Making Of Kubo And The Two Strings

Old-fashioned stop-motion meets new-fashioned 3D printing in this directorial debut by the head of Portland, Ore.-based Laika studios — and THR was on the set.

- Carolyn Giardina

Stop-motion animation is a time-honored art: Humans have been molding figures out of clay and filming them one frame at a time since the dawn of cinema. But last summer, while visiting Laika studios outside Portland, Ore., I encountered a stop-motion puppet so advanced — not to mention so huge — that simply lifting one of its boney fingers was nearly as complex as a lunar launch.

At 400 pounds, standing 16 feet high, with an arm span of 23 feet, the enormous skeletal monster in Kubo and the Two Strings is believed to be the largest, most complicated stop-motion puppet ever built. As I wandered through Laika’s sound stages, where Kubo painstakingly was shot over a period of two years before its release in August, I kept running into all sorts of scary monsters — like that 11-foot-tall one-eyed creature that still keeps me up at night. Most stop-motion sets are universes in miniature, with tiny towns built on workshop tabletops — and that’s also taking place on these stages. But mostly I felt like a mouse in a world of giants.