How LAIKA Studios Stopped Our Hearts through Movies
LAIKA Studios continues to push boundaries in the stop-motion animation industry, one frame at a time.
Words Mikaelah Bianca Panopio
Photo courtesy of LAIKA Studios, Kubo the Movie, and Focus Features
November 04, 2025
Button eyes, secret door, yellow raincoat… ring a bell?
These are the familiar elements from the 2009 film, Coraline. If you’ve stepped into the eerie but beautiful charm of Coraline, then you’ve entered the soulful world of LAIKA Studios, an award-winning powerhouse of stop-motion feature films.
Founded in 2005, LAIKA has since been producing masterful animations handcrafted by talented artists and innovators. Its stories are loved by people of all ages, surprising, inspiring, and thrilling those who sit down and watch.
Photo courtesy of LAIKA Studios
From giant skeletons and cursed children to magical instruments and creatures in a box, LAIKA's creations are a perfect blend of the spooky and the heartfelt.
A painstaking masterpiece
Stop-motion animations are the embodiment of “good things take time.” This art form involves the physical manipulation of objects and figures, photographed frame by frame, to naturally transform stillness into motion.
It is one of the most intricate techniques of filmmaking, and LAIKA has mastered this painstaking art. By fusing storytelling with cutting-edge technologies and bringing together artists, makers, and engineers, the studio produces phenomenal creations.
Every blink, flutter, or expression of a character is another meticulously handcrafted piece. To bring these small, magical worlds to life requires immense patience, skill, and craftsmanship.
For instance, Kubo’s origami boat from Kubo and the Two Strings was made of approximately 245,000 laser-cut leaves, and the entire sequence took 19 months to shoot.
A video uploaded on YouTube, “Hand-Making Coraline: Behind LAIKA’s First Feature,” offers a peek behind how the studio brought its debut film to life. In it, Neil Gaiman, author of the original novel, said: “Absolutely everything you see on the screen, somebody’s made.”
Giant sets built on a miniature scale, hundreds of puppets, thousands of sculpted hands, and numerous faces crafted for a piece of dialogue. Even the characters’ garments and accessories were hand-knit using tiny needles as thin as human hair.
“It’s like building a movie, a molecule at a time,” one artist described it.
Stories that haunt and heal
Behind every movie are hundreds of artists driven by boundless imagination, ingenuity, and passion. So it’s no surprise that all five of LAIKA Studios' films have earned multiple awards and Oscars® nominations.
Photo courtesy of LAIKA Studios
Coraline, one of the most popular stop-motion movies, is an excellent blend of chilling and stunning. It revolves around a girl named Coraline who discovers a secret door to a world strangely similar to her own, only better—or so she thought.
Its creepy but enchanting elements make it the perfect pick to watch this Halloween.
Continuing the spooky-season lineup, ParaNorman is LAIKA’s hauntingly charming take on the zombie apocalypse. It follows Norman, a kid who can see and speak with the dead, as he’s suddenly given the grave responsibility of lifting his town’s curse.
Photo courtesy of Focus Features
Aside from dark fantasy and horror, LAIKA Studios also embraces action, adventure, and comedy in its marvels. Kubo and the Two Strings is a visually stunning epic about a gifted young boy who goes on a quest and battles against spirits and monsters along the way.
Meanwhile, The Boxtrolls is a whimsical family adventure following an orphaned boy named Eggs, who lives with boxtrolls beneath the streets of a town. Missing Link, on the other hand, takes the audience on a lighter yet heartwarming journey as a lonely creature sets out to find his long-lost relatives.
In a world where almost everything is fast-paced, LAIKA Studios continues to tell stories and inspire people one step at a time—flicker by flicker, frame by frame.
