LAIKA Animation has created a short film featuring the majority of its film characters, coming together in order to celebrate “Friendsgiving.”
The film begins with Mr. Link/Susan from Missing Link walking in with a freshly cooked turkey. Suddenly he drops the turkey, and the moment freezes in time as the camera pulls back to reveal his guests. Sitting at the table are the protagonists from Coraline and ParaNorman, as well as those featured in Kubo and the Two Strings and The Boxtrolls. “Happy Friendsgiving!” a caption at the end of the video reads.
Another video goes behind the scenes of the short film, detailing the effort that went into the final animation. “Our films take years to create and work on our latest project is ongoing,” LAIKA‘s Head of Animation/Animation Supervisor Brad Schiff told Collider. “But as a studio we are more and more committed to creating shorter form content that our fans can enjoy online and on our social channels. But anything we create has to meet the incredibly high bar that LAIKA has established.”
“We have extremely high standards at the studio and we applied them to the Friendgiving piece as stringently as we did on our five Oscar nominated films,” Schiff explained. “We can’t work any other way, frankly.”
He continued, “This piece, only 29 seconds in length, still took 10 full weeks of production from concept to end of production today and involved every production department. We know that our movies have a lasting impact on audiences and we wanted to create something shorter…but no less impactful. We still want a viewer to be profoundly affected in some way by everything we put out into the world. We want it to enhance the animation medium, to engage our fans, to add to their holiday celebration, and to stay with them long after viewing.”
LAIKA was founded in 2005, with Nike co-creator Phil Knight as one of its owners. Knight‘s son Travis is the president and CEO of LAIKA, and directed Kubo and the Two Strings in 2016.