Stop-motion animation is amazing, precise, and presumably maddening work. While those slackers and armchair artists at Pixar let computers do the heavy lifting (ooh, don’t sprain your wrist clicking that mouse too hard, Lasseter!), the patient grunts at Laika spend hours handcrafting every detail of their onscreen worlds and even more time making those inanimate objects move. It’s no wonder the company’s last two movies, The Boxtrolls and this summer’s Kubo And The Two Strings, have inserted behind-the-scenes footage into their end credits; if we slaved for weeks making miniature figurines move an inch or two, we’d make a big deal about the painstaking process too.
Now the wizards at Laika, further insistent on humble-bragging about their brilliance and long attention spans, have released a couple of supplemental videos about the making of Kubo. Both are fascinating (if brief and heavily promotional) glimpses into their production methods, showing how the studio pulled off such effects as a churning ocean, a boat made of leaves, and that multi-eyed monstrosity Kubo encounters around the midway mark.
Honestly, the labor is often as much fun to watch as the fruit it bears; we could eavesdrop for hours—which, yes, is about the amount of time it would take them to capture a few frames of action. We get it, Laika. You’re industrious. And you’re making the rest of us look bad.
[via Laughing Squid]