
film to pretty mainstream stardom. In the late nineteen fifties,
Cloaky developed the Davey and Goliath series as a project
for the Lutheran Church. In the nineteen sixties and seventies,

(17:28):
Rank and Bass Productions, Inc. Started producing their now classic
holiday specials, including Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer, Santa Claus
Is Coming to Town, and The Year Without a Santa Claus,
all of which I remember watching every year in my
childhood and sometimes as an adult. These are still run
every year, and the story of Hermie the Elf and
Rudolf in the Land of the Misfit Toys continues to

(17:51):
enchant people. Yeah, it's kind of funny even you know,
we we are so used to high level special effects
and c G. Yet kids today will still just sit
down and be completely entranced by these. I also just
like that The Heat Miser lives on. In the late
nineteen seventies, Phil Tippet and the team at Industrial Light
and Magic, we're working on effects for The Empire Strikes

(18:12):
Back when they tapped into an old school technique that
hadn't seen all that much use. That's what's come to
be known as go motion. So for the ad acts
or you may say a t eighties depending on your preference,
and Taunton's in that film, they didn't only use stop motion,
but instead they moved the armatures of those puppets slightly
with the frame exposed, and this creates a sense of

(18:34):
motion between the frames, just as would happen when a
human actor we're moving during a normally running camera shot,
thus minimizing the jerkiness that stop motion can sometimes have.
Sometimes tipp It is credited with creating this technique, and
he did really improve on how it was done. But
the blur technique itself was actually used as far back
as the nineteen twenties and some of Ladislastarrovitch's films. Go

(18:59):
Motion with used on a number of other films in
the eighties, but as special effects technology advanced, it really
fell out of favor. Peewee's Playhouse kept stop motion animation
in front of us viewing audiences in the form of
its penny cartoons, which featured simple stories narrated by a
little girl. I love the Penny cartoons. Pewee's Playhouse ran
from six to and during that time animators Craig Bartlett

(19:23):
and Nick Park created the Penny shorts, and eventually Bartlett
went on to create two D animation series for Nickelodeon,
but Nick Park went on to create the much beloved
Wallace and Grammic characters. Inventor Wallace and his very patient
dog Grommet have started so many shorts and features, including
A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and Curse of
the were Rabbit. Nick Park has also made films that

(19:45):
don't star Wallace and Grommet, including Chicken Run and Toy
eight Teens, Early Man. And Another more modern day contributor
to stop motions ongoing story is Will Vinton Studios. If
you recall the commercials which featured the California of Reasons,
which started running in the mid nineteen eighties, you have
seen work out of this studio. Vinton also produced the

(20:06):
series The PJS, which innovated by using foam rubber puppets
that could easily be replicated to create the stop motion animation.
This came to be known as foammation, and it was
that that enabled the studio to produce a thirty minute
sitcom on a weekly television schedule. One of the major
moments and stop motions more recent history is Tim Burton's
The Nightmare Before Christmas, which came out in That film,

(20:29):
directed by Henry Selleck, tells the tale of Jack Skellington
longing for a life outside the bounds of Halloween Town.
It became a huge hit, and more than twenty five
years later, it continues to be a huge property for Disney.
So I was a lot of merchandise available and it
really gave stop motion a big boost in popularity and
ushered in a whole new phase for the medium. Since

(20:52):
there have been dozens of stop motion feature films produced
all over the globe and will Vinton Studios that we
talked about a moment ago of all it over time
and it actually became like a in two thousand five.
Since Likeca's first feature film, Cora Line, adapted from the
Neil Gaming book of the same name, debuted in two
thousand nine, the studio has produced Para Norman, The Box Trolls,

(21:13):
Cubo and The Two Strings, and now their new film
Missing Link coming up. We're gonna share Holly's talks with
four people from the production team at LIKECA. But before that,
we will pause for a quick sponsor break, and now
we are going to hear as promised from some of

(21:34):
the folks at like and because their new film, like
I said at the top of the show, is a
period piece. It is set in the late Victorian era,
one of my favorites. Uh. Some of my talks were
centered around capturing that time period as part of the film,
and other talks focused more on the history of the medium.
First step is Deborah Cook, the costume designer for Missing Link.
She's also designed costumes for Para Norman, The Box Trolls,

(21:57):
and Cubo and The Two Strings, as well as having
worked the fabricator and a modeler on many other films,
so she's got a lot of experience building and dressing puppets.
One of the really fascinating things that she talked about
was how she uses the historical trends in the period
the film is set, for example, the availability of synthetic
guys to convey the personalities of the puppet character she's dressing.

(22:18):
And she discusses one of my very favorite things a
little bit, which is Victorian underpinnings. Your work Obviously, like
any costume designer, starts with a copious amount of research,
and I'm wondering how you get that process kickstarted, particularly
when you're doing something historical and you have to get
like your historical knowledge base ready to start designing. Sure,

(22:40):
it's not greatly different from how he would research any
film in the live action world or any other type
of movie. Really um to to start off, I'll have
several conversations with the director and we'll stop feeding out
in the vine of the movie and read the script
to find the character's costumes and their their personality as well.

(23:01):
Costume really does feed the personality of the character and
informs their emotional arc across the movie as well, and
supports that. They will also find what motivates the costume
change and what it should be from and into to
help pinpoint what we're looking for, how many costume changes
there might be, what emotion they might be feeling in
each costume, and how the costume helps propel the story

(23:24):
forward and support that emotional journey as well. So I'll
start by deconstructing the script and identifying information for their costumes,
such as any described item of clothing or accessory, their
actions or activity and their personality and character notes from Crisp,
but there are director as well, and this gives me

(23:44):
a baseline to grasp who they are, the director's expectations
for them, and for me to explore costume ideas to
flesh out their personality. And it also pinpoints the era historically,
the region and if there's any economic strains on the
style of their costumes, if they're meant to exemplify something
in particular, for instance, in Line or Adelina, they're very vain.

(24:09):
They're quite vain and they love their clothes. And Adelina's
influences are Spanish and Lionels are very much set in
the city of London, but they're very fashion forward, so
it's looking its techniques. It might be around it at
that time that were new to textile explorations such as
the weaving for lion Or suits and for Adelina's clothing,

(24:32):
that vibrant future color and line or turquoise cravat would
have been quite um ala mode. At that time, synthetic
dies were first coming into play, so moving away from
those Victorian smoky colors and into something more vivacious and
playful was was possible at that time. And they definitely

(24:53):
indulged in that. And in contrast to that, Susan link
suit is acquired in the Pacific north West and there
is a history of weaving in that area and those
kind of colors and that that weaving came into play
there as well. So you start to build a contrast
between the characters and their origins and how they play

(25:16):
against each other and how that plays out of course
the movie. Now, when you are adapting period clothing, which
Avon has very unique silhouettes into teeny tiny, diminutive sizes
for puppets, what is the biggest challenge that comes up
in that process? Well, I guess we're not going to
build them as they were built, So in a way

(25:36):
that's a win for us. So we're not going to
build Adelina corset, for example, under her explorer that she's
wearing an f bend swan bill corset, and we don't
actually build any of that underneath, So we build a
puppet shape in that form and build a costume over that.
So in that way it's a win. If it was

(25:57):
a live action movie, they would actually be building all
of that very humans, but they have to build in
all those restraining shapes underneath. So in a way that's
a game, but in other ways, building fabrics in the
scale that we work, which is between one fifth and
one six human scale, we need to find the right
size threads, the right fabric selection with the particular properties

(26:20):
we're looking for. Our puppets shapes also differ from humans
quite greatly. So even though they appear as humans, where
their arms are set in their bodies, and where their
legs are set in their bodies and where their waists
are and their shoulders are are not where they are
for humans. They're built for animation, so there's particular arm

(26:43):
lengths where the elbow position is that we need for
our puppets to be able to touch their faces for example,
or walk or bent over. It's very very different from
human proportions, so you're working with those restrictions as well
as finding a small scale fabric, which we now are
way more explorative at the studio and we've become quite

(27:06):
self sufficient in the fabrics that we make are very
very specific for us and specific for the animation requirements.
So we need to building understructures for example, so we're
not just looking at building our own fabrics. We're also
looking at small gauge wires, weighted linings and how they
all interact together as well. So it's greatly removed from

(27:29):
the idea of a live action costume or how traditional
historical costume would be made. We can make our own
departures to our own medium. I also wanted to ask
you about kind of walking the line with a historical
film between the historically based research and the obviously very
like stylized look of any of the films that have

(27:52):
come out of Like and Like. Where are you comfortable
kind of with the give and take of that and
maybe veering a little off his ouricle accuracy to stay
in the style of the character. And when do you
say no, no, we really need to make sure that
this particular element of period fashion is included here. It
does it varies um sometimes I mean I mean this.

(28:14):
In the particular instance of Missing Link, we very much
wanted to Victorian feel two aspects of Adeline's clothing and
aspects of the line or clothing, and just making sure
we capture those elements that read does that, but then
having the liberty to make a big departure for ourselves

(28:35):
to add in that the color palette of the movie,
for example, is very very bright, it's very vigorous, it's
very up tempo, and that is not very Victorian. So
combining those elements, for example, and some of the surface techniques,

(28:55):
they need to capture the essence of Victorian era and
Victorian bricks and clothing, and then they're very luxurious and
they're quite rich. Um, they're very textural. But then we
need to make a departure into a field or area
that suits animation. So there's there's quite a few aspects
to consider in forming the costumes and regional representation as well.

(29:21):
So we worked with a cultural specialist when I was
constructing the Himalayan costume to make sure that we had
authentic reference for the type of jewelry and the type
of cloth that would have been worn in that region
in that era, what the colors might be, what the
origin of the threads might be, and then adding in
a flare of personality to suit the characters as well.

(29:43):
So there's there's quite a few few elements coming together there.
The next interview is with Arian Sutner, the producer on
Missing Link, and Arian has a seriously impressive history in film,
and then start motion animation in particular going back to
working on the name Are Before Christmas. If you check
out her Internet movie database page, your job may drop.
She has really touched a lot of the films that

(30:05):
are our cultural touchstones for us today. So I wanted
to talk to her first and foremost about how the
industry has evolved over the course of her career. To
start with, you have a pretty impressive stop motion career,
both as an artist and a producer, so I feel
like you also have a unique perspective on this industry
that very few people would really have access to. In

(30:26):
your opinion, what has changed the most about stop motion
animation during your career. I think what's changed the most
since I started, um, which was probably around nine, is,
you know, the technology, and there is such a long
list of things that worry around back then, just in

(30:46):
terms of computer software, cell phones, um, you know, and
that's industry wide, but it's awful the whole world. So
I think specifically related to stop motion. If I keep
going back to, you know, the first movie that I
worked on, which was Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. We

(31:07):
that's kind of as a good touchstone for like how
we were making those stop motion movies versus what we're
doing today. You know, at the core, we shot on
thirty five million meire film with these really old Mitchell cameras.
They were actually used in World War Two that the
camera housing and the internal gearing were really solid and reliable,

(31:29):
so they were perfect for filming frame by frame. Um.
And they're huge, they're they're ginormous, they're really heavy, they're cumbersome.
So clearly I don't know how they did it in
World War Two. But also it wasn't really easy moving
them on on the set, you know, to um. We'd
also do and we do lab runs at the end
of every day to get the film process so we

(31:49):
can watch daily's just the next morning, so you have
a cut off when you can deliver your film to
the lab and how you have to and when you
can pick it up. But else there was no digital
x on on that movie. It was all like shot
and camera, like some crafty optical effects. We edited entirely
on a steam deck, you know, with film, so we

(32:10):
didn't use the avid at all. It's we had, you know,
we had bins of film and we were spicing together
the film in terms of storyboards, you know, we were
drawing artists were drawing pencil on paper and then we
were shooting them on a down shooter manually, so like now,

(32:30):
we shoot everything. You you were at the sets, you
probably saw those digital fl are, the single lens reflexes,
the cameras, you know, their consumer cameras. You can purchase
them like anywhere. That means that we have dailies all
day long. That's a huge difference in terms of how
it makes stuff. We have programmable lighting and and programmable

(32:52):
camera moves, certainly digital compositing and and and we were
you know, we use a lot of CG. I mean,
we use CG for everything really, we think for puppets
and sets. Yeah, we've we've taken advantage of those three
Oh my god, it's like three decades of technological advances.
So the most noticeable difference I think on screen is

(33:14):
probably is probably the facial animation, which might have been
something we talked about when you were here. So like
a nightmare, we had replacement facial animation, and it was
it was totally analog. We had you know, basically done
by really really skilled um sculptors, sculpting and molding, tasting, painting.
I mean, we still have those processes for some things,
but this was done for every single face. So, um,

(33:38):
if you've got you know, twenty four facial iterations for
every second of film, which we still have, that's like
a lot of faces to be made by hand, and
need to imagine that, you know, time and budget would
play a factor in the range of I guess the
emotional life of these characters, you know, the puppets, because
you can only do so much and you you know,

(33:58):
you can't really beat insistent that you want to only
do as many as you can be consistent by making
it by hand. So I think that was a huge
challenge and it's still a huge challenge getting the shapes
and the paint colors too, like match perfectly one frame,
uh to the next. Everything then had to be and uh,

(34:18):
very very simple so that it was repeatable by hand,
so we'd like anyway, we introduced the three D printer.
Really that process on coraline that was the first I
don't know, I think we were the first people to do.
It was like a pretty big game changer for the
stop motion world. You know, we could add a lot
more color because we weren't doing all the color by hand.

(34:40):
Although it's still a little bit simple. We were able
to you know, print more faces, have them be more repeatable,
so we could really introduce more of a range of
human emotions. That kind of broadened the story telling that
we wanted to do in terms of, you know, the
characters in our lives like us shown on their faces.

(35:02):
So I mean we we just basically with all this technology,
like we were getting rid of the impediment to storytelling
that we used to have in stopped motion film, right,
so we are able to not just shoot what's within
three walls or basically what's in a in a box,
you know, on set. But I would say, what's interesting
for me is that, like all this technology has made

(35:25):
it got rid of all the challenges, so we can
expand our worlds, tell these really ambitious stories and really
tell any kind of stories we want to without limits.
But it doesn't make anything simpler or easier. You know
my dream I thought when I, like even when I
was working on TV shows, I thought, oh, I can
just get rid of these cumbers and cameras. We can
have turnover on the sets. It will be so much

(35:46):
faster and we'll be able to make quota. But of
course that just you start filling in all that time
with you know, more ambitious projects and things that you
don't know how to do, so kind of, you know,
it doesn't make it easier, It just makes it the
films that you get to see more rewarding to watch,

(36:06):
I hope or not. I don't want to speak badly
about those other ones, but it just offers more. You know,
it's a bigger world. We we don't have as many
limitations now. Yeah, well, I feel like everything gets richer
as the medium develops over time. And I have seen
you speak kind of to that before, and that kind
of leads into this next question, which you may have
already given me the answer. But uh, like I've seen

(36:28):
you speak before about how every project is a learning process,
and I remember particularly seeing you on press junket for
Cuba and saying, we were not ready to make this film,
but we had to catch up to what we needed
to do. So what are maybe some of your favorite
moments in the industry during your career that you feel like, uh,

(36:48):
will be historically significant, that were like those moments that
really kind of bumped the industry forward a little bit.
I feel like every movie has some, but do you
have like the one favorite one where you're like, we
did this. You know, whatever kind of animation you're working on,
it's all kind of incremental, so you're counting your success
and seconds and frames and so sometimes the good question,

(37:09):
because sometimes it's hard to step back and really try
to parse the big triumphs or the big successes from
just the little ones that happened, you know, on the
day to day, and then they start to kind of
take on equal significance. But I don't know, I don't
want to shoot our own horn, but it is doing
your own horn. I think that it's not the movie,

(37:31):
but like the biggest historical lead for stop motion for us.
I think it's really um from what I have seen
is being able to be at the studio that's been
here like really tenaciously and thoroughly devoted to the stewardship
of this kind of filmmaking stop motion, which is like
a you know, all the stuff I've worked on before
it was they were tended to be like isolated events.

(37:55):
You know, you set up shop for like two years
on your hire crew, you start shooting, and just you're
pretty much learning what you're doing while you're doing it.
So by the time you're finished the movie. Sometimes it's
you know, new people. Every often there are new groups
of people. You're like, Okay, I have a pretty good
understanding of what we just did. And then you're scrambling

(38:17):
to find another job or is there going to be
another job, and everybody dissolves, they go their separate ways,
and then like a couple of years later, maybe three
years later, you're like, okay, let's do this again from scratch.
So there's no real built in time or money for
research and development. Like if I'm I'm producing something that's
scrapping or a part of it, there's no line item
that says we will research and develop right now. There's

(38:41):
there's literally no time for it. So and I mean,
I think that's the case for so many movies and
certainly I'm sure a lot of industries. But because we
have this like dedicated space now and we have you know, more,
way more than just a handful of our artists and
technicians are like you know, all of our our long
time key people, they're able to really experiment with untested ideas,

(39:06):
and they're able to also work together because we have
a history together. We kind of refer back to what
we are successes and what we didn't do so well,
we have a shorthand for communicating and solving those problems.
So I think it's not necessarily like the you know,
it was a game changer, for example on Coraline to
get that printer, it's unbelievable. But I think it's really

(39:28):
the studio being here that is the game changer for
me that I'm able. We get to continue to work
with these people who are still creatively, really curious about
this art form, the kinds of movies we're making, and
we keep building on it. I said that to you
about I guess I said that about Kuba, But um,
you know, we weren't ready to do miss Missing Link
the way we did it. We without having done the

(39:49):
four previous movies there, we wouldn't have been able to
do it. Next up is Brad Shifts, who, like Arian,
has worked on a lot of films. He's the animation
supervisor on Missing Link, and during his chat with Holly,
they talk about animators of the past that inspire him,
as well as passing the torch and the historical knowledge
onto the next generation of artists. So, first of all,

(40:10):
you like many of the people that like, have worked
on some very big stop motion projects that I think
most people would recognize. But I wonder how much you
are aware of and think about the people that have
come before you, like Harry Housing and O'Brien, and how
much that inspires your work. You know. It's an interesting

(40:31):
question because I think about that a lot, but maybe
not in the way that you would think we would.
I think I would. It's I talked about a lot
in the sense that I was inspired by Harry Housen
and you know, Willis O'Brien and George Pale and Ranking
and Bath all that stuff. And when I go back

(40:51):
and I look at that stuff, while it was groundbreaking
for the time, it's pretty ropey looking at that motion,
you know. And and and I see what we're what
we're doing today, particularly here at LICA, and it's so
smooth and naturalistic. And that gets me thinking about what
the next generation of animators who are inspired by the

(41:14):
work that we're doing right now, how good their stuff
is going to be. And I'm just it's interesting because
I'm just starting to see it. And um, I have
one of my animated this is such a weird thing. Um,
you know, we just celebrated the ten year anniversary of Coraline,
and somebody asked me, you know, was that strange, you
know that it's been ten years, And I think, you know, well,

(41:36):
not really. I do it all the time and it
doesn't so I don't really think about it as being
strange to feel like it was just yesterday. But then
I was reminded when one of my assistants just just
came on board and she went out to dinner with
one of my animators who was celebrating his twenty four birthday,

(41:57):
which meant he was thirteen when coral came out, and
fifteen when ParaNorman came out, in seventeen when box Trolls
came out. And here the kid who grew up so weird.
This is this kind of stuff that makes me start
to feel old. I grew up watching the work of it,
my peers and I did, and now here he is.

(42:18):
Now we're peers, and this guy just has you know,
he's just one of these people that just has this
unbridled natural talent and we just have to figure out
how to teach him how to work in the production environment.
But you know, just the thought of where they're going
to go is so exciting to me. Yeah, I am.

(42:40):
I have talked to a lot of animators at various
points in time, and what I always love is how
many of them talk about a similar thing where it's
like these kids grew up thinking this technology is just
to rigor and so for them, like the next thing
is going to be amazing. Yeah, you know, we we
you know, like I didn't even know when I started,
I didn't even know. We didn't have frame grabbers, you know,

(43:01):
I didn't know any of that stuff. If I had
a character that sell down in the middle of the
night when I was shooting one of my short films,
I just sort of picked it up and I balled
where I thought maybe he was, you know. And and
now these kids, you know, now these kids grow up
with this technology that you know, they can see where
they've been and they can see their live frame, and
it's it's incredible. It's really exciting. Um. Obviously, the design

(43:26):
departments on a film like Missing Link will take into
account like the historical setting of what's going on in
it as they've developed their designs. But I wonder if
historical norms are something that you consider when you are
doing the animation, like how a character will move or
how they'll behave are those things that you think about
in a history context, they are, you know, but it's

(43:48):
it's interesting all the departments do such extensive research that
costume wise, we really benefit from the research that the
costume department does because they will go back and look
at historic you know, pull historical reference and costumes from
films that depict historical references. So we get the benefit
of piggybacking on their reference. So you know, the way

(44:10):
Adeline's dress moved, we had a load of material that
we were able to look at. So in that context, yes,
Kubo was very was very much that way. Like I
looked at a lot of kiro Sour films because we
had to figure out how we were going to control kimonos.
And you know, there's a reason that there hasn't been
a whole lot of you know, loose or loose fabrics

(44:32):
characters and in stop motion because it's a nightmare. But um,
you know, I looked at a lot of Kirosawa stuff,
Red Beard, Seventh Samurai, You, Jimbo, and so yes, sometimes
we look a lot of historical reference. Other times we
piggyback on what what costume will do. We shoot all
sorts of reference, So the costume department also will buy

(44:54):
fabrics and dresses and costumes for us that we'll shoot
reference on stage and we'll put it, you know, and
what'll dress up an animator and walk around so we
can see that, you know, how the weight of the
fabric moves, and that kind of reference we do, and
if appropriate, will do historical reference. But a lot of that,
you know, I'm able to piggyback from other departments reference,

(45:16):
which is quite nice. Where just just a big, big
family in that sense it um, because you do have
a little bit of a a unique view having worked
on so many of these important films. I'm wondering what
you think are some of the most significant moments in
stop motion and you can make that the history of
stop motion or just within your career or both if

(45:38):
you want to do each. All right, um wow, let's see.
You know, I think willis O'Brien for King Kong Ya
huge huge. You know. George Pale, people um, you know,
kind of skims by. Sometimes feels like people forget about
George Pale and the puppettoons, and he was really the
originator replacement animation, and I think given what we're doing now,

(46:02):
um with the faces, it's pretty significant. Leads to me,
great Harry House and of course Ranking and Bass. You know,
we all my generation all grew up with the Christmas
specials on TV, which was really sort of my first
introduction to to stop motion without really knowing what it was,
you know, and and going back to Harry House and

(46:24):
you know, with Mighty Joe Young and seven Voyage is
a Sin Bad. You know, I always thought those films
were cool, but I don't think it really stood out
to me until the Clash of the Titans was I
remember my aunt taking me and looking back, that was
again I didn't know what stop motion was, but there
was something that I loved about that film, and looking back,

(46:44):
it was the stop motion effects still tip it of
course for all the stuff and the Tontons and Empire
and oh I'll talk about Forever, so great, so great,
And when I discovered stop motion and in school, it
was really Will Benton, you know, with the with the

(47:04):
California Raisins, and you know, that was the place I
always wanted to work with Will Bent in studios, So
that was pointed for me for me, and of course,
you know Henry and Henry Sella and Tim Burton for
a Nightmare before Christmas. I really kind of look at
as as sort of putting stop motion back on the map,
because that sort of was the beginning of this next
wave of stop motions. It was Nightmare, and then it

(47:28):
was James, and then there was a lull, and then
it really picked up with the work that Ardman was
doing and then Corpse Bride, which began my ride, which
has been you know, I feel so fortunate and lucky
to have been on this ride, you know, I mean
in includes let's see Corpse Corpse, Coraline, Fantastic, Mr Fox, Para,

(47:51):
Norman Box, Trolls, Cubo, Isle of Dogs, Missing Link. Yeah,
you could just lie down at this point, people like, Wow,
it's an impressive career. It's it's yeah, I'm done now.
And I mean the exciting thing is, you know we're
stepping We've just finished Missing Lincoln hasn't even come out,
you know, we're starting to do development on Film six,

(48:14):
which I'm so jazzed about. I can't say anything about it,
but it's it's so exciting to get to work on
projects here at lico, where we're continuously trying to push
what's possible in the medium, and it keeps it, It
keeps it fresh, it keeps it fun, it keeps it inspiring.
And Yeah, just feel incredibly, incredibly lucky. Yeah, you're doing

(48:36):
all the stuff that historians in another fifty a hundred
years will be like, I can't believe they pulled this off. Um,
it's just pretty cool to think about. Uh that is.
Are you like that's a little too much? I can't
think that. I do think. I do think sometimes, you know,
I do. I do think about um, just like and

(48:57):
the stuff that we're doing, and how our films don't
necessarily fit in the in the same box that all
other animated films do. And I hope that history smiles,
you know, brightly on what we're doing. I can't imagine
it won't. I do have another question. This sort of
builds on something you talked about when we first started
speaking about having people working under you that are you know,

(49:19):
we're inspired by the films you were making earlier in
your career, and a lot of creative industries and particularly animation,
both like two D and three D, as well as
what you guys are doing. I think there is this
sort of baked in, like almost old school guild style
mentorship where one generation shares their knowledge and what they've
developed with the next generation. But I find also there's

(49:41):
often just historical knowledge that's passed along. Do you find
that's that's true and is that something you think about
and that you want to make sure future animators in
your field know what's come before them, or do you
just want to enable them to do amazing work and
they'll figure out the history on their own. Um, I
don't think that they need to figure it out all
on their own. I think which how to share those things.
It's interesting a lot of the people that come here,

(50:03):
you know, well, everybody who comes here is so in
tune with the history of stop motion that the coolest
thing to share is I mean, we're in the midst
of an evolution of an art form right now, and
and myself and a bunch of my peers here have
also been in this, you know, in this journey together.
So one of the things I've been talking to my

(50:23):
animators about I think I touched on earlier. A lot
of our journey was sort of based on working our way,
climbing our way to the top of this stop motion mountain,
if you will with um, if you look at like
as at the top of what we're doing right now.
I used to think that the you know, working on
television shows was the path. You know, you you're animating

(50:43):
every day as fast as you can, and you're you know,
you're building a library of techniques, the library of instincts
on what what to do. But now you have these
you know, kids coming straight out of school that have
this incredible talent and they're stepping off the ski lift
at the top of the mountain, but they don't have
any of those other experiences. So you know, everybody works

(51:06):
in a way that they you don't think about it
like it's it's just sort of an innate way of working.
You know, you don't think of how you're moving the
puppet or how you're setting up your unit as being special.
But what I'm realizing is that's the important information we
need to start sharing to these younger kids. So I've
I've really sort of put out a challenge to my
animators to start breaking down your technique, Start breaking down

(51:30):
how you approach a shot, Start breaking down you know,
how you move a puppet and let's start sharing that
with the kids that don't know that, that haven't had
to work their way up from television, who were starting
their journey right here at the top and are going
to just keep pushing it towards the sky. It's fascinating.
It's really interesting too, to have that perspective shift about

(51:53):
what I thought you had to do versus where we
are now and now what we have to do to
help that group whose jury me is starting at the top.
I find it really exciting and really cool, and it's
interesting because I'm still trying to get my head around
the best way to do that. Last, but not least,
I was lucky enough to chat with Chris Butler, who

(52:14):
wrote and directed Missing Link as well as one of
my all time favorite films, Para Norman. I kind of
had a dorky ParaNorman Fangerl moment before any of the
stuff that you're about to hear. Uh. He also wrote
the screenplay for Cuba and the Two Strings. It also
turns out he loves history, so this talk covered important
moments in stop motion history, as well as contextualizing a

(52:34):
story in a historical setting and grappling with when words
came into being versus when the story is set, so
right out of the gate, I didn't actually really think
about this. When I mentioned to my husband that I
was going to be talking to you, he was like,
ask him why he does so many history movies? And
I was like what? And then I realized that the
movies that you have written in your time at like

(52:58):
all do have a pretty significant history element. Are you
secretly a history nerd? It is no secret. I am
history nerd. I am unapologetic about it. I wish more
people were obsessed with history, because then we might actually
learn something. Yeah, I mean I feel the same obviously,
but it's always a delight when you meet someone in

(53:19):
the wild who you might not anticipate is a history nerd.
So are you consciously including historical elements in your films
or does it Is it just so natural for you
to be thinking that way that that just comes out.
It's definitely part of me. It's it's it's in my DNA,
so I don't think i'd be able to avoid it.
But I also think when you're when you're writing a movie,

(53:41):
particularly for animation, you know you're you're creating a world
that you want to be compelling, that you want to
draw in an audience so that they believe in it.
They have to believe what they're seeing on the screen
in order to be invested in it. You know, you're
already a step removed with animation, but as you're you're
showing the audience something that is different from reality. And

(54:04):
I think what helps an audience is something to hook onto,
and quite often that is historical detail. Certainly with this
movie Missing Link, it takes place in the Victorian Age,
and sometimes you have to get across a lot of
information in a relatively short time. For example, because of

(54:28):
constraints of time and cost, I had to establish the
city of London very very quickly, and I also also
had to establish what time period it was, so immediately,
if you think of Victorian London, you think of handsome caps,
horse drawn carts, top hats. There's a whole bunch of

(54:51):
historical signifiers that everyone knows. After everyone is aware of
and throwing them all into one shot, you immediately get
the audience on your side. You They immediately know where
they are. It might be superstylized, but they get it.
You don't have to say London eight. You just have
to have a shot of horse drawn cards. But that

(55:12):
that's it to me, that's what that's what the history
thing is. You use it to give the audience that
recognition so that they know where they are and they
feel comfortable with what they're watching. And I think that
goes the same even if it's like a fantasy movie.
There are certain things that you you lean on um

(55:33):
to create that tapestry. You know, certainly it's something that
you know. Deborah Cook as as an example in the
costume stuff, she does exhaustive historical research and the reference
that she brings into it immediately gives you, well, first
of all, it's it's classy. Um. It gives it a sophistication,

(55:54):
and it gives it that you know, if you make
something up, I think it shows um, if you use
real life as an inspiration, it automatically gives a credence
that I think it's hard to ape, you know, it's
hard to just come up with. Yeah. Turning a little
bit to just the history of the industry. When I

(56:15):
have had the good fortune to talk to, for example,
two D and three D animators, I just find that
they all seem to have a pretty strong sense of
the history of their industry, and I'm wondering if you
feel that the same is true for stop motion. Yeah,
I think it is. I think it's probably because when, well,
certainly my generation and before, when you're a kid and

(56:37):
you first get exposed to animation in my case, actually
it's two D animation. First, there's this kind of like
magic spell that's cast and you're, like, you're young, creative
mind is thinking, I need to know what this is.
I need because I want to do this, and so
you're you're you instantly start trying to find out everything
you can about it. And because I'm old, for me,

(57:00):
you know you can. You couldn't just google it, So
it meant going out and buying books and watching every
behind the scenes footage of every animated movie you could
possibly think of. You know, you you there's a hunger
that comes with that interest because you want to know
everything about it. So I think you you automatically, anyone
who's in animation automatically has that in them. I think

(57:24):
I think that's where it comes from with me. With
stop motion. I think it's also because the history of
it is so rich and enjoyable, and it's something that
you see all the time. Like everyone has seen the
A T. A T. Walkers in in Empire Strikes Back
if that stop motion. Everyone has seen you know, Ray

(57:46):
Harry House and Creatures or the you know, the Skeleton
Fight and Jason the Argonauts adds out there, and it's
it's very easy to see. So I think it's easy
to become invested in the history of this medium. So
when you're writing a story like Missing Link, which I
think is pretty clearly a very sprawling period piece. Uh.
And I know you mentioned some of Deborah's research, but

(58:07):
what kind of historical research do you do. I actually
love the research part because I love reading. I love
finding treasures in old books or old reference books, photographic books.
I use it as an excuse to just buy stuff
so for the movie. But and and you know, bear

(58:27):
in mind, I've been writing this on and off for many,
many years. So over that time, I've accumulated so many books.
I could not even tell you how many Sherlock Holmes
books I have read. And even the ones that are
not by Conan Doyle, I've read everything. Um. And it's

(58:47):
it is an era that I love. It's very easy
for me to do that, and I'll buy you know,
kids picture books because they get across usually within majery
um at that period in a very succinct way, by
DVDs everything that I can get my hands on that's
out of that period, So it's not just kind of

(59:10):
dry nonfiction. I will try and dive into any fiction
that exists at a certain time as well, because that's
really what we're doing, telling stories, so you kind of um.
For me, obviously, a starting point for this was Lost Horizon,
which you know, obviously is the it's the first mention

(59:32):
of Shango Lare in fact, and I think it was
written in two I could be wrong, but that was
obviously an important starting point for me because I'm writing
a story about the starch for Shango Lare, so obviously
I read that, and then I followed that up by
watching the movies of that. And there are certain aspects

(59:53):
of those movies that have really nothing to do with
history other than the part of the history of cinema,
but I'll lean on that a little bit as well. So,
for example, the first version of Lost Her Eyes in
the Black and White movie, which is problematic in so
many ways, not least of which is that Shangola is
quite clearly an art deco mansion in l a Um,

(01:00:16):
But there's aspects of that that I try and get
some art deco into the design of Shango Lar in
the movie. There are white doves in the black and
white version everywhere, and so of course I have white
doves on the balcony in my Yeti temple. So I
think it's cherry picking. It's cherry picking what I want,

(01:00:38):
what I like, what I find amusing, or what I
think enriches. And sometimes I'll read a lot and maybe
only use ten per cent of it because that's the
other thing is, like you know I said earlier, you
want something to to make your set incredible, but you
don't want to alienate a viewer by being too slavish

(01:01:01):
to reality. I mean, this is a story about a
talking bigfoot dressed as a man. Wait are you are
you telling me that's not a real thing. Well, this
could be a longer discussion than I anticipated. Um, but
you know what I mean. It's like, at some point
you can say it's okay if I'm not realistic with

(01:01:23):
this as an example Bigfoot. And this was one that
I wrestled with a lot because I do take history
seriously and the use of the word bigfoot did not
start until, um, the nineteen fifties, I think in American journalism,
and I think the Patterson footage wasn't until nineteen sixty something.

(01:01:47):
So a lot of the ideas we have of bigfoot
as a creature came from the middle of the last century.
Obviously I'm starting a lot before that, but I did
for a while. I wrestled with I'm not going to
use the word bigfoot because it wasn't used back then.
Sell Lionel himself is a cryptozoologist. That term didn't exist

(01:02:08):
until the you know, the middle of the last century.
But there's a point where you like, does it matter?
So in fact, how only making a joke of bigfoot.
When Lionel holds up the cast of the foot, one
of the guys in the club says, oh, that's a
big foot, um, And that was That was my way

(01:02:29):
of nodding to the fact that historical accuracy, but also
trying to have a bit of fun with it as well.
I probably think way too much about this stuff, but
if people ask me, I certainly have reasons for all
these decisions. I mean, at the end of the day,
you're a storyteller, right now. Do you, as a director,

(01:02:51):
are you ever at odds with your right self when
it comes to grounding something like the Yetti Temple in
a historically set piece of fiction, or or do those
two sides of yourself play pretty nicely together. They play
pretty nicely with with me depending on where I am.
I mean, obviously what my tastes change, my my ideas

(01:03:13):
change over time, and if I'm writing something for a
long time, they can change quite a lot. But for
the Yeti Temple as an example, you know this, I've
also got to be delicate in a lot of my
decisions because we're not just talking about history as it
pertains to me culturally, but we're talking about the history

(01:03:33):
of other cultures. So for the Yeti Temple, you know
shangra La, it was an invention of an author, but
it's based on Shambler and there you know that that
has an importance in Buddhism. So I wanted to make
it clear that I'm not trying to make this the
shambler of a specific religion or faith. You know. What

(01:03:56):
I'm trying to do is create something that's separate from that.
But you could see why people can associate the two.
When it came to the design of the temple, I
wanted to almost suggest that like yetis um, you know,
being eight men, essentially, we're like the square roots of

(01:04:16):
different cultures. So we referenced Jainism, we reference Buddhism in
terms of architectural styles, and this is really you know,
at this point, I hand this over to the production
designer and I talk about what my thoughts are um
And it's a story point in the movie, which actually
comes from a lost horizon that people who live in
Shango Lard don't age, when in fact, in this movie

(01:04:40):
they're not immortal, they're yet ease in that they are
still primitive man, if that makes sense. So I wanted
to nod to that. And that's why we kind of thought, well,
if we backtrack from certain architectural styles and combine them
and almost find like the square root of them, what
could that look like. It's almost like if you were
designing Atlantis or you know, some of the fantastical place,

(01:05:02):
but you want it to be believable enough, so you
do borrow from different designs, different styles, And I thought
Nelson did a really sophisticated job in finding the look
for that thing. I would concur that set as it
was mind blowingly beautiful. Shifting back to kind of the industry,
in your opinion, what's been the most significant development in

(01:05:27):
stop motion film during your career, Like, what is the
thing that future historians will be like, this was the
moment that the industry shifted. I think it's two things. Generally.
I think it's digital technology. Digital effects have enabled us
to tell different kinds of stories in stop motion. You know,
stop motion traditionally was limited in its scope and scale

(01:05:50):
because you have physical assets, you have a puppet on
a set, so you're limited as to how big that
public can be, how big that set can be. So
I think if you look historically, you can see that
in the kinds of stories that stop motion was telling.
And I think digital technology has allowed us to kind
of knock down the walls. With c G extras, digital

(01:06:13):
set extensions, we can paint on a much bigger canvas.
And also just in terms of the complexity of the
animation because there's so much that clean up that can
be done digitally, you know, in terms of rigging, puppet
rigging um. That has changed the face of stop motion animation,
no doubt, But I think For me specifically, it would

(01:06:36):
be facial animation, replacement places and three D printing of
faces that has enabled us to aspire to a level
of nuance and uh sophistication in acting facial acting that
I think wasn't really possible before. I mean, you get

(01:06:58):
some great practical or facial animation in stop motion, you
can achieve that, but I think we took it to
a whole other level. And actually it's one of the
things that I'm most proud of with Missing Link is
that I think we've approached a level of acting in
the facial animation that is like nothing that's been seen
or instop motion. You know, even the idea of up

(01:07:21):
until this movie, we had like a kit system for
the faces where we would build dialogue out of different
faces that were in a kind of library. Well, with
this movie, everything bespoke. Every shot has been independently animated
and printed, so every performance is very much specific to
that line of dialogue, and I don't think that's been

(01:07:43):
seen before instop motion. That's amazing. Ir to evidence your answer.
As I was prepping for this, I was rewatching Cubu
and I had to posit at one point and Cubo
was kind of jumping through the air, and I thought, Oh,
he would hate seeing that picture of himself because he's
making a really weird face. And then I went, oh,
my god, they made him make a really weird face. Um,

(01:08:03):
so kudos you. It was a very strange kind of
meta moment. You know, I recently had a similar thing,
and that's when I feel confident in that we've done
our job right. You know, I've watched this movie again
and again and again, hundreds and hundreds of times. I
attended to watch it every week while we were making it,

(01:08:25):
because you need that kind of global perspective. But just
a couple of months ago, I was watching the scene.
It was to a scene with Lionel and Link on
the ship, and just for a second, I caught myself
because I completely believe that these characters were having a conversation,
and that's what I want. And if I can be fooled,
even for just a second, if I can forget that

(01:08:46):
I'm supposed to be doing a job, and then then
we're doing something right, you know. Incidentally, Chris was exactly
right in his guests as to the year that the
book Lost Horizon came out. It was three. So finally,
I want to back to my interview with Arian Settinger
just for a moment to close this episode out, because
I wanted to get her take on how today's stop

(01:09:06):
motion animation is going to look from the vantage point
of the future. So, when historians of the future look
back at this era in the industry and maybe even
your career, what do you hope stands out? Oh, I
just I hope what stands out is that we made
great movies. I mean, that's that's it really are. I believe,

(01:09:27):
just like we're talking about Rudolph, our movies really endure
there their personal and their universal. They look great a
decade later. You know, it just showed Coraline at this
big concert hall here, the Schnitzer in Portland, and it
was a you know, sold out crowd. People are still
interested in that movie. And I think that's the two

(01:09:48):
of a lot of stop motion animations. I hope that,
you know, I hope future generations find them interesting and
watch them and share them. And he said, it's a
heavy question. I think that none of us really at
the legure sitting back and aspecting what we doural impact
while you're doing it. But I would say that you do.

(01:10:08):
We do try to make as much meaning into these
movies as we go along and hoping that people find it,
you know, relatable and meaningful and often food for thought.
Many many thanks to everyone at like for sharing their
time and thoughts and the love of their craft with us.
In case it's not abundantly obvious, the whole experience of

(01:10:30):
getting to visit their set and speak with the people
whose work I have been admiring for years, It's an
absolute joy for me. It felt like an early birthday present.
Missing Link is opening this weekend April twelve, so if
you're in the mood for a stylish round the World romp,
also funny and rooted in history, go check it out. Yeah,
I'm gonna do super short listener mail because this is
a long episode. Okay, if you're still hanging in with me,

(01:10:56):
we're gonna have a quick email from Sue, who writes Hi,
Holly and Tracy. I am a third grade teacher teaching
social studies, particularly history topics is my favorite part of
the day. I love it, and my students love it.
I really enjoyed finding your podcast, and as I've been
making my way through the archives, I particularly choose episodes
that enhance the topics I teach, civil rights, Titanic, early settlements, inventions,

(01:11:17):
and inventors, just to name a few. Though most of
the details in your podcasts are a little too much
for my nine year olds to consume, I often throw
out random facts that add to the lesson. I might
say I was recently listening to a story about blank
and learned blank. Yesterday, we were going through a book
about popular inventions, and a few times in the book
I was sharing extra comments. When I turned the page

(01:11:39):
to begin talking about the next invention, one student perked
up and asked, did you just hear a story about
this one too? I'm so glad I can learn daily
and add to my teaching through the work you do.
Keep it up, and I look forward to catching up
on all the years archives. Thank you so much, Sue,
and also thank you for being an educator. My hat
is always off to teachers, and I feel like they
need a lot more love than they generally get. So

(01:12:01):
thank you, thank you, thank you. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can also
find us everywhere on social media as Missed in History,
and our website is missed in History dot com, where
you can find all of the episodes that have ever
existed to the show and work through the archives like
Sue is doing. If you would like to subscribe to
the podcasts, I highly encourage it. You can do that

(01:12:21):
on the I Heart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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