A Giant Leap Forward

Not only is Missing Link a bold venture in terms of storyline scope, it also marks a remarkable collection of firsts for the studio. For example, all of the movie’s puppets were built approximately 20 percent smaller than the puppets of the studio’s previous movies. This scale difference allowed sets to be smaller and also made the Mr. Link puppet, which stands about 16 inches tall, the largest character. Each puppet also used a unique “jetpack” mechanism — a remote turnbuckle device fitted to the hips and the small of the back, which allowed the animators to create small incremental movements.

Missing Link is also Laika’s first movie to use full-color resin 3D-printed replacement faces on all of its puppets. (The studio first used the Stratasys 3D color printer on ParaNorman’s main characters). The technology allowed the filmmakers to use 3D print custom-animated facial performances for every character used in the film. The rapid prototyping department printed over 106,000 faces for the movie — about 39,000 were Lionel faces, 27,000 were Link faces and 13,000 were Adelina’s.

In addition to all the meticulously built puppets, the movie manages to offer what few if any stop-motion movies have been able to do: take viewers along on a heady adventure to far-flung location such as the Scottish Highlands, Victorian-era London, the American Northwest, a cross-country train ride through the U.S, then to the jungles of India, and finally ending up in a remote snow-covered village in the Himalayas. Overall, the movie used 110 sets and 65 unique locations. ◆