In the past 10 years. Is there a particular reason for this?

We want to make movies that matter and to do so in a way that truly pushes the medium of animation forward. That takes time. For Kubo and the Two Strings, the time from the very start of development to the time we came to theaters was about five years. Any one animator on any given week might produce three to four seconds of footage, so we’ve had a good week if the entire animation team has produced a minute or two of footage. It’s a slow process, but we think it’s worth it.

We continue to take this medium of stopmotion animation to places it has never been and to expand its storytelling possibilities. For this movie, we took techniques from theater, stage, woodworkers and machinists, traditional artists and craftspeople, futurists and technophiles, and maybe even some technophobes. LAIKA re-imagined the process to revolutionize facial replacement in stopmotion animation: for decades, the puppet’s entire head was swapped out to change the facial expression, but with cutting-edge, rapid prototyping 3D printers we can create upper and lower portions of faces. This innovation yields trays and trays of facial halves, allowing our puppets to have millions of potential facial expressions.

Besides, people who work at LAIKA have an innate artistic restlessness, quieted only when a story challenge has been identified and met.