Boxtrolls Interview with LAIKA Filmmakers: Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable

While I was at my super top secret set visit of the Boxtrolls I had the chance to interview Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable the directors of Boxtrolls. They are both so very passionate about the film and what they get to do over there at LAIKA. I mean they created The Boxtrolls, a community of quirky, mischievous creatures who have lovingly raised an orphaned human boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead-Wright) in the amazing cavernous home they’ve built beneath the streets of Cheesebridge. And they did a FANTASTIC job.  So here are a few things that I learned during that lunch!

The story actually came from a book called “Here Be Monsters”. I had no idea there was a book about Boxtrolls. Laika acquired almost 10 years ago when the company first began. The book is over 500 pages long and it took them quite a while to chisel it down and decide on how they wanted to tell the story. In the end they ended up with something that is nothing like the book at all, but it did spark the ideas!

It takes quite a bit of time to finish a stop motion movie. An animator typically took 1 week to complete 3.7 seconds worth of footage, which is just under 90 individual frames. Divide that by 87 minutes of run time (87 minutes of run time Times 60 seconds = 5220 seconds) = about 1400 weeks. Good thing they have more than one person able to work on the footage at one time right?

A few interesting facts we learned about the costumes for the puppets was that there are 14 different fabrics in Lord Portley-Rind’s white hat and that the movie’s smallest costumes were for Eggs as a baby: the sweater, measuring 3.5” from cuff to cuff across the length of both arms and chest, and the baby socks measuring 5/8” long. Imagine that? The scale of this movie was so small and the details in it were amazing. Really, the details were amazingly intricate.

Boxtrolls is different from all their other movies. This one isn’t going to be as intense but it’s still going to tell a great story.