Laika Studios: RANKED
There are certain movie studios whose names immediately get me excited. You see their logo at the beginning of a film, and you know you're probably in for something special.
Pixar used to have that kind of effect on me on a regular basis, and there are certainly other studios that have established wonderful reputations over the years.
But when it comes to animation, particularly the kind of animation that requires an almost insane amount of patience, craftsmanship, imagination and actual physical work, there is one studio that I think stands apart from just about everybody else.
I love Laika. I love what they do, I love how they do it, and I love the fact that they continue to exist in a movie business that seems increasingly determined to make everything as quickly, cheaply and artificially as possible.
Laika is an independent animation studio based in Hillsboro, Oregon, just outside Portland, and since the release of its first feature film, Coraline, in 2009, it has consistently produced some of the most beautiful, imaginative, intelligent and emotionally satisfying animated movies of the modern era.
And with the release of their latest film, the extraordinary Wildwood, in theaters now, I thought this would be a perfect time to go back and look at the studio's remarkable history and rank the five animated features they made before Wildwood. Now, ranking these movies isn't particularly easy, because I genuinely love all five of them.
This isn't one of those lists where I get to complain about a couple of terrible movies at the bottom. Laika has never made a bad movie. Not one. And considering the amount of time, money and work involved in making these things, that's an extraordinary accomplishment.
The studio itself has a fascinating history, beginning with another legendary name in stop-motion animation: Will Vinton. Vinton was the Oscar-winning animator responsible for some of the most memorable clay animation of the 1970s and 1980s, including the enormously popular California Raisins commercials.
His Portland-based studio was a major force in stop-motion animation, producing commercials, television projects and short films. But by the late 1990s, the company was struggling financially and looking for investors.
Enter Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, who began investing in the studio in 1998. His son, Travis Knight, was already working there as an animator, and Phil eventually acquired the struggling company in 2002.
In 2005, the studio was reorganized and renamed Laika, after the famous Soviet space dog who became the first animal to orbit the Earth in 1957. It's a wonderful name for an animation studio, although the actual story of the dog is pretty heartbreaking.
Travis Knight eventually became Laika's president and CEO, and he's a fascinating guy. Before becoming the driving creative force behind one of the most ambitious animation studios in the world, he was a working animator on projects including The PJs, the wonderfully strange stop-motion television series starring Eddie Murphy.
He learned the craft by actually doing it, moving puppets, adjusting expressions and painstakingly creating the illusion of movement one frame at a time. And I think that background is incredibly important to understanding what makes Laika so special. Because stop-motion animation is hard. Really, really hard.
I don't think most people fully appreciate what goes into making one of these movies. We're talking about hundreds of artists, animators, sculptors, designers, puppet makers, costume makers, model builders and technicians working for years to create something that eventually appears effortless on the screen.
Every character has to be designed and physically constructed. Every little costume has to be made. Every miniature set has to be built. Every facial expression has to be carefully created.
And then the animators have to move these incredibly detailed puppets a tiny fraction of an inch, take a photograph, move them again, take another photograph, and repeat that process thousands and thousands of times.
Just think about that for a second.
You're sitting in a movie theater watching a character walk across a room, turn around, pick something up and smile. It takes about five seconds. For the people making a Laika movie, that little moment might represent days of work. And if something goes wrong halfway through, well, good luck. You're probably going to have to start over.
Now, Laika certainly uses modern technology, including computers, 3D printing, digital compositing and visual effects. They're not sitting around in a barn making movies with a camera from 1932.
In fact, they've been pioneers in combining new technology with traditional stop-motion techniques. But the foundation of what they do remains physical, handcrafted animation.
The puppets are real. The sets are real. The lighting is real. The movement is created by actual human beings manipulating actual objects, frame by frame. Technology enhances the work rather than replacing the artists who create it.
And the results are breathtaking.
There's a texture to Laika's movies that I find almost impossible to resist. You can practically feel the fabrics, the wood, the stone, the hair and the tiny details in every environment.
The characters have weight. The worlds feel tangible. There's something magical about watching these little physical objects come to life, especially when you know how much work went into making them move.
But here's the thing about Laika that makes me love the studio even more: the animation is only part of the story.
They also make terrific movies.
I mean, actual movies, with intelligent scripts, complex characters, sophisticated themes, real emotion and stories that aren't afraid to get a little strange, a little dark or even genuinely frightening. These aren't just beautiful technical demonstrations. They're wonderful pieces of storytelling that happen to be animated.
And that's an important distinction, because you can make the most gorgeous animated movie in the world, but if the story is lousy and the characters don't mean anything, who cares? Laika understands that.
One of the things I've always admired about their movies is that they seem particularly interested in outsiders. The kids who don't fit in. The weirdos. The loners. The people who get picked on, misunderstood or dismissed because they're different. Their movies celebrate those characters.
They give them adventures, allow them to discover their strengths and, most importantly, treat their differences as something valuable rather than something that needs to be corrected.
Travis Knight has talked about feeling like an outsider himself, and that sensibility runs throughout the studio's work. There's something wonderfully reassuring about a movie that tells a kid who feels strange or isolated that maybe being different isn't such a terrible thing. Maybe it's actually what makes you special.
And Laika isn't afraid to scare those kids a little bit, either.
That's another thing I love about the studio. Their movies frequently have a wonderfully dark edge. There are ghosts, monsters, witches, supernatural creatures, bizarre villains, creepy houses and genuinely disturbing situations.
They understand something that the best children's storytellers have always understood: kids like being scared. They like strange things. They like dark fairy tales. They don't necessarily want everything to be bright, cheerful and sanitized. Sometimes they want to be challenged, and sometimes they want to be a little freaked out. Laika gives them that.
The studio's first feature was Coraline in 2009, directed by the brilliant Henry Selick and based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. And while we're talking about Henry Selick, can we please acknowledge something that has annoyed me for years?
Everybody seems to associate The Nightmare Before Christmas with Tim Burton, and I understand why. Burton created the original story and characters, and his name is right there in the title.
But Henry Selick directed that movie. He was the filmmaker responsible for bringing that extraordinary world to life. He also directed James and the Giant Peach, another wonderful stop-motion film, and he deserves an enormous amount of credit for his contributions to animation.
With Coraline, Selick created one of the great animated fantasies of the 21st century. It's creepy, funny, imaginative, visually stunning and surprisingly disturbing. The story of a young girl who discovers a seemingly perfect alternate version of her life, only to find something horrifying lurking underneath, is exactly the kind of material Laika would become known for.
It celebrates curiosity and individuality while reminding us that getting everything you think you want might not be such a wonderful thing after all. I absolutely love Coraline, and it's a terrific movie to revisit around Halloween.
Then came ParaNorman in 2012, directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler, and here's another movie that perfectly captures the Laika sensibility. It's about a young boy who can communicate with ghosts, which naturally makes him something of an outcast.
Nobody understands him, everybody thinks he's weird, and before long he finds himself dealing with a supernatural curse and a town full of people who aren't nearly as normal as they think they are.
ParaNorman is funny, creepy, moving and filled with wonderful characters. It has terrific animation, great comic timing and a surprisingly sophisticated message about fear, prejudice and the way people treat anyone who seems different. It's also a movie that understands that monsters aren't always the creatures with rotting flesh and glowing eyes.
Sometimes the real monsters are ordinary people who allow fear and ignorance to turn them into something ugly. That's pretty sophisticated stuff for an animated movie about a kid who talks to dead people.
And, like Coraline, it's a perfect Halloween movie. In fact, one of the things I love about this time of year is having an excuse to revisit both of them. Not that I really need an excuse.
Laika followed that with The Boxtrolls in 2014, directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi, based on Alan Snow's novel Here Be Monsters!. This one is a wonderfully strange, funny, steampunk-flavored fantasy about a community of misunderstood creatures living beneath a city and a young boy who has been raised by them.
The movie has an absolutely gorgeous visual style, a marvelous sense of the grotesque and some very funny satire about class, social status and the absurd lengths people will go to in order to be accepted by the supposedly respectable members of society.
It also has a terrific voice cast, including Ben Kingsley, Toni Collette, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Tracy Morgan, Jared Harris and others. That's another thing Laika has consistently done well: casting talented actors who understand how to create distinctive characters through their voices without turning the movies into glorified celebrity showcases. The performances serve the stories, and the characters remain the stars.
And once again, the heroes are the outsiders. The strange little creatures everybody fears turn out to be far more decent and lovable than the supposedly civilized people who want to destroy them. There's a wonderful message in that, and Laika delivers it without sacrificing the comedy, the adventure or the glorious weirdness.
Then, in 2016, came what I consider to be Laika's masterpiece.
Kubo and the Two Strings.
I cannot say enough good things about this movie.
Directed by Travis Knight, Kubo and the Two Strings is one of my favorite animated films of all time. Not just one of my favorite Laika movies. Not just one of the best animated movies of the last 20 years. I'm talking about one of the most beautiful, emotionally powerful and artistically accomplished animated films ever made.
It's an extraordinary fantasy adventure inspired by Japanese mythology and storytelling traditions, about a young boy named Kubo who possesses a magical shamisen, a three-stringed musical instrument that allows him to bring his origami creations to life.
Kubo has already suffered tremendous loss, including the loss of his left eye at the hands of his grandfather, the Moon King. When the forces threatening his family return, he embarks on an epic journey with two remarkable companions, Monkey and Beetle, to confront his past and discover the truth about who he is.
The animation is almost beyond description. The landscapes, the creatures, the action sequences, the elaborate costumes, the magical effects, the enormous skeleton, the incredible attention to detail, it's all astonishing.
But what makes Kubo and the Two Strings so special is the emotional depth of the story. This is a movie about family, grief, memory, loss, storytelling and the ways we keep the people we love alive through the stories we tell about them. It's about finding family in unexpected places and understanding that love and memory can be more powerful than violence or immortality.
And it absolutely destroys me every time I watch it.
The voice work is phenomenal, with Art Parkinson as Kubo, Charlize Theron as Monkey, Matthew McConaughey as Beetle, and wonderful contributions from Ralph Fiennes, Brenda Vaccaro and George Takei. Theron is heartbreaking, McConaughey is terrific, and the relationships between these characters are so beautifully written and performed that the movie becomes genuinely overwhelming. It's funny, thrilling, scary, imaginative and deeply moving, sometimes all within the same sequence.
Kubo and the Two Strings is a masterpiece. Period. It's a great movie, regardless of whether it's animated or live-action, and I think it deserves to be discussed alongside the greatest works in the history of animation.
The film also demonstrated just how far Laika was willing to push the technical boundaries of stop-motion. It received Academy Award nominations for both Best Animated Feature and Best Visual Effects, an extraordinary achievement for a stop-motion movie, and won the BAFTA for Best Animated Film. The studio had already established itself as a major artistic force, but Kubo took things to another level.
Their fifth feature, Missing Link, arrived in 2019, directed by Chris Butler, and it's probably the lightest and goofiest of the Laika movies. It's a wonderfully entertaining adventure comedy about an eccentric explorer who encounters a lonely Sasquatch searching for a place where he belongs. The voice cast includes Hugh Jackman, Zach Galifianakis, Zoe Saldaña, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Timothy Olyphant, and the film has a marvelous sense of humor.
It's a little more playful and less frightening than some of the studio's earlier movies, but it still has that unmistakable Laika personality. Once again, it's about outsiders, loneliness, friendship and the desire to find a place where you fit in.
The animation is spectacular, the characters are charming, and the script is witty and surprisingly touching. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, another well-deserved recognition for a studio that has never been content to simply repeat itself.
And that brings us to Wildwood, the studio's sixth animated feature, directed by Travis Knight and based on the fantasy novel by Colin Meloy, the lead singer of the Decemberists, with illustrations by Carson Ellis. Set in and around a mysterious forest near Portland, the film follows a young girl named Prue who ventures into a dangerous magical world to rescue her baby brother.
It's another enormous undertaking for Laika, filled with strange creatures, elaborate environments, dark fantasy elements and the kind of painstaking handcrafted animation that has become the studio's trademark.
In an industry increasingly dominated by sequels, franchises, recycled intellectual property and movies designed by committees, Laika continues to make films that feel personal, handcrafted and genuinely artistic.
These people spend years creating worlds that didn't exist before, populating them with wonderful characters and telling stories that aren't afraid to be dark, funny, complicated, sad or emotionally challenging.
They take risks. They trust their audiences. They respect children enough to believe that kids can handle difficult ideas and complicated emotions. They celebrate the strange, the lonely, the misunderstood and the different. And they do it with a level of visual artistry and craftsmanship that is simply breathtaking.
I admire the work ethic. I admire the dedication to stop-motion animation. I admire the willingness to spend years perfecting something that will appear on the screen for only a few seconds. But most importantly, I love the movies themselves.
They make me laugh. They make me nervous. They make me smile. Sometimes they make me cry. And in the case of Kubo and the Two Strings, they remind me of just how powerful and beautiful cinema can be.
So, with Wildwood arriving in theaters, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to celebrate the studio by ranking the five Laika animated features that preceded it. Every single one is worth seeing, and every single one represents an extraordinary amount of talent, imagination and love for the art of filmmaking.
And while I certainly have my favorites, ranking these five movies is really just an excuse to talk about how much I love this remarkable studio.
Here are the five pre-Wildwood Laika movies, ranked in order of my personal preference.
LAIKA: RANKED
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