Well this is what I’d consider bittersweet. It’s good and bad mixed into one and I’m a little nervous to be celebrating. According to The Oregonian, movie studio Laika (check out background history), that brought us Coraline, has laid off 63 people in its computer animation department this past Friday because the studio has decided to specialize only on stop-motion features instead of the initial plan which was to develop both stop motion and computer-animated films. This reduces Laika’s work force from 243 to 180. And so it seems that Laika is trying to be the Pixar of stop motion, I use Pixar to represent something or someone who’s really damn good at the specific field of expertise.
But poor animator that now don’t have jobs anymore. 63 is a lot of people, man! They probably didn’t see this coming when they got the job, thinking they’ll be doing what they love to do for at least another decade or two. It’s a shame that this revamp had to happen at the cost of people losing employment.
But who can blame Laika for pursuing this niche?! The studio’s first film, Coraline itself was a decent success earning $120.2 million at the worldwide box office considering the production budget was $65 Million but as some of you may know more than me, stop-motion is a grueling, most time-consuming process, that requires manipulating puppets, frame-by-frame, it could take a week to film just a few seconds of footage. This however is a growing trend, The Fantastic Mr. Fox opens this fall, Tim Burton wants to resurrect FRANKENWEENIE this way, so it’s no wonder Laika made this move. The prospect is hot!
Coraline director Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas) serves as Laika’s supervising director and will continue to make films for the studio which by the way is in the final stages of choosing its next project and plans to announce its selection in the next several weeks, although we probably won’t see the movies on the big screen for at least a few years because once again, it’s a slow process.
