As someone who always has a moment to make a snarky comment about the use of CGI over practical effects ( even when they’re used well), I cannot overstate how much this animation This sensitivity is strongly reinforced by the film’s stop-motion animation, which is not done justice by words like “painstaking” and “intricate” and It’s a deeply sensitive film, and these tricky elements are handled with grace. It uses this challenging content as a way to show kids the respect they deserve it teaches that they too can be smart and brave, like Kubo, and That’s not to say it’s a horror film, or something that families should avoid showing their children. Think it deserves all the praise we can give. Kubo isn’t afraid to give kids a scare, and to confront them with hard truths and terrible realities, and for that I Throwing the precocious Kubo (Art Parkinson), our protagonist (and expert shamisen player with emerging magical powers to boot), into many situations thatĪre terrifying on a level I haven’t seen since the animated films of the late 80s and early 90s like The Secret of Nimh or The Land Before Time. This beautiful film, set in a magical feudal Japan, deals with death, mental illness, abandonment, and more – not to mention Something I admire greatly about Kubo, among its many admirable qualities, is its unabashed approach to providing challenging content in aĬhildren’s movie context. That wasn’t odd-looking CG I had seen, it was beautiful stop-motion animation! I was amazed at how starkly different my reaction was to theįilm’s look once I was processing it through the correct lens – to say nothing of how amazed I was by the craft and power of the final product. It wasn’t until the film came out and I heard that it had been made by LAIKA, purveyors of stop-motion magic like Coraline and Paranorman, that I suddenly became “Our grab bag of tricks and tools and methods grows larger with each film, enabling us to tell bigger, more expansive stories, or to focus that innovation on other aspects of a more intimate story.The publicity for Kubo and the Two Strings didn’t hook me because my eyes deceived me I saw the trailer and thought the strangely-stylized CGI visuals looked janky and oddly angular,Īnd said no thanks. “While I’m not certain that this specific technique will gain widespread use on future productions, it’s yet another arrow in our quiver,” Knight said. In the end, the Moon Beast became an altogether disruptive and painstaking achievement for Laika. READ MORE: Review: ‘Kubo And The Two Strings’ Is A Stop-Motion Masterpiece “It was important to hit not only an approved look but a consistent look because there were 65 of these shots,” added Peter Vickery, the compositing supervisor. “They put gold mylar inside the puppet to get really interesting gold reflective surfaces, and then when we were lighting it, there were multiple passes,” Steve Emerson, the VFX supervisor, told IndieWire. VFX then dialed in the degree of bloom coming off the creature’s body. Laika painted the Moon Beast with Ultraviolet inks, which are invisible to the naked eye, but when they shot a second exposure under black lights, those sections would glow, like an ‘80s music video. “So we embarked on this crazy idea to intentionally build Moon Beast to not look like his artwork while he was being filmed, but to capture different types of imagery as he was being animated, and then composited together to complete the final look.” “The 3D printer could provide translucency but not a lot of color and glow,” McLean added. He also had glow, shimmer and a hard exoskeleton.” “There was potential for Moon Beast if we could print translucency. “It was a creative and technical challenge to figure out if we could write the software to get a more sophisticated application of color,” McLean told IndieWire. This was more difficult for the animator, but the material could withstand the abuse of production.īrian McLean, the Academy Award-winning director of Rapid Prototyping, ordered a new plastic printer, started initially for the Monkey character, but tailor-made for Moon Beast. So Laika rolled with plan B, which was to create the entire creature in a harder resin. The problem was the rubber would wear out and it deteriorated almost immediately.
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