The archive · Work & Ways of Doing · Technical decision · 2016
Laika 3D-prints 23,000 faces so Kubo can make 48 million expressions
Kubo's designs outgrew hand-painted faces, so Laika printed 23,187 full-color replacement parts — 48 million expressions.
Laika
What it had to solve
Laika makes stop-motion films by swapping physical faces on puppets, frame by frame. Kubo and the Two Strings demanded a leap: Monkey's flowing hair, Beetle's hard-edged face and the Moon King's translucent, fish-inspired look could not survive the powder-and-glue 3D printing the studio had used since Coraline, so Laika either softened the designs or reinvented its rapid-prototyping pipeline.
How it works
Stop-motion animators have always cheated: a puppet's face is swapped for a slightly different one, frame by frame, to make it talk and react. Laika, the Oregon studio behind Coraline and ParaNorman, had industrialized that trick with 3D printing, but the character designs for Kubo and the Two Strings threatened to break the whole pipeline.
Monkey's hair, Beetle's sharp planes and the Moon King's translucent, fish-inspired look needed fine detail and translucency that powder-and-glue printers could not deliver. Rather than soften the designs, Laika's rapid-prototyping team moved to Stratasys Connex3 multi-material color printers and wrote its own control software when the vendor's fell short.
The numbers grew cinematic: Kubo alone got 11,007 unique mouth shapes and 4,429 brow shapes — 23,187 printed faces in total, or more than 48 million possible expressions, against 207,000 for Coraline's title character in 2009. The Moon King became Laika's first fully 3D-printed puppet, built from roughly 881 parts.
In early 2016 the Academy gave Laika a Scientific and Technical Award for the rapid-prototyping process, and Kubo opened on August 19, 2016 to a 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes score — five years of work that made an old craft feel new.
Why it lands
- Printing individual mouths and brows removed the hand-painting bottleneck, letting animators change expressions faster and with mechanical repeatability.
- Full-color plastic printing added translucency and crisp edges, so character designs did not have to be softened to fit the technology.
- Writing their own software turned an off-the-shelf printer into a proprietary pipeline no other studio could rent.
- The Academy award and the film's reception proved the process to the whole industry, not just inside Laika.
What it did
In early 2016 the Academy gave Laika a Scientific and Technical Award for the rapid-prototyping process, and Kubo — five years in the making — opened to a 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, with The Hollywood Reporter calling it the studio's most ambitious film yet and the title character able to show a range no hand-painted puppet could reach.
What you can take
When a craft hits a hard limit, fix the tool instead of flattening the idea: a pipeline built in-house becomes a capability competitors cannot rent, and the constraint itself pushes the art forward.
Since then
Kubo opened on August 19, 2016, after five years of development, and its face counts became the standard illustration of Laika's process in trade coverage. The rapid-prototyping approach the studio refined on the film carried into its later features, and the Scientific and Technical Award had already put the technique on the industry's record as a legitimate, award-winning way to keep handcrafted animation alive against CGI.
Sources
- Kubo and the Two Strings: Rapid Prototyping evolves
- How 'Kubo and the Two Strings' Combines Origami, Digital Effects and a 16-Foot Puppet
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