The studio is studiously anonymous. There’s no name on the front door—Laika’s headquarters are located at NW 22nd Avenue and Pettygrove Street in Portland—and the modest reception area offers few clues to the company’s identity besides an illuminated poster for Coraline that announces a 2008 opening. (Production delays pushed back the release to this month, which perhaps was just as well since an earlier opening would have competed with Disney’s Bolt and Universal’s The Tale of Despereaux.) Venture deeper inside the massive warehouse and the space takes on the look of Santa’s workshop, with all the elves obsessively making hand-sculpted puppets and miniature scenery. One storage room is jammed with replacement body parts (under the strain of constant manipulation and hot studio lights, most of the puppets’ body parts have to be replaced regularly): one sliding drawer holds nothing but replacement faces, a disturbing sight for the uninitiated. Metal shelves hold tiny shirts, dresses, and sweaters made of finely knitted cloth and yarn. (One Coraline crew member, Althea Crome, had the sole job of hand-knitting miniature sweaters and clothing for the puppet characters, using knitting needles as thin as human hairs.) During production, nearly 150 sets were spread out in the cavernous warehouse, each a meticulous miniature world in which the animators staged the action. One set was so intricate it featured a floor that collapsed into a spider web into which Coraline tumbles. The two-story set used computer-controlled winches to make the thin wire web collapse in just the right pattern.
At the height of production, about 450 animators, designers, modelers, sketch artists, carpenters, and camera people swarmed through the warehouse, building Coraline frame by frame. Each upraised eyebrow, painted fingernail, and blade of grass in the movie exists in real life, albeit in miniature. The real “actors” are the animators who manipulated the puppets. “It’s exhausting work,” says Travis. “It’s a performance in slow motion that you act through the puppet. You’re burning your fingers on hot glue, you’re cutting your hands on bits of armature wire, you’re crawling through sets and banging your head on pipes. You go home and you feel like you’ve been digging trenches for ten hours. The only reason stop-motion characters have life is because they take it out of someone else. They’re little vampires that suck the life out of the people who work on them.”
Coraline employed thirty-five animators in all, some recruited from Disney and DreamWorks, some lured from England; still others were local recruits. To shoot each scene, animators had to pose the puppets, shoot a single frame of film, stop the camera, carefully change the position of the puppets and scenery to imply motion, and then shoot another frame. To complete one second of finished film, this procedure had to be repeated twenty-four times. “I wouldn’t do what Travis is doing for anything,” says Phil, shaking his head. “I would say to him, ‘How was your day?’ and he would say, ‘Oh, good, I got ten seconds in the can.’ And I’d think, ‘Ten seconds—for a whole day!’ It would drive me crazy.”
Laika is taking advantage of an incentive program offered by the Governor’s Office of Film & Television, which gives studios a 20 percent rebate on Oregon-based goods and services such as set-construction materials, camera and audio equipment, art supplies, hotel rooms, and catering, plus a cash payment of up to 16.2 percent of production personnel wages. Unlike other states’ film programs, the Oregon incentives are cash rebates as opposed to tax credits. For Laika, the Coraline incentives were ultimately worth about $250,000.
Oregon’s one glaring handicap in attracting location shoots for live-action films is its weather. The winter grayness is why many of the films shot here—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Drugstore Cowboy, The Ring—tend to be gloomy. Yet for an animation studio, the weather is irrelevant, making Portland friendly to animation experts from across the country and to the oddball geniuses already in the area. “Portland does have a history of nurturing unusual creative talent,” Travis says. “The music that comes out of here is very distinctive, and filmmakers like Gus Van Sant are off the beaten path. I think we stand a chance to be a creative force in Portland that really does have its own point of view. The city naturally draws a certain kind of person, the sort of person we want as an employee at Laika. You can’t chase Pixar or DreamWorks. We have to be our own thing.”
Within Portland’s animation scene, Laika is, at this point, the only big game in town, though there are smaller shops such as Happy Trails Animation, whose commercial clients have included MTV and the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Between seventy-five and one hundred freelance animators live in the area, some of whom have worked for Will Vinton. Joanna Priestly is a local award-winning independent animator and teacher who worked on Sesame Street and on music videos for Joni Mitchell; she’s also taught at the Art Institute of Portland. Portlander Marilyn Zornado produced animated commercials at Will Vinton Studios and later produced her own animated film, Insect Poetry. Local animator Laura Di Trapani also worked at Vinton and contributed to such music videos as “And She Was” by the Talking Heads and “Boy in the Bubble” by Paul Simon. The Portland chapter of the Association Internationale du Film d’Animation (International Animated Film Association) has sixty-seven members.
The city’s animation community stands to get an even bigger boost if Laika goes through with its planned state-of-the-art feature film complex. Phil Knight already has purchased thirty acres in Tualatin near the I-5/I-205 interchange, about twelve miles south of the Nike campus. He plans to build a four-building animation campus designed by the same architects who laid out Nike’s two-hundred-acre Beaverton headquarters. Knight originally planned to break ground in Tualatin late last year, but construction is on hold. Moving forward depends on whether Laika can secure a development deal with a distribution company to put out the animated films already on its drawing board.
Published: February 2009
