5 Crazy Facts About Making ‘The Boxtrolls’

“The Boxtrolls”introduced us to Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright), a boy lovingly brought up by cavern-dwelling, box-wearing trolls. With a social-climbing exterminator Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) determined to get rid of every Boxtroll, Eggs must pretend to be a regular, surface-dwelling boy to save his family.

Good animation succeeds, in part, when it makes every image appear effortlessly and flawlessly. Thus, most people have no idea about the long and elaborate process of making a stop-motion animated film.

Here are five crazy facts that will blow your mind about all the work that LAIKA, the animation studio responsible for “The Boxtrolls,” “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” put into “The Boxtrolls.”

1. It’s a Slow, Methodical Process: The movie has been in the works in some way since 2008, when LAIKA first announced it would adapt Alan Snow’s children’s book “Here Be Monsters.” Then came four years of production. Of all the forms of animation, stop-motion is the slowest. During the animation process for “The Boxtrolls,” a LAIKA animator took an entire week to complete just 90 individual frames. That amounted to just 3.7 seconds worth of footage. If our math is right, that means it would’ve taken one animator 31 years to finish an almost 100-minute file. Luckily, LAIKA employed more than 30 animators to get the job done.

2. So Many Pieces: LAIKA artisans hand-made more than 20,000 props for the movie, including 55 different sculpts of prop cheeses. The movie is set in a town called Cheesebridge, so naturally all the characters are obsessed with cheese (especially during a fancy society party, where there’s a huge cheese table), and cheese-related puns are everywhere. But it wasn’t all about the cheese on the “Boxtrolls” set: the prop designers made everything from the various kinds of foods in the market to the grass and flowers (even different kinds of teeny, tiny weeds) around town.

3. Design Inspiration: The period costumes were inspired by everything from the Mod look of The Rolling Stones to Shirley Temple’s curls and bows to Bill the Butcher’s coat in “Gangs of New York” to the tutus of the Bolshoi Ballet. And speaking of the costumes, the teeniest ones were those made for baby Eggs: a sweater that measured only 3.5 inches across the length of both arms and chest, and itty bitty socks that were only a 5/8 of an inch long. The costumes required an expert costumer who could micro-knit to make baby Eggs’ clothes. On the more elaborate end, Lord Portley-Rind’s intricate white hat was made up of 14 different kinds of fabric.

4. 3-D Printers to the Rescue: Stop-motion animation requires changing the puppets’ positions and gestures for every frame, painstaking work made a lot easier thanks to the technology of 3-D printing. LAIKA’s 3-D printers made it easy for the animators to change the puppets faces featuring hundreds of different emotions, from excitement to horror. The many nuanced faces with gradually changing emotions makes for a more seamless viewing experience, but it also means LAIKA ends up with more than a million character faces to store on their premises, so after production, it’s common for LAIKA to lend a few puppets out to museums and exhibits.

5. LAIKA is owned by a NIKE heir: The CEO of Portland-based LAIKA is Travis Knight, son of Phil Knight, the legendary NIKE founder and chairman. But Travis isn’t merely a businessman who financed the studio, he’s an accomplished lead animator who has worked on every project he’s produced with LAIKA. In fact, he was the last animator left working on the set after the rest of the team had moved on to other projects. Knight is next working on his directorial debut for LAIKA, making the newly announced film, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” a story set in mythical ancient Japan starring the voices of Matthew McConaughey, Charlize Theron, Rooney Mara, Ralph Fiennes, and Brenda Vaccaro; the title character of Kubo will be voiced by Art Parkinson (young Rickon Stark in “Game of Thrones”).

“The Boxtrolls” is now available on Digital HD and will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on Jan. 20.