A short day at TIFF

A scheduling mishap cut day two of the Toronto International Film Festival down to two screenings, plus an early look at one of the year's most anticipated films.

You know Laika's work

The studio behind ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings has gotten steadily better at both craft and technique with each film.

Wildwood hits next month

Laika's next stop-motion feature arrives in theaters on October 23rd, and the trailer alone shows animation far smoother than anything the studio has made before.

Frame-grabbers killed the stutter

Digital cameras let animators watch every recently shot frame as they work, tracking each puppet movement so nothing jerks unless someone wants it to.

“There's no reason for stuttery animation, other than a stylistic choice.”

An art form mid-evolution

Head of animation Brad Schiff frames the smoothness not as a trick but as stop-motion growing up on better tools.

“We're in the midst of the evolution of an art form.”

Puppets that breathe

An internal diaphragm called a breather, first tried on 2019's Missing Link, is now fitted to every major puppet. Characters visibly inhale, and they read as human.

A bike chase in Portland

Unfinished clips showed a fast, tense chase through the city, plus a girl escaping a mansion of tail-chasing guard dogs and soaring on a giant bird.

The numbers behind it

233 puppets, 36 of them versions of the lead girl Prue, 49 animators, and 231 weeks from first frame to finished film.

Julian, made with heart

Cartoon Saloon's hand-drawn film follows a seven-year-old obsessed with mermaids, clashing with his conservative grandmother in Brooklyn. The ending will get you.

Stuffed is a taxidermy musical

A lonely man answers an ad promising to make him exceptional and meets a taxidermist who wants to stuff a human. Then they fall for each other, which complicates things.