KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS FACTS.
Kubo’s puppet had a total of 23,187 rapid prototype faces created. In combination, Kubo had over 48 million possible facial expressions!
The Sisters’ costuming was inspired by Tome Gozen, a female samaurai warrier. The cape included 861 laser-etched feathers, each uniquely sized and shaped.
The kimono worn by Kubo’s mother was inspired by the women courtiers of the Heian era. Over 2,000 laser-cut pieces of weighted lining are in the kimono, giving it proper the proper weight and folds.
The full-scale Giant Skeleton is the largest stop-motion puppet ever built. 70 unique swords were made for the skull and over 1,000 bones were created for the torso’s armor.
The Garden of Eyes sequence was created using a single 11 feet tall puppet shot from multiple angles. The animators created a remote interface for the puppet that included a track ball made from a computer mouse and bowling ball.
The Moon Beast is LAIKA’s first fully 3D-printed puppet. It was built at a one-fifth scale and composited into shots with the full-scale Kubo. If built to scale, The Moon Beast would have been over 17 feet long!
Three versions of the origami sailboat were created, along with six versions of the sail. The surface of the boats were covered in nearly 250,000 laser-cut leaves which took almost 100 hours to apply. The boat sequence took 19 months to shoot!
The amount of work that went into this film is mind-blowing. There will never be enough praise for the people involved.