If you’re a fan of LAIKA Studios’ stop-motion animated spectacles, you probably have a good idea of what you’re in for when their latest film Missing Link heads into theaters this April: Stunning animation, well-developed characters voiced by top-tier acting talent, and a surefire Oscar nomination come awards season. But more casual moviegoers might miss out on just how much work and artistry goes into making these relatively small but highly complex and sophisticated puppets move, one frame at a time, in order to bring the next great adventure to the big screen. That’s why the following movie details from my set visit to LAIKA Studios, along with a small group of fellow journalists, highlight the many, many people behind the scenes of the production.

During our visit, we got to chat with the departmental leads of a number of areas that make LAIKA films possible, from costumes, to puppet fabrication, to rigging, and production design. This is where the nitty-gritty details of stop-motion animation really gets done. We learned about the painstaking detail of hand-sewn and surprisingly highly engineered costumes for dozens of puppets, the engineering challenges of making a foot-tall puppet for a husky character covered in fur, the technological advances in rapid prototyping (which previously earned LAIKA a Science and Engineering Academy Award) used on this film, the challenges posed by animating a massive elephant, and the many and varied landscapes across 60+ locations in this globe-trotting adventure. Missing Link looks like another marvelous movie from LAIKA and it’s thanks to the hard-working cast and crew that it can now come to life!

Featuring the voices of Hugh Jackman, Zach Galifianakis, Zoe Saldana, Timothy Olyphant, David Wailliams, Emma Thompson, Matt Lucas, Ching Valdes-Aran, Stephen Fry, and Amrita Acharia, Missing Link hits theaters on April 12th.



Here’s the official synopsis for Missing Link: