WOOD WORK

“At Laika, we don’t want house style, so every film is its own thing and the design should reflect that. For Kubo, our visual inspiration was the many forms of classic Japanese art, you see some of that infused in this concept art. Some of the main influences were origami and ink-wash paintings, but the biggest was Ukiyo-e, which literally means ‘pictures of the floating world’. The most prominent form of that is the classic Japanese wood block print, so we drew inspiration from the masters like Hokusai and Hiroshige; we wanted

Kubo to look like a moving wood block print.”