The imaginative movie Kubo and the Two Strings is nominated for an Oscar in the “Best Animated Film” category this year, and its animation supervisor, St. Louis native Brad Schiff, is among the nominees for the “Best Visual Effects” category (alongside the likes of those who worked on such blockbusters as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Marvel’s Doctor Strange).
Schiff heads the animation team at Laika, an animation studio based in Portland, Oregon. Laika is behind some of the most visually stunning stop-motion films in recent memory, including Coraline, ParaNorman, and The Boxtrolls. (He was the animation supervisor for all three.)
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Schiff grew up in Clayton and Town & Country and attended Parkway West High School. He later studied art at Central Missouri State University, where a professor once recommended that he drop his drawing class. “To this day, I really don’t understand why,” Schiff says. “My stuff wasn’t the best, but it was far from the worst in the class. The only thing I can think of is he was trying to light a fire under my behind.” He eventually transferred to the University of Tampa, after a friend there showed Schiff animation projects that he’d created for class. There, Schiff discovered he had a knack for sculpting, which led to stop-motion. He went on to film school at New York University. After college, Schiff worked as an animator for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.
Kubo is the sixth feature film that he’s worked on as an animator or animation supervisor. Set in Japan, the film follows the titular young boy’s journey—accompanied by a beetle voiced by Matthew McConaughey and a monkey voiced by Charlize Theron—to solve the mystery surrounding his late samurai father. Along the way, he carries a magical musical instrument.
Kubo has already won the best animated feature prize at this year’s Visual Effects Society Awards, and come February 26, Schiff will represent St. Louis at the 89th Academy Awards.
How rare is it for an animated film to be nominated in the Oscar’s “Visual Effects” category?The last time it happened was in 1993, when the Tim Burton classic A Nightmare Before Christmas received a nomination. (It lost to a little film called Jurassic Park.)
“You never do these things for recognition,” he says. But when you do get it? Schiff says, “It feels really good.”
SLM recently caught up with Schiff to discuss Kubo and his next project.
What were some of the biggest challenges in making Kubo? The whole thing. [Laughs]. It’s such a crazy movie. I read the script, and I thought it was incredible. It was always a really special movie to me from the very beginning. But the question was always, “How in the hell are we going to do this stuff?” Any one of these things on its own would be an incredible challenge.
Because it was set in Japan, we had baggy costumes. While it may seem like a little thing, you’ve never seen baggy clothes in stop-motion before because it’s a frickin’ nightmare—you have to be able to control it. But there’s no such thing as hair simulation or cloth simulation in stop-motion; everything has to be manipulated by hand, one frame at a time, by a stop-motion animator…
We had a 16-foot tall skeleton. We built the largest stop-motion puppet in the history of the medium so far. It was so cool. Everybody was so on board with what we were doing that we were just determined to figure it out…
We really had the go-ahead from the director and the producer to just figure it out. We’ve been working together for 10 years as a team, so we have really good relations with one another. And we trust each other. I think that’s sort of one of the biggest things that helped was the trust that we had in one another to move forward with some of these crazy ideas.
Was there a particular moment when you had to take a step back and say, “Wow, it’s so cool that we’re doing this”? I had sort of a childlike moment when I first saw the skeleton finished. My grandfather is from New Orleans, and he was a woodcarver. As an artist, he had all these friends who made Mardi Gras floats, and I remember going into some of his friends’ Mardi Gras float shops as a kid. You’d look up and see these giant paper-mâché creatures and human forms. It was just so awe-inspiring as a kid. When I walked in and finally saw the skeleton all put together, I felt like that little kid again…
It’s my sixth feature film, but they’re all kind of on the same scale. But there was something about this one—just the scope of that and the size of that skeleton—where it really felt like, “Oh my God. This is a big-time movie we’re making right now.”
Did the animators have a quota each week, in terms of film time you’d complete? Typically what we try to get from each animator is five to six seconds per week. At least that’s what we shot for on Coraline. And it seems as the complexity of each film goes on, that quota gets lower and lower. And Kubo—due to the costumes and hair—each one of those is just another character that the animator has to deal with. We averaged just under 3.5 seconds a week per animator. It was slow going. It took us just over 90 weeks for principal animation.
What scenes did you work on? I’m the animation supervisor, so I’m in charge of developing all the characters in the film and doing animation tests. We nail down how each character walks and personality quirks in their actions. And I sit in every editorial brief with the director and follow up with all the animators in making sure they stay on style and are delivering what the director asks for.
I oversee all of the animation, but because this film was so big, I would step in every once in a while and animate a few shots here and there. When the skeleton falls apart at the end of that scene, I animated him. I got to animate a lot of the father and young daughter in the cemetery, which was great because I got to shoot reference my daughter. So the little girl runs like my little girl—her little actions and the way she acts. That was fun to do. It felt very personal.
Are you working on a new film now? Yeah, I can only call it Film 5 right now. They’re waiting to make some sort of big-splash announcement. But we’re almost halfway done with the movie.
