by Brendan Foley
Animation zealots will continue to insist for as long and as loudly as they can that animation is not a genre of film, but a medium upon which any story or genre can be depicted. As reasonable as this protestation is (and despite how overbearing the protesters can often seem), the fact of the matter is that much of mainstream animation is trapped in endless regurgitation of similar styles and stories. While the folks at Pixar can occasionally bust out a masterpiece when the mood suits them, the look and feel of much of modern mainstream is stuck in a rut. There are, of course, fringe and outsider artists working on the, you know, fringes and outsides, doing their own thing and receiving very little attention or finance for it.
And then there’s Laika. Owned by Nike co-founder Phil Knight (yes, really) and with Knight’s son Travis as CEO and president, Laika has thus far produced three feature length films. Coraline, Paranorman, and The Boxtrolls are each miniature masterworks, merging comedy and horror and adventure into a tone that no one else in modern children’s cinema, let alone animation, seems interested in attempting.
Over the course of their three films, directors like Henry Selick (Coraline), Sam Fell and Chris Butler (Paranorman), and Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi (The Boxtrolls) have created certain recurring patterns and thematic points. Looking over the current catalog, these are the major life lessons of Laika films.
1) Adults Are Useless
Perhaps the most valuable lesson that anyone can teach children is that adults are often as baffled by the world around them as children are. More so, in fact, since children at least don’t go around expecting the world to make any sense. This lesson has been at the forefront of each Laika film, as the adults that theoretically should be protecting/helping the imperiled kids are either oblivious, idiotic, or too wrapped up in adult bullshit to pay attention to the truly important things.
This trend may reach its peak Paranorman as the adult ignorance not only results in a whole mess load of zombies wreaking havoc, but also finds a mob almost killing a group of kids out of mindless paranoia and fear, only to immediately duck responsibility once things calm down. No, if a kid wants to get anything done, they have to do it on their own, whether that’s solve a problem or combat a heinous demon-bug thing and send her screaming into a void of nothingness. Because, yes, that happens in a children’s film. Oh, speaking of:
2) Kids Are Tougher Than You Think
This speaks to both the Plasticine people in the frame, and the people in the audience. If the audience is made of plastic, that’s their own business. So much of entertainment geared to a younger set is neutered, soulless dribble, designed to be bright enough to hold the attention for sub-90 minutes without challenging anyone whatsoever at all.
Laika doesn’t play that shit. Not only do they put their young protagonists through the wringer (and certainly, anyone who survived the experiences of Coraline would need years of intensive therapy and probably a whole mess load of medication), but the films all challenge the young viewer with slower pacing, clever writing, and a willingness to push stories to dark, bleak corners before earning their way back to the light.
Coraline takes the most familiar of places, home, and the most loving of relationships, mother and child, and twists each into a surreal nightmare. Paranorman takes great pains to illustrate the pains of isolation and depression, and then hits you with the undead and atrocities committed in the name of God. Even the much sillier Boxtrolls features our lovable monsters seemingly annihilated, casualties of what is, essentially, a race war. These are films which speak frankly to children about some of the ugliest veins of human experience that they might encounter in their lives, and the films do so because the filmmakers believe in the ability of children to embrace the scary and the sad. It’s an approach that flies in the face of much of Hollywood’s traditional wisdom, but Laika has a specific attitude when it comes to the weird.
3) The Weird Will Triumph
Few film companies seem as rigorously devoted to exploring and explicating the plight of the isolated individual the way that Laika has been thus far. Terry Gilliam watches these movies and thinks, ‘Gosh, they’re laying it on a little thick with this.’ I don’t know why Terry Gilliam is speaking with Goofy’s enunciation in this example, just go with it.
There’s genuine, wrenching pain to be had in the way that the films of Laika depict the isolation of being a ‘weird’ individual, the feeling that everything about you is wrong, that your entire being is being strategically judged and stripped apart by your peers, your parents, by the people who claim to love you the most but who are capable of hurting you the most.
I’ve been that kid. It sucked.
This is territory where the exaggerated, cartoon world comes in handy. If Paranorman did not have its funky art-style, it might have been an unwatchably grim parable about a young boy who is hemmed in at all sides by people who seem resolutely incapable of understanding who is. The Boxtrolls, again, runs right up to the edges of species genocide, but even this tragedy pales in comparison to the way the film depicts young Eggs’ horror at having to go out among the human world and attempt to disguise himself as one of them.
That push and pull between being yourself and being accepted, between sticking to your guns and getting along with the masses, that’s one of the hardest things for any child to negotiate as they grow into this world. It doesn’t really get easier as you get older. Most children’s fiction sugar-coats this point, with “BE YOURSELF!” printed in bold-colored letters and blared into your face until your ears have started spilling blood and your eyes have melted out of your skull and run down your face like egg whites spilling down a pan.
Or not like that, at all. I might be exaggerating.
But if Laika’s writers, directors, and other creatives hit this familiar theme, and hit it hard, their execution more than justifies it. Because they play so harsh with the ugliness of their worlds, it only makes the eventual triumphs seem all the more meaningful. The filmmakers also place the emphasis squarely on the intimate, humane aspects of their heroes’ hero’s journey.
So Norman’s arc in Paranorman isn’t about getting recognized by the rest of the town, it’s about forging a strong bond of friendship and making at least some kind of peace with his family. For Eggs, victory doesn’t mean collecting wealth or treasure, it’s about bringing the disparate pieces of his personality into a whole, and moving forward from there. The films disregard bombast in favor of climaxes that emphasize the incremental personal growth that might lead towards happiness, while never letting the protagonist lose sight of the idiosyncrasies which make them so interesting.
Weirdness, despite what John Hughes brainwashed a generation into believing, isn’t something to be hidden or ironed out. Being weird is what makes these people interesting, and what allows them to see through the bullshit that the ‘sane’ world is drowning in, and figure out a means to save it.
Because even if the world of the ‘sane’ and the world of the ‘grown-ups’ is nonsensical and scary, it still deserves to be saved. Because…
4) Empathy Over All
The notion of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is passed down to all children as one of the most important illustrators of empathy. Coraline, Paranorman and The Boxtrolls are each illustrations of that same principle, depicting the way that the young characters move from a selfish, closed off view of the world and to a more open and accepting one.
The Coraline Jones of the opening of that film is something of a brat, rude to her parents and new neighbors, making snap judgments based on how they initially appear. She dismisses each of these new faces as crazy or boring, and it is only through opening herself up to what they have to say that she is able to solve the world of the Other Mother and escape. The Coraline of Coraline’s closing moments has opened herself up to other people, bringing these strange and wacky individuals together and celebrating with them.
Paranorman possesses a similar reversal, but it’s not the main character who has their perspective opened up: it’s the audience. Heading into the film, Paranorman’s villains seem broadly established: there’s an evil witch’s ghost and her zombie army. But, bit by bit, the film chips away at our immediate associations and reveals that there are no villains, only scared and lonely people who have made awful choices in the past, choices that are continuing to ripple down throughout time. The mission Norman takes up is not to defeat the big monster, but to understand and empathize with it.
The Boxtrolls builds an entire world around that same basic reversal. The film opens with a shot of terrifying troll monster dashing into the dark with a baby in its arms. We might be scared for the infant, but moments later the film reveals that the Boxtrolls are kind and loving and the baby is well-cared for.
Both the humans in the above world and the trolls of the below world have constructed visions of what the other is like, and those biases result in suffering, exploitation, and the Boxtrolls being scapegoated for everything that goes wrong. It’s not until the people of the surface understand the humanity living within the trolls (which is revealed by someone literally pulling off a Boxtroll costume and revealing a child underneath) that both sides are able to live in harmony, with the Boxtrolls happily constructing gadgets and devices for everyone.
After all, there’s nothing better than making something…
5) There’s Beauty in the Handmade
The very first shots of Laika’s very first film were of a hand carefully constructing a doll. It’s a beautifully meta-moment, a declaration of aesthetic intent as a company founded on the beauty of the small and the hand-crafted opened their opening with loving shots of painstaking craft.
That love of the lo-fi, of the analog and the practical runs through each film on a textual and subtextual level. There’s Norman, with his affection for rubber-monster effects, and there are the Boxtrolls with their hilariously overinvolved gadgets and widgets, cobbling together disparate pieces of refuse to make things are startlingly alive. What does that last bit remind you of?
Laika has yet to have its big smash hit, the film that puts them over the top and into the center of the pop culture conversation. Their films require extraordinary amount of time and labor, so they will most likely never enter the Pixar/Dreamworks stride of churning out multiple films in a year.
But just as their films sing an ode to the weird and the impractical, so does the company and its creatives work similar magic in our world. There’s something comforting to know that in an age stifled by the sheer amount of content and constant innovation, it is possible for the idiosyncratic and the individual to stay afloat and producing work attuned to that specific voice.
Here’s hoping that Laika will continue filling our screens with dreams and nightmares for years to come.