'Boxtrolls' Directors Reveal How Film's Animation Was Created

The new animated movie The Boxtrolls is the latest project from Laika, the studio that brought us Coraline and ParaNorman, and its directors recently had a Q&A with the Los Angeles Times Envelope Screening Series, discussing how they went about using stop-motion animation for their new film.

The Boxtrolls is based on the children's novel Here Be Monsters by Alan Snow. It is the story of an orphaned boy who is raised by cave-dwelling trolls who live in boxes. The young boy tries to save his friends from an evil exterminator with the help of a young girl (Elle Fanning) he meets.

Directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable with producer and lead animator Travis Knight — president of Laika — answered questions about the demands of working with stop-motion animation.

"Let's be honest, working in stop-motion is awful. It's the worst. It's such a stupid way to make a movie. It's ridiculous," said Knight. "You're literally playing around with these dolls that are maybe 9 inches tall, trying to coax a performance out of it. You're sweating under hot set lights. You're inhaling noxious fumes from rubber cement and hot glue. It's just awful."

Despite the frustration of working with bite-sized dolls, Knight hopes moviegoers will find the beauty in the craft that making the film was for them.

The frustration continued as an elaborate dance sequence took the production team around 18 months to create.

"Sometimes the things that you wouldn't expect to be difficult are extraordinarily difficult, virtually impossible. One of those things came up as we were working on the story where we wanted to take our character, who has virtually no contact with human society ... and put him in a really uncomfortable position ... and from our perspective the worst possible thing you can put a kid like that in is an aristocratic dance party."

For this dance sequence, they had to bring in choreographers, and the integration of the practical puppets with computer-generated puppets became a "real logistical nightmare," Stacchi added.