#Laika studios cracked#

'When we started Laika 10 years ago, we could see the writing on the wall. 'The ethos of this whole place is that we are artists first and foremost,' says CEO Travis Knight. Focus Features handles their distribution, and until this year, even their marketing has seemed home-grown, focusing on sizzle reels and modest, tasteful videos about how their hands-on aesthetic makes them stand out in a digital marketplace. Where other studios are increasingly moving to a make-or-break, blockbuster-only model, Laika's roughly 400 employees, are quietly turning out a film every two or three years, making $60 million features that bring in around $100 million at the box office. From their Hillsboro, Oregon warehouse, just west of Portland and at a comfortable remove from Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Laika has positioned itself as a studio that has the time for those routes, and is scaled to afford the extra effort. That refrain - 'there are easier ways, but we challenge ourselves to take ultra-detailed, time-intensive routes instead' - came up repeatedly during my visit to Laika. 'God knows,' Pascall sighs, 'there are easier ways to make movies.' It's a lot of effort for something most people wouldn't notice. Kubo's production manager, Dan Pascall, says the most time-consuming part of making the ships isn't even immediately evident: The design crew had to map every leaf - thousands of them, each individually laser-cut and about the size of a human thumbnail - and reproduce the exact same pattern on both ships, so they'd match from shot to shot within the film. Standing next to them, it's easy to see how many hours of work went into constructing them to look like real sailing ships made of leaves, even through the lens of an ultra-high-def Canon 5D Mark III positioned inches away from the decks. These are, comparatively, little boats.īut the detail on them is spectacular. These are two of the sets for Laika Studios' new stop-motion film Kubo And The Two Strings, and when they appear in the film, they look immense: The Japanese child warrior Kubo and his animal companion Monkey leap and roll across those decks, fighting an enemy who hovers above them in midair, in the middle of a violent storm that rips leaves off the ships and tosses them around on surging waves. Both ships are spangled with bright orange, yellow, and red spots, but up close, the spots resolve into tiny autumn-leaf decals, meticulously applied to every surface in thick layers. They're each about the size of a conventional canoe, but they have masts, rumpled sails, tiny handrails around the edges, and little decks connected with miniature stairs.

#Laika studios cracked#

I'm standing between two boats - one intact, one cracked into two jagged halves.