TORONTO – Ask Canadian illustrator Graham Annable how he landed his first big directing gig in the meticulous world of stop-motion animation and he simply shrugs.
Each step toward his upcoming 3-D feature The Boxtrolls has been an unpredictable sequence of happenstance, he insisted during a visit to Toronto this past spring.
“I think back to when I graduated from (Oakville, Ont.’s) Sheridan (College) — which is over 20 years ago now — and the thought that I would be back in Toronto speaking about a stop-motion animated feature that I co-directed would never have entered my mind,” Annable said in an interview after delivering the keynote address at the TIFF Kids Festival Industry Conference in April.
“It is kind of an amazing thing for me to sort of map all the different choices and decisions that got me to where I am right now. I don’t think I could ever repeat that performance. A lot of folks ask me: ‘How do I get to where you’re getting?’ And I honestly couldn’t tell you exactly how it happened.”
Well, Annable did log a lot of hours as an animator at places including Chuck Jones Enterprises and George Lucas’ video game company LucasArts, where he spent 10 years.
The 43-year-old Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.-native went on to hone his love for storyboarding at the Portland, Ore.-based Laika Studios, where he put his stamp on the Oscar-nominated stop-motion films Coraline and ParaNorman.
From those two acclaimed features Annable was named head of story on Laika’s third project, The Boxtrolls — a stop-motion and computer-generated hybrid adaptation of Alan Snow’s book series Here Be Monsters!
The Victorian-era period piece unfolds in Cheesebridge, “a town obsessed with wealth, class, and the stinkiest of fine cheeses.”
Beneath its cobblestone streets live the Boxtrolls, an underground community of dumpster-diving oddballs who wear discarded cardboard boxes. They’ve raised an orphaned human boy, named Eggs, since infancy and when they are targeted by villainous pest exterminator Archibald Snatcher it’s up to Eggs to become their guardian.
The voiceover cast includes Elle Fanning, Simon Pegg, Ben Kingsley, Toni Collette and Nick Frost.
Annable said his leap from storyboard artist to director started while working on ParaNorman. During a lull in production he was asked to try his hand at storyboarding a sequence from an early script based on Snow’s monster-filled book. He immediately gravitated toward the boxtroll characters.
“They were just super-fun, these crazy characters that lived in boxes and didn’t speak in any discernable language,” he said. “For a storyboard artist, at least for me, it was really exciting because everything had to get worked out visually through pantomime and expressions.”
He put together a rough animatic which provided a direction for the film and earned him the title of head of story. That eventually “kind of morphed” into the co-director position with Tony Stacchi, said Annable.
As with Coraline and ParaNorman, Laika’s latest quirky feature employs a century-old style in which intricate handmade puppets are moved infinitesimally around tiny elaborate sets. It’s all photographed one frame at a time to create the illusion of motion.
At the peak of production, Annable estimated roughly 350 people worked on The Boxtrolls, while roughly 50 stages were constructed and as many as 30 animators worked on set at the same time.
Amid a sea of computer-generated animated blockbusters, Annable said he appreciates the unique look and feel that stop-motion offers.
“There’s just nothing that looks like it, it really does stand out,” Annable said of the technique, also seen in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, and Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits, from Aardman Animations, the British company behind the Wallace & Gromit films.
“Stop-motion is so tactile and there’s so much texture to it and I really feel like we’ve done a lot with The Boxtrolls — it’s such a rich-looking form of animation. You can feel the light on all the objects, you can feel the density of everything.”
Still, The Boxtrolls does take advantage of modern-day technology by integrating visual effects to enhance the handmade elements, he said.
And it employs 3-D printers to create a range of facial expressions that can be inserted into each puppet without the need to re-scupt the figures.
“I think Coraline had about 207,000 expressions available to her. And Eggs, our main character, has about 1.4 million,” Annable noted.
“So the amount of ability to emote and act in the films just keeps going up and up.”
The learning curve for Annable has been steep, with the soft-spoken illustrator calling the experience of directing “terrifying and exciting at the same time.”
“Being a story artist, I sort of presumed a lot of things that were happening out on the stages but I really didn’t quite know … the level of detail and the amount of decisions required when you’re in the director’s seat. It’s been a pretty amazing education for me for the last couple of years.”
The Boxtrolls opens Friday.
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