Missing Link (2019) (1 Viewer)

[Edwin-S]

As is usually the case with Laika, there's a mid-credits scene where they pull back and let you see the puppets and the process in a time-lapse fashion, so yeah, it's definitely stop-motion. There might be some CG effects in there somewhere (I don't recall offhand) but it's absolutely a stop-motion film.

I don't doubt for a minute that it is stop-motion. They haven't made any other type of animated film since they started making films under that brand-name. It may have some elements of CG for all I know, but the characters and sets are all physical. It is just that they have gotten so good at eliminating the "tic" that traditional stop motion has suffered from that now they are being accused of "faking it" by supposed animation fans.

 

[Edwin-S]

I ended up seeing this Sunday afternoon. I had gone to it Saturday, only to find out that they had changed the time from 5:00pm to 4:40pm due to a broken projector. When it comes to story this Laika outing is probably the one with the least depth as far as characterization goes. It also relied a bit too much on drawing lines on a map to move the story to different locales. On the other hand, the film was a treat visually and the stop-motion animation was of the usual high quality. Nobody has mastered stop-motion to the level that Laika has, not even Aardman.

Even though the story had less depth than many of their other outings, I found the film far more entertaining to watch than "Boxtrolls". Frankly, I would pick up a copy of this film for my collection before "Boxtrolls". This film did leave me with the feeling of having a political message to it.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Showtimes are now up for this weekend and surprisingly, my local theater isn't completely closing Missing Link yet. So it won't be losing my theater in its screen count drop.

However, starting Friday they are only going to be showing it once a day at beginning 9:55am. So its gross potential going forward there is still extremely limited.

 

[Malcolm R]

Article about Laika's future plans in light of their recent Golden Globes win for Best Animated Film:

https://ew.com/awards/2020/01/20/missing-link-laika-future/

 

[Jake Lipson]

That's a really good article. Thanks @Malcolm R for posting it.

I would hate to see Laika switch over to streaming, only because it has been my pleasure to see each of their beautifully-crafted films on the big screen to soak up all that gorgeousness, and I want to be able to continue to do that. I also want to be able to continue to buy physical discs for their future films to go on my shelf alongside the existing five. But partnering with, say, Netflix would certainly alleviate some of the financial concerns which the article raises, so I would understand it.

One of the major issues facing Laika, which I've talked about before with regard to them, is the lack of awareness of their brand for the family audience. Pixar can launch a new film that's not a sequel and be relatively sure that they'll do well because they have built up a lot of capital with the family audience.

Even though Onward itself is a new property, parents who will be buying tickets for it know that Pixar has made a lot of great movies before, and they know that they're likely to get an enjoyable, worthwhile theater trip out of going to see Onward. Disney Animation has that same brand awareness, especially in recent years as they've found their way in the CGI era post-Tangled. Illumination makes what I think are garbage movies, but lots of people like them, and family audiences know what Illumination's brand is with the minions and so forth. They know what they're going to get when they buy tickets there.

Does anyone else remember this first teaser trailer for Inside Out? The whole central conceit of this ad was to use clips from previous Pixar films to remind people how they feel about Pixar as a brand before introducing the new film.



I don't think Laika could pull off something like that because there does not seem to be a strong enough association among the family audience for what the Laika brand is.

Those of us around here who are serious film fans know and love and recognize Laika. However, I'm not sure that the average consumer of family films know that. If they don't connect Coraline to ParaNorman to Boxtrolls to Kubo to Missing Link as being from the same studio, then there is no currency with this audience. That means every time Laika comes out with a new movie, the marketing has to start from zero selling the new property, rather than being able to rely on people to get excited for the new Laika movie. I saw Coraline with a friend when it first came out and we both liked it, but he has never seen the subsequent films. When I recommended that we go see Kubo, it wasn't something he was really interested in because even though he had seen and liked Coraline one time seven years before, he wasn't passionate about Laika as a brand.

They need wider audiences than just film geeks on the internet to trust them enough to get excited about their next movie simply because it's their next movie. I'm not sure how Laika can go about fixing this problem, particularly because they now have films at different distributors. Focus dropped the distribution of Missing Link and Annapurna picked it up, but Focus retains the distribution rights for the four films that Laika made under their deal. So I'm not sure if Laika could even use clips from their films distributed by Focus to promote their next one, even if they had enough cachet with the average audience member to pull off a trailer like that Inside Out one.

Focus used to release Blu-ray bundles of the Laika films whenever a new one came out; when ParaNorman was released to disc, you could buy it by itself or in a double pack with Coraline. When The Boxtrolls came to disc, you could get it with Coraline and ParaNorman. (I have this 3-pack because somehow I didn't buy Coraline and ParaNorman right away, although I'm not really sure why I didn't because I always loved them.) When Kubo came out, they issued a four-disc box set including Coraline, ParaNorman, Boxtrolls and Kubo. They can't do that anymore because the Blu-ray of Missing Link is distributed by Fox, per their disc distribution agreement with Annapurna. But even those box sets would only sell to people who know to look for them/know what the brand is.

I don't know how Laika can manage to increase awareness of their brand while their films continue to gross less and less each time. Some people inside Hollywood with marketing degrees should figure that out. But that's what I would try to cultivate if I were them. If the Golden Globe win can help in that regard, then that would be wonderful.

 

[Malcolm R]

One of the major issues facing Laika, which I've talked about before with regard to them, is the lack of awareness of their brand for the family audience. Pixar can launch a new film that's not a sequel and be relatively sure that they'll do well because they have built up a lot of capital with the family audience.

I think you can say that about a number of animation studios that are not Pixar/Disney. I recently made a post in the 3D thread about how beautiful the animation was in Abominable, yet it was largely ignored at the box office. I'm sure at least some of that could be attributed to the fact that it's a Dreamworks/Pearl production, and not a Pixar/Disney release. Pixar/Disney is not always an automatic sell (see "disappointing" yet still healthy returns for The Good Dinosaur and Cars 3), but it's about as close as you can get. For other animation studios (Dreamworks, Blue Sky, Laika), it's a constant struggle despite producing some excellent films (except perhaps Illumination, which has also built a pretty strong brand).

 

[Jake Lipson]

I think you can say that about a number of animation studios that are not Pixar/Disney.

100%, although most of them seem to have more awareness than Laika. DreamWorks Animation is a well-known animation brand, but they don't have the consistency that Pixar and Disney do. For every How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek, you also get a Shark Tale or Bee Movie. So the name alone is not enough because in order for brand loyalty to develop, you have to give the audience something that they're going to like more often than not. The highs of DreamWorks, when they get there, are very high, but the lows are also very low, and it's hard to tell on each individual project which DreamWorks you are going to get.

With Pixar, the bad ones (pretty much the Cars sequels and The Good Dinosaur) are so infrequent that people are willing to forgive them, if they even remember them. Illumination is pretty much always consistent, and while I don't understand the appeal of their films at all, obviously a lot of people really like them because they wouldn't generate the kind of reliably high grosses that they do if people didn't like them.

Laika, because they are smaller and haven't had the kind of promotional budget that Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Illumination enjoy, doesn't even have the level of awareness that DreamWorks does. Again, I'm not talking here about us on this board or people who spend a lot of their time talking about film, but the wider general audience who likes movies but doesn't spend their time obsessing over them. They need to work on building that.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Director Chris Butler spoke to Screen Daily about how the Golden Globe win for Missing Link has given the film a new lease on life.

https://www.screendaily.com/feature...r-its-surprise-awards-success/5146566.article

The whole article is worth a read, but this quote jumped out at me and I think speaks to what we've been talking about here.

“Awards season has been great for my mental health because it’s given us the chance to get the film out there again and people really love the film when they see it. But, by far, the most common question I get asked after these awards screenings is, ‘When is the film coming out?’ People weren’t even aware that it came and went. That’s what we’ve got to change.”

 

[Tino]

I believe This film has a legitimate chance at an Oscar upset.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I believe This film has a legitimate chance at an Oscar upset.

I'd like that. I really enjoyed "ML" and think it's the most interesting of the noms I've seen.

It probably gets a boost from the fact the 2 of the 5 noms are so obscure. It still has to battle with 2 more well-known franchises...

 

[Tino]

I'd like that. I really enjoyed "ML" and think it's the most interesting of the noms I've seen.

It probably gets a boost from the fact the 2 of the 5 noms are so obscure. It still has to battle with 2 more well-known franchises...

Klaus has a good shot too I think.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Klaus has a good shot too I think.

I dunno if voters are gonna pick something that barely ran theatrically.

Yeah, "Roma" won some big awards, but it got a passable theatrical distribution, at least, and it was well-known.

I never even heard of "Klaus" until it got nominated, ahd I doubt I'm an outlier.

How many US screens did it play on, 6?

 

[Jake Lipson]

Klaus is a Netflix movie, so of course it got limited theatrical distribution. The filmmakers behind it are not in the same league of name recognition as Cuaron, Scorsese and Baumbach, so Netflix almost surely put it in less theaters than they did for Roma, Irishman and Marriage Story. Also, as usual, they refuse to report grosses or theater counts for any of their releases.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Klaus is a Netflix movie, so of course it got limited theatrical distribution. The filmmakers behind it are not in the same league of name recognition as Cuaron, Scorsese and Baumbach, so Netflix almost surely put it in less theaters than they did for Roma, Irishman and Marriage Story. A

All of that is why I'd be shocked if it won the award...