We talked about George Pal physically sculpting from a hand drawn prototype. What you have is a high tech development of that old idea. But as you develop these new techniques, creating your facial animation in a computer, for example, at what point does stop motion stop being stop motion? We obviously still have light shining on solid objects, it’s photography – that seems to be the cardinal rule? But what if you get to the point where armatures are manipulated using digital controls, the sort of rigs CG animators are used to, rather than hand – sort of how the sea is done in Kubo – is that just an advance or is it something new, no longer stop-motion?

For me, I think we’re working in a medium that’s over 100 years old but still just scratching the surface. We made Kubo and it was by far the most ambitious thing we had ever taken on, we’d have to develop new techniques and tools that we had never used before. I think this speaks to the ambition of the artist to take the medium where it has never been before.

There are some people – shall we call them purists? – who think stop motion should be a certain way, the Harryhausen herky-jerky style. I’ll tell you this: Harryhausen was not a purist in the sense that he was cutting edge technology for the day and if he had the tools we have now, he would gladly have made use of them. He invented technologies.

What we want to do is have this medium live up to its potential, which means always pushing, trying to advance it, trying to get the next level of performance, nuance and subtlety, and to make it as dynamic as it can possibly be. But what you’re looking at when you look at stop motion film is a physical object shot on a set, with lights and a camera, brought to waking life by the will and imagination of an animator. That never goes away. I don’t think that it being nuanced and subtle means that stop motion has lost its charm. No – it’s stop motion is starting to live up to its potential. When you stop seeing the characters on screen as a novelty, as puppets assembled of steel and silicon, and start connecting to them as human beings with hopes and dreams and aspirations, which I believe we did in this film, when you can connect with them on that level, we succeeded. We’re trying to tell stories in this medium that we love in the best possible way, not settling but always pushing for the next innovation.

We could never had made Kubo had we not made Coraline, or then Paranorman and The Boxtrolls. All of those evolutions, with the gang coming together, all of the tools and technology and artistic solutions over ten years, without that, we’d never be able to take the medium where it is now. There’s been a seismic shift. The same techniques Georges Melies used a hundred years ago, we’re still using them, just blending them with the cutting edge.