“I think what the films share in common is they definitely have strands of the same DNA,” Laika CEO Travis Knight recently told us. “That goes to our approach and our philosophy, which goes back to the kinds of films that we loved growing up, what we think is the best kind of filmmaking, which is really dynamic storytelling. You have an artful balance of darkness and light and you see that in the films that we’ve made to this point, where we don’t want to have a house style. We don’t want things visually or aesthetically to look the same. We don’t want them to cover the same kinds of thematic ground. What we do want to have is dynamic storytelling.”
It looks as though audiences connected with the storytelling of their latest release, The Boxtrolls, as its opening weekend of over $17 million bested that of their last features, Coraline and Paranorman. Today we’re going nearly a decade back to the early days of the company, when they weren’t yet established as the preeminent stop-motion creators. Back in 2005, under the direction of Henry Selick, they created their first and only short film, Moongirl, based on a story by Michael Burger. A CG work, it follows a boy who takes a trip to the moon where he meets our titular character. It’s fairly charming and while the animation is more crude than we’re accustomed to, it’s fascinating to see the studio’s beginning. Check it out below thanks to Film School Rejects.
What do you think of the short?