Welcome to the first installment of Toonzone’s “Two Strings Tuesdays,” the day dedicated to special content posted a week in conjunction with the upcoming release of LAIKA Animation Studio’s latest feature film Kubo and the Two Strings (coming to theaters on August 19, 2016).
Travis Knight is LAIKA’s President and CEO, and has led or been involved in all key creative and business decisions at LAIKA since the studio’s founding in 2005. He was Lead Animator on Coraline (2009) and Lead Animator and Producer on ParaNorman (2012) and The Boxtrolls (2014). Knight was honored with the Annie Award for his character animation work on ParaNorman and an Academy Award®. nomination for The Boxtrolls. Knight makes his directorial debut on Kubo and the Two Strings, which he also produced.
Arianne Sutner, producer for Kubo and the Two Strings, was Animation Producer on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and coordinator of the story department on The Nightmare Before Christmas. She also worked on War of the Worlds, A Bug’s Life, and James and the Giant Peach and produced ParaNorman for Laika in 2012.
During a set visit, Toonzone News was able to sit down with them for a Q & A interview session with other members of the press.
Director and animator Travis Knight working with Kubo on the Sun Village set for animation studio LAIKA’s epic action-adventure KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Steve Wong Jr Laika Studios/Universal Pictures
TOONZONE NEWS: Was Kubo and the Two Strings something that you had always wanted to do and were waiting to do an action piece?
TRAVIS KNIGHT: I’d like to say we had some kind of grand plan from the start here at Laika, but that’s not really been the case. I will say that we have a philosophy in the kinds of films that we make. We want to make films that are meaningful, that are bold, that are visually distinctive and emotionally distinctive. That are enduring. We are not looking to make little pieces of ephemera, so we’re trying to capture and modernize those same kinds of filmic experiences that we had when we were children. The kinds of beloved stories that spoke to a deep truth. Those are the kinds of stories that we want to make that can bind families together. We recognize that there’s all kinds of stories that hadn’t really been touched upon in animation. When people look at animation generally, they have a very narrow view of what constitutes an animated film. We take a broader view of what that means.
With Coraline, I think you saw off the bat, to us it did not seem like it was a groundbreaking story, but it was the kind of story that wasn’t being told in the modern era. It was very much in the spirit of the classic, dark Disney fairy tales, but those movies weren’t being made anymore. So in that way it felt almost like a restorative tonic because it was just unusual for the era, but it was from a grand tradition of storytelling that went back 60, 70 years.
So when we started developing Kubo, it was about five years ago. It was an original idea that we generated here in the studio, and there was something about it that I sparked to immediately because it was exactly what I was saying before. On the surface, it was this raw-looking rip-roaring white knuckle thrill ride. A big action-adventure quest movie. Those are the things you certainly don’t see in stop motion, or just largely in animation. This was something that felt completely different. It was an opportunity for us to tell a different kind of story for the medium that was like the kinds of things I loved growing up. Those big epic fantasies like Star Wars or J.R.R. Tolkien or Lone Wolf and Cub. Fusing that with different mythologies from around the world and bringing it to life visually in a way that was really interesting, in a way that could share our admiration and appreciation and respect for this incredibly artistry of a beautiful culture that is typically not demonstrated on the big screen.
So with all these great things at play, that felt like it was an opportunity for us to do something really interesting and meaningful, but underneath it all, you have to find a personal story. It felt like with this specific story and this setting, we were able to get to the personal core of it, which ultimately comes down to a boy crossing the Rubicon from childhood to adulthood and the things that we gain and the things that we lose along the way. It was an opportunity for us to bring our own perspectives and observations and now as parents ourselves, to look back at those experiences from when we were that age, looking at it from a slightly different perspective and hopefully bring a degree of wisdom to that kind of thing. There were a lot of interesting elements at play that felt like we could tell something that was unique but hopefully very meaningful and moving as well.
Arianne Sutner
ARIANNE SUTNER: Although you were saying it wasn’t the right time, it was the right time for the crew to really take on these big monsters. To step outside. The right time for a specific kind of challenge for us and for the group that had been working together for a long time, and it really was the right time to explore that.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: Yeah, I would have a little amendment for that. I think it’s not specifically about time because there is an inherent restlessness here at Laika that we always want to challenge ourselves. We don’t want to coast, so with each film that we do, we are able to build cumulatively on the technology, the artistry, the process that we develop from film to film to film, and it just means our appetite grows. We don’t want to say, “We know we can do that, we’ll just keep doing the same thing.” That was an impossible challenge at the beginning, but we handled that…what’s next? How can we challenge ourselves further? I think any artist really likes to to test their limit and push themselves to do more, to do better, and that certainly was the case here on Kubo. When we started making the film, there were a whole host of challenges that we looked at and had no idea how we were going to do it. We just didn’t know. But that kind of challenge for this group of people is exciting. I think any community of artists can rally around the idea of doing something new and innovative and really pushing the medium to places that it’s never been before, and that is absolutely close to the people in this building.
QUESTION: What have been the biggest advancements from ParaNorman to Kubo?
TRAVIS KNIGHT: The biggest and most obvious game-changing thing that we did right goes back to Coraline when, as an aesthetic approach and in terms of the production, we decided to try to find an artful blend of technology and craft and art. That was something not typically done in stop motion. Going back ten years ago, in order to justify our existence as practitioners of stop motion, we had to find a way that we could bring it to a new era. We couldn’t just keep doing the same things that had been done before. At that point and certainly now, we entered a glossy digital age where everything you could imagine could be done by computer, so what’s our reason for being as stop motion artists? Why are we not just dinosaurs? Our approach is pretty anachronistic. The hand-made approach to making films just isn’t done anymore. So we had to find a way that we could honor the traditions and history and the past and bring that into a new era. For us, it was like Luddites embracing the loom. You’re finding a way that our caveman mentality could live side-by-side with futurists and astronauts. Finding some way that we could take the best of all those different things and have something new come out of the other side of it.
Coraline was probably the prime example. I think that a lot of the choices that we made there were fairly seismic in changing the way that stop motion is made The most obvious example was using rapid prototyping for our facial animation. That had never been done before. When we started doing it, it seemed like it was going to be an impossible thing. We had no idea how it was going to work. But with each one of those choices, we figured out and were able to bring value to the production, and bring nuance and emotional complexity to the character’s performances In each successive film, we have been able to add refinement to that process. The fundamental part of that facial animation process goes back ten years ago when we started working on Coraline, but you can just see how it’s evolved from film to film by looking at the facial performances. The color, the texture, and the overall nuance and range of emotions we can get out of the characters has increased dramatically over that period of time.
Model maker Molly Light works on the Garden of Eyes set for animation studio LAIKA’s epic action-adventure KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Steven Wong Jr Laika Studios/Universal Pictures
But then there are other things. An obvious example is how we’re treating the monsters on this film. We have a handful of really big, exciting, scary monsters. The biggest one is the giant skeleton, and when it’s fully assembled it’s 16-feet tall. But that really is a growth of what we did on the last couple films, because we decided partway through Boxtrolls to make our big third act spectacular centered around the villain Snatcher and his weapon of mass destruction, which was this big massive mecha drill. Originally we were thinking about how we were going to do it and there were a number of things at play. We do have a fusion of technology and craft, and sometimes you wonder where the trade off is. Is this something we build or does it make more sense to do it in computer or is it some fusion of those two things? Originally, we were going to do it as a scaled down model, the big mecha drill, but even at 50%, it would’ve been the biggest puppet we’d ever made, so we did a test of that. At some point, the lightbulb went off and we realized that the mecha drill is really just a giant puppet, and if we treated it as such, then you start breaking it down to its constituent parts and we realized this is something that we can figure out. We know how to make little puppets, we’ll just make a big one. So instead of a typical flying rig that we would have on a puppet, we had a massive motion control device to support its weight, but all the basic mechanics and ideas behind the way it was built and the joints and everything else — you could distill that all that down to we’re making another puppet. It’s just a big one. Once we tackled that, when we were looking at Kubo, we realized it was just a bigger puppet. But we wouldn’t have known we could’ve done that had we not taken that step on Boxtrolls and then apply that to this movie, which is why we were able to blow out the scale and the sweep and the spectacle because of the stuff that we figured out in the last couple of films.
QUESTION: How have the sets grown over the various productions?
ARIANNE SUTNER: The goal is to keep it within the confines of this building. We’re really working on growing, but not to make it larger. It’s just to bring these closer together. It’s not a great idea to have 69 sets going at the same time. Bad idea. We want to keep animators working on units, and as we start to shoot stuff we realize we have to move sets apart and zero in on things. This is a really large, exterior movie, as you’ve seen, and in order to shoot that properly, even with miniatures, we had to take advantage of the size and sets, but it depends on the script and it depends on the puppets and I want to try scaling them down a little bit so that we don’t continue to grow…unless we decide to do a movie with giant puppets.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: One of the main considerations for production is that you always want to keep your animator working. Your animators are your actors, and you don’t want them sitting in a trailer all day. What we do is when we’re on set with the bounce units is have animators working on a set and then you have another unit that’s being prepped for them. As soon as they finish working on their shot, they can bounce to another unit and then keep animating. So you have set dressers who are prepping their next shot, cameramen prepping their next shot, so when they’re done, they can keep moving. The math isn’t quite right, but it means about two units per animator. That’s basically been the same, right from the start. Every movie that we’ve done has been made and shot right in this building and the number of units is comparable from film to film. We did more on this one and we carved up the space in different ways, but the basic idea is the same. I think the difference with Kubo from, say, Coraline or ParaNorman or Boxtrolls is it really is a road picture, so that meant we weren’t revisiting a lot of the same locations again and again and again like we did say in Boxtrolls. IN that movie, there was a handful of sets and locations that we kept coming back to. With Kubo, each new sequence presented a new set, a new environment that we had to design and build, which was a challenge. We hadn’t done that before.
ARIANNE SUTNER: I remember on ParaNorman, you were animating for a year or more on one set, just coming back to that. That’s not what’s happening in this one. But we also like to boast that we have a lot, because the hard working guys that show you around and are so proud, they each have 40 units or something But it’s really, like Travis was saying, to keep people working as much as possible. Just keep that flow going and keep them animating.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: Having been an animator for 20 years, it’s dispiriting to not be able to work. Oftentimes, the set up time just kills you. You’re sitting there waiting for everything to get going and you have ideas and your fingers are itching to get going. All the time, the prep work that comes to set a shot up can just sap the energy out of the animator. One of the things that we figured out early on Coraline is that we’ve got to find ways to keep our animators busy, to keep them engaged, and that’s part of this. Making sure that they always have stuff to move on to after they are done with the shot. It keeps a level and consistency of performance as well. One of the things that we do differently here than when we started is that animators, more or less, own sequences of the film. They are one set of hands from the beginning all the way through the end of a particular sequence. Typically in the old days, you used to just throw warm bodies at something and potentially you’d have ten, twelve, fifteen animators on one sequence just depending on where you’re at in production. It’s very hard to have a level of continuity of emotion and quality and performance over an entire sequence if you have so many people getting their hands on it, so we try to keep our teams as lean as possible so to have a consistency of thought and approach to how we make these things. Typically, unless it’s particularly complex, one animator will have brought an entire sequence of the film to life. We’re able to ensure a level of performance and quality over the entire sequence.
QUESTION: The consistency of a performance is easier to review on a daily basis.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: Right.
QUESTION: So having that single performance within a sequence, having any subtle variations that appear between sequences is less picked up by the audience?
TRAVIS KNIGHT: It’s also the nuance and the complexity an animator can get out of a performance. After walking through it with the director, if they have a sense of the arc of that particular sequence and where each shot fits within that sequence and where the sequence sits within the film, then they know what the emotional ups and downs are and so they can chart that stuff accordingly. It’s not all singing, all dancing every single shot. If we know that this is the peak emotional moment of the sequence, I’m going to hold some things back and reserve for this bit. Or I’m going to make sure I make an acting choice here resonate later there, so it’s keeping all that complex stuff that happens to make these characters feel like living, breathing things. You can do that when you can focus on this one thing, as opposed to, “Oh this is just a show and I’ve got to do these 48 frames and then I’m moving on to something else and I don’t know what the context is.”
ARIANNE SUTNER: We definitely have specific quirks and certain things like an affinity towards a character and they bring that to life. We have exceptional people here, but given our schedule and at this part of Kubo’s journey in the first act, it’s hard to get five or six different animators to express that in a beautiful, consistent kind of way. We try to shoot in continuity to the extent that we can, just so we can preserve the emotional arc and the energy of it. There are real performances.
Animator Justin Rasch works with Monkey on the Long Lake set for animation studio LAIKA’s epic action-adventure KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Jason Ptaszek Laika Studios/Universal Pictures
QUESTION: So the animator will watch it and try to do it in correct order?
TRAVIS KNIGHT: There are big chunks of this film where we would have a shot and a reserve shot for the animator. That would be their bouncing. They’d shoot the shot and then they’d go back and shoot the reverse for the reaction and then go back and shoot the other one. So actually, there’s big chunks that were actually shot in slow motion, in continuity in those sequences. It does keep that emotional flow going to the highest degree. But as Arianne was saying, there are different things that animators are good at, other things they are challenged by or struggle with, so you end up casting animators just like you would actors. This specific animator is really great at action, really good at dynamic action or physics or whatever, so you throw them the action sequence. This person is really good at subtle emotion so you put them on something else. That way, even though there’s 20, 25 people that are touching these puppets at any given moment in the film, there is a continuity how they’re behaving because you’re casting people appropriately.
TOONZONE NEWS: What’s the biggest number of animators you have working at once?
TRAVIS KNIGHT: It varies.
ARIANNE SUTNER: As Travis said, we like to keep it down to as small a group as possible. Also there’s only a small group of people in the world who can do this at this level. The most…maybe 29 animators I would say, to different degrees.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: Yeah, a combination of assistants and leads, that sort of thing. For most of the show, typically we have about 20 animators or so, and some people come on at a later date to help get it finished and we have assistants that come on. So the teams are actually pretty small, pretty lean.
ARIANNE SUTNER: I’d love to increase that if and when we can find people.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: They’re hard to find. They’re hard to build. Not too many people like to do this kind of work.
QUESTION: Could you comment on how you put your camera crew together and how the role of lighting cameraman (LC) changes to director of photography (DP) and how their responsibilities differ?
TRAVIS KNIGHT: That is a natural progression for a light and cameraman. LC is essentially like a mini-DP. They are in charge of their sequence. You have your DP, which is looking at the overarching camera and lighting and color for the film, but underneath them, they have the lighting and cameraman, and they have their own teams bringing their sequences to life. I’ve known most of the guys that have worked on the show here for ten, twenty years. We all know each other really well, we’ve worked together for a long time. Beyond just the camera team here at Laika, we’ve more or less been able to keep the band together for our entire ten years of existence, and I think because of that, we work really well together. We’re like a strange, dysfunctional little family. You know everyone’s quirks, you know what they’re good at, you know what they struggle with, and we all try to support each other. But we’re able to build on it. As I said before, because we all stayed together, we’re able to build on all the artistic and technological innovations from film to film. What the guys on this team, Frank Passingham who is our DP, is a guy that I’ve worked with as far back as Coraline. He was my LC on a couple of different chunks on that film while I was working as an animator. John Ashlee is someone I’ve known for 20 years, and he was our DP on our last film. So when you have artists of that caliber who are DP-level talent working as a light and cameraman, you’re pretty much guaranteed that your lighting and camera work is just going to be jaw-dropping and exceptional. That’s the case here. Any one of those guys can be a DP.
ARIANNE SUTNER: They are and they have a great measure of respect for one another. I like to think of pairing the kind of movies that you have and really your director with the right DP. Any of them have the leadership and the technical chops and the artistic chops, but I think it’s really that specific chemistry of what you want, an affinity for the material, and their availability. I’ve known Chris Peterson since I was 22. That’s terrifying [laughs] So you know these people, they love the crews below them. They really want to work with the same group of people and bringing them up and mentor them and give them shots to do if and when you can, and they’ve really done that exceptionally well on this movie too.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: There’s an incredible generosity and spirit in our lighting and camera teams where the LCs try to groom some of this younger talent. So oftentimes what we’re seeing now, some of those teams are transitioning to the new show, which is in pre-production right now, which we can’t discuss, that they bring up some of these younger guys, they start off as ACs or assistants, and they are able to, essentially, by the end of the show, they’re doing LC work. So that’s happening right now. Some of my key guys early on on the shoot are now transitioning off of the show and the people that they were grooming during the course of the show are now doing LC work. So that’s a way you can keep that talent nurtured and cultivated, so that ultimately, when we get down the road and we’re working on multiple films concurrently, that we’ve groomed that talent to take that next step in our evolution. They’re all pretty awesome. They’re great guys. They’re very impressive.
Production Designer Nelson Lowry working on a forest set for animation studio LAIKA’s epic action-adventure KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, a Focus Features release.
Credit: John Leonhardt Laika Studios/Universal Pictures
ARIANNE SUTNER: They all have lunch together.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: I think about when we were making Boxtrolls, one of the things we wanted to do was to liberate the camera so it felt free from the constraints of what you typically see in a stop motion film, which is a bunch of locked off shots or relatively simple motion control shots. We really wanted to make it feel, in terms of cinematography, much more like a live action film. That was something that we tasked John Ashlee with, and he handled that extraordinarily well. He developed with our tech teams. He developed different technologies where we could do that. On a frame by frame basis, he actually made the camera feel like it was actually being held and operated by an actual person as opposed to a robot. We applied a lot of those things that John and his team developed on Boxtrolls to Kubo which, again, I think if you look at some of the big, dynamic action sequences, they certainly don’t feel like they’re put together a frame at a time. They feel like it’s happening in the moment, and that’s an outgrowth of that.
ARIANNE SUTNER: I have said before that I always think of them as real cinematographers because they are really working with light. It’s not all done in the computer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just a different thing. It’s probably an interesting job for them because it’s miniature, it’s live-action a frame at a time. They work with cutting edge visual effects and a really top notch visual effects team. They get to work with good material, we’re constantly pushing their boundaries. Pushing forward of what they did on the last show, they’re really whizzes with motion control. I’m thinking they have that pretty good.
QUESTION: What was the biggest challenge of the film you had to solve?
TRAVIS KNIGHT: As many times as you do it, the stuff that’s hard is always hard. There’s never anything that’s easy, even a simple reaction shot of a puppet. The way that we animate here, we don’t do post to post. We don’t do simplistic animation. We do real naturalism where these characters feel like living, breathing things, so they’re shifting their weight. They’re breathing. They’re having tiny little micro-reactions to what’s going on around them. And that requires extraordinary observation on the part of the animators, real subtlety on the part of the light and cameramen. We’re not playing to the cheap seats, this is real filmmaking. You go see these things, and they’re miniatures. The puppets are that big [makes size with hand] and even though the sets are very impressive, they’re still relatively small. But on the big screen, it has to feel like it has the sweep and scope of a Star Wars movie. So the challenge is always to make these things feel like living, breathing things. These things are happening in the moment. This is, even though it’s a stylized environment, that it has its own rules and that we’re following those rules.
There’s the obvious stuff like action. Spectacle. That stuff is really, really hard to do in stop motion. It just doesn’t naturally do that. Most stop motion films feel like they are shot on a table top because they are, but this story demanded a different kind of perspective, and we need to feel the beauty and the threat of the natural world, which meant big, expansive things. That stuff isn’t easy to build or shoot or shoot on for the animators, but it was what was required of the story. There’s this big action sequence that happens on a boat, which was just a nightmare to not only figure out the choreography and everything, but how we were going to shoot it, meaning the practical stuff with the CG visual effects and how those things interplay. Then we had to figure out how the boat was going to move, so we had to develop a new tool for that. And then how water would then interact with the boat. Oh God! [laughs] That seems pretty obvious: a big action sequence where you’re fighting a giant monster, of course that’s going to be hard.
Or even the different scales that we have. We have the smallest puppet we’ve ever built, which is about that big [makes hand gesture] interacting with the largest puppet we’ve ever built, which is 16 feet tall. And sometimes within a shot, you’ll have multiple scales happening at any given time. So you have to figure out the math. We have this Moon Beast creature. It’s pretty big as a puppet, but in these characters’ world, it’s supposed to be a hundred feet long, so if that puppet is interacting with our hero Kubo, we have to shoot those at two different times on two different units and have motion control and then we have to figure all that stuff out, so knitting all those things together and feel like they were shot in the moment, we’re watching this as it’s happening, that’s always a hard thing. To make it feel like it’s real and happening in the moment.
But I think the thing that most people probably don’t think is hard, but which is one of the hardest things to do, is the subtle stuff. It’s the making these characters feel like they’re alive, that they’re thinking, they’re living, they’re breathing, they’re emoting, they’re feeling these things in the moment. That’s the key to the audience, and forging an emotional connection to the story and characters that they’re watching. If they’re reminded that what they’re looking at is an artificial thing, if there’s some kind of constant reminder that it’s a doll, that it’s not a living thing, there becomes something of a barrier between the audience and the emotional connection. I think that’s one of the reasons why people have a difficult time with motion capture films. They’re so very close to being human but they’re not quite there. There’s something that’s dead about the face and the eyes and people can’t get past that. We’ve seen examples of that, but that’s very hard to do. The benefit that you have in something like stop motion or 2D animation is that it’s already an abstraction from reality. For some reason, people can connect with that easier. But still, if our puppets aren’t moving and breathing and emoting properly, I think people would “Oh, that’s a quaint, charming, little thing,” but they’re not thinking of it as a living, breathing thing that is happening, where we’re experiencing their journey in the moment. That’s one of the things that we challenge all of our artists to do. For our puppet makers to make excellent puppets that can handle that kind of rigorous demand and can contort the bodies in weird ways, and at the same time get the kind of subtlety and nuance that we need out of the performance. And then for our animators to be that damn good, to be keen observers of human behavior so that they can apply that, put that through their own experience and filter and imagination. Frame that time in their hands, bring this thing to life. It’s still magical to me when I see a character that feels like it’s alive, knowing that it’s just a puppet. It still amazes me to this day.
ARIANNE SUTNER: It’s all in the script. It is such an ambitious script. A lot of exciting things that we knew were going to be hard. The water, the stylized water, getting that right, and these huge monsters. So we knew those were going to be hard, and we’re rising to the challenge, we’re figuring out how to innovate as we go to capture what we want in the freshest, best way. But what we didn’t worry about at the start is a character who has long hair or a kimono, and that ends up being this weird, surprising non-exciting challenge that was hard and took longer than expected. They were tearing their hair out, trying to figure these things out.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: And that’s not something that people will notice. People will only notice a kimono or hair when it’s not moving properly, or when it looks weird. So if you do it right, no one notices your work. If you don’t do it right, everyone can see it. They’re taken out of the movie.
QUESTION: How did you present the story concepts to the team?
TRAVIS KNIGHT: It’s such a swirling gumball of all our loves and obsessions. There’s obvious things. We continually reference the great films of Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki. We reference a lot of the incredible artistry of the classic woodblock prints from artists like Hiroshige or Hokusai or Kiyoshi Saito. That’s some of the visual influences in both the filmmaking and just the overall production design. But then, as I said, it is something of a stew of all the things that we love, so it really is a fusion of East meets West, Old meets New. There’s Star Wars in there, there’s Tolkien in there, there’s Greek and Norse mythology in there. There’s our own life experiences in there. There’s moments that are drawn directly from our lives that are then reflected in the movie. So you can point to the exciting things for the crew to get them really jazzed, which is, it’s a big epic samurai film. Who wouldn’t get excited about working on something like that? But that’s not enough to keep a crew sustained for multiple years working on a project. They have to bring something of themselves and find a reflection of their own lives and experiences within the work to keep them motivated, and to pour their souls into a project for two or three years.
ARIANNE SUTNER: I was just thinking, at the very beginning, when we’re storyboarding, we usually assemble the movies that your director is obsessing over and thinking about in terms of each scene being a visual. You can look at this scene in a Kurosawa movie for where the camera is or for light. It’s an amalgam of all your film references put together and then for style that would be a little bit more specific. For character design, that’s another set of influences, but I was just thinking about it, it could be David Lean.
TRAVIS KNIGHT: I was just going to say we want this sequence to have a David Lean feel. You can very easily spiral out of control and each thing can feel it’s not really glued together, so that’s the trick to have a unified look and voice and vision throughout. You grab all these disparate perspectives and influences, and then you at some point have to synthesize everything and have one clear point of view. That comes down to really having a very small core team that has digested all the stuff that we’re trying to do with the film, can very clearly communicate to their teams, and have the discipline to make sure that we’re staying on track and on target. Because you’re working on them for so long and with so many different people, things can drift and creep around. The style can go off the track. So unless you’re really disciplined, right from the start, and always keeping and referring to the bible, the touchstones, the artistic point of view that we try to capture right from the start, it’s very easy for a film like this to spiral out of control over time.
ARIANNE SUTNER: Travis is working really closely with those leads to continually edit things out. So at the beginning, everything is on the table. Kubo is, aesthetically, is very disciplined and always going in there to put details in or take details out so it’s a consistent world.
Beetle puppet on display in the Puppet Room for animation studio LAIKA’s epic action-adventure KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Steven Wong Jr Laika Studios/Universal Pictures
TRAVIS KNIGHT: For us, we want to do something different aesthetically for every film that we do. The Boxtrolls was hyper, hyper detailed, which was evocative of a certain style that was fitting with the story. For Kubo, it’s a different kind of story and the aesthetic we were going for was consistent with the traditional Japanese aesthetic, which has a spare poetry to the beauty of it. That meant looking at some of those classic things that we reference. The asymmetry, the vibrancy of the colors, the bold compositions. Just the simplicity of some of that incredible imagery. Being bold about it, but letting it speak for itself and not cramming every square pixel of the screen with information. Being very disciplined about the imagery that we’re putting on the screen and having it mean something.
ARIANNE SUTNER: Traditionally, a model is supposed to be the sum of its details, so if it doesn’t have tons and tons of details, then we get nervous and fear it’s not going to be successful, since it really is a translation of the world. It takes experts and discipline to say, “we are leaving some of these out.”
TRAVIS KNIGHT: If you look at, go sequence by sequence of the film, you’ll notice the color palette, while rich and varied on any given sequence, is primarily two or three colors. That’s it. That goes down to making sure that we’re disciplined and that we’re all focused. We’re all making the same movie and you always have to remind each other of the movie that we’re making along the way.
Toonzone would like to thank Travis Knight and Arianne Sutner for taking the time to talk with us, as well as the folks at Laika and Fumi Kitahara of the PR Kitchen who supported our set visit, and stay tuned for more content in the next Two Strings Tuesday in one week. Kubo and the Two Strings opens August 19, 2016.
The post Two Strings Tuesday: “Kubo and the Two Strings” Q&A with Travis Knight and Arianne Sutner appeared first on ToonZone News.