There’s a castle in Burbank where magical puppetry occurs. It’s one where, upon entering, visitors will see lifelike silicone dolls — a mix of nude and fully dressed — resting on tables, as well as models of their inner wire framework. Deeper, they’ll find a room full of miniature sets — a hotel room, a restaurant, and the like. This castle is the site of production company Starburns Industries, where Charlie Kaufman’s latest film, Anomalisa, which he co-directed with Duke Johnson, was created over the course of three years.
Starburns was formed by Dan Harmon and Dino Stamatopoulos in 2010 with the intent of specializing in stop-motion animation. Since opening, the company has produced Adult Swim’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole, Beforel Orel, and Rick & Morty, to name a few projects. Anomalisa is the company’s first feature, groundbreaking accomplishment for stop-motion animation as a whole.
On my visit to Starburns, I held hands with Michael Stone, the main character of Anomalisa (voiced by David Thewlis). Up close, I could see the impressive attention to detail put into this foot-tall puppet — the small hair that was individually punched into his arm, his little glass eyes, his salt-and-pepper alpaca hair. I then held Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), dislocating her mohair skull cap to further inspect its purple streaks, and then took a look at Lisa’s friend (voiced, like all other characters, by Tom Noonan), the supposed blonde bombshell who was decked out in fashions from 2005 — a knitted skirt and top paired with black tight and black wedges.
Aside from all this puppet inspection, I spent my afternoon at Starburns speaking with the creative team behind the undertaking of Kaufman’s film — producer Rosa Tran, animation supervisor Dan Driscoll, VFX supervisor Derek Smith, as well as Kaufman and Johnson — about the complicated, nerve wreaking, and overall fulfilling process of creating Anomalisa.
In The Beginning
Anomalisa is a visually stunning film thanks, in part, to its characters’ realistic appearance and mannerisms. But in the beginning, Anomalisa was Kaufman’s sound-play, one performed at a theater in the dark. When it came time to transform the unseen to one of the most complicated and time-consuming visual forms of filmmaking, the task proved daunting for many, especially considering the low budget the filmmakers were originally working with. The film
received additional financial support via Kickstarter, and from there the team embarked on the challenging task of bringing realism to stop-motion.
Charlie Kaufman, co-director/writer/producer: There was this conceit that it was a non-visual thing and things were written to be non-visual or un-visualized so the audience could imagine, in the original play. So, there was an enormous amount of conversation between [Duke Johnson and I] about, how do we do this? The first thing we did was we recorded the actors and their voices, so that informed a lot of the decisions that came after about what things would look like, what puppets would look like, how it would play out with time.
Dan Driscoll, animation supervisor: It was something I had never seen before, Starburns’ first feature, and so it was very overwhelming and I wasn’t really sure how we were going to do it, but you take a step back and tackle problems as they come along and just discover a whole new way of making a film, really.
Rosa Tran, producer: I was really excited for the challenge because, number one, we’d always dreamt of doing something like this and it was so cool; you thought of all the possibilities and this opportunity and you just go for it, we’re just going to do it. I was extremely overwhelmed and it was very nerve-wrecking. I would get panic attacks and, for the first year and a half, we didn’t have a lot of money, so me and a couple production assistants were the production team. I was really honest with all of our crew members and I said, “I know this isn’t your rate and this is all I can afford. If you can help me out, this is the rate that I could give you,” and they all agreed. They believed in the project and they liked the content and they were up for the challenge.
Derek Smith, VFX supervisor: Sometimes puppets would break in the middle of a shot and there wasn’t enough budget to make a brand new puppet. It takes a lot to make a puppet, we would just have to keep going. So, we would have to take over and visually try to fix whatever was wrong.
Tran: For us, what worked in our favor is we came from TV and really low-budget cable, Adult Swim budget, where you work with what you have. Failing is not an option because stop-motion is such a small community that if we shut down, if we went on hiatus, we would never get these people back. And so we were losing people to other shows. But if our production shut down, it would be 10 times harder for us to get everything going again.
Smith: They ended up getting the money they originally didn’t think they were going to get, so they were able to make it a little bit longer. Certain shots ended up being more complicated.
The Puppets
A team of 10 to 20 people, managed by puppet supervisor Caroline Kastelic, tended to the intricate details of the film’s puppets. Michael Stone was based off of Duke Johnson’s brother-in-law, while Lisa was modeled after a woman the producers spotted in Los Feliz. The challenge was in making the puppets as human as possible, unlike previous stop-motion films where characters have leeway to be seen as cartoony. The seams in their face were kept intact as a visual tie-in to the movie’s themes. The Michael and Lisa puppets cost around $20,000 to $25,000, while the background characters were around $12,000. But, according to Johnson, their worth is priceless.
Duke Johnson, co-director/producer: We knew we didn’t want it to be cartoony and have exaggerated features and big eyes and stuff because we recorded the voices first, and that had a certain tone that felt small and intimate and real, and so we wanted to capture that in the puppets.
Caroline Kastelic, puppet supervisor: We were trying to make them look realistic and that’s very challenging because, if you have a puppet that’s ParaNorman or Coraline or something like that, they’re cartoony, they don’t look like humans, so they don’t have to bend perfectly like humans and move perfectly like humans. But these did… It was a conceptual choice to keep [the seam line] in because the major theme of the film is everyone is a construction, and what are we and who are we and what are we made of? And these puppets are a great example of that. You can see their construction, you can see they’re created and they are made by somebody. And it’s great for what we do because the eyebrows and the mouths are changed separately so they can get different expressions, so leaving that seam line was very convenient for everyone, as well. [Laughs.]
Johnson: We found real people to base them off of, and we got a sculptor in and she interpreted these real people into sculpts.
Tran: We were struggling to find a character design [for Lisa], we had these designs and nothing was right and we were taking a break that day and just went to Little Dom’s for lunch, and I sat there and looked up and I just saw her. For some reason, your gut feeling was like, “That’s Lisa.” She just had that sweet smile and you think about somebody from the Midwest and what they look like, and you’re trying to picture Lisa in your mind and she just, for some reason, was Lisa to me. I nudged Duke, and Duke looked over and said, “Yeah, I think she could be a really good Lisa. Go talk to her! I can’t talk to her, I’m a guy, it’s going to be weird.” [Laughs.] It would be such a pick-up line. So, I just introduced myself… She reached out to us a couple days later and was really excited to be a part of it.
Kastelic: The other characters, the world characters, all have a generic composite of a bunch of employees that work at Starburns. They’re brought into a 3D program and combined to make an average world face. So, Michael and Lisa have unique faces, and all the rest of them are based on what they consider an average of a group of people.
Tran: I think Duke had seen pictures of his brother-in-law on Facebook and it was floating around in his mind, and then when he came back [from winter break], he was like, “I got Michael.” [Laughs] I think it was a gut feeling for him like how I had that gut feeling for Lisa. Duke is actually a sketch artist, and he took a picture of his brother-in-law and sketched out a picture of his brother-in-law and he became Michael.
Kastelic: Their armatures, it’s like their skeleton, what makes them move… those are sent to the mold and then cast and you get a body, a silicone body. Then somebody else would take that body and seam it, just taking down the mold lines on both sides, then paint it. And then it would go to costume and get costumed. And then somebody else would do the hair on the heads. The eyes were all handmade, as well, all painted. So, somebody sat there for weeks just painting eyeballs. [Laughs.] We even had to think about hair. You see this arm, we had to hire a hair puncher, so she physically takes tiny hairs and a needle and inserts them into the silicone. Lisa’s hair is mohair and Michael’s is alpaca. So, you use that because it is a real fiber and you can do a lot with it. You can heat it, you can style it like normal hair, but it’s little bit finer than human hair, so it’s easier to work with and good for puppet scale.
Mundanity And The Year 2005
The sets of Anomalisa are kept simple and mundane reflecting the reality of an average hotel, as well as Michael Stone’s outlook on the world as a whole. And with the film taking place in 2005, the production team found itself reflecting on a time that, while not terribly long ago, was surprisingly different upon further reflection.
Johnson: Any time you establish a new look or a new aesthetic, that’s a huge challenge in and of itself. We’re not basing it off anything else. We invented our own look and our own design for this, which is a lot because everything is designed. Every single thing you see is designed from scratch, so that’s a big challenge.
Smith: The directors really wanted everything — the effects, the sets, the background, the characters — they wanted them to take a backseat to the main characters because the emotional focus was on them, so that definitely was a conscious choice as far as the aesthetic goes. Even though you have all these beautiful realistic sets, there’s something about the realism that helps them not jump to the forefront of your attention.
Tran: We didn’t think [2005] was that dramatically different and then the costume designer, she did this huge vision board for us to pick out costumes and references and stuff and it was totally different. It wasn’t like bell bottoms and ’70s clothing, but it was slightly different. We also weren’t sure if everyone had cellphones at the time, more cultural things versus looks. People weren’t tweeting, selfie sticks weren’t invented. [Laughs.]
Smith: Things like the TV in the room, it’s an old CRT, it’s not like a nice flat panel. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s what used to be in hotel rooms, not these nice LCD flat panel screens. You forget that it was only 10 years ago. It’s like how he doesn’t have a cell phone, but he’s got the old clunky iPod, stuff like that. It’s fun, a little bit like going down memory lane. Like, oh yeah, 2005.
Caroline: The [costume department] had a lot of freedom, it was cool. Besides the main characters, the background characters we made so fast and there were so many of them that it was just fun for them to go, “I’m going to make her Ugg boots.” [Laughs.] It ended up being very fun. And it was 2005, so we pulled a lot of references from that time period and just tried to match that.
Driscoll: 2005 was, for me, discovering how much I actually want to be an established animator and dedicating my life to it. And now, here we are finishing a movie that takes place in 2005. That’s interesting, I hadn’t really thought about that. [Laughs.]
The Sex Scene
The sex scene was unanimously talked about as the most difficult scene to film, among those I interviewed, due to the amount of movement and the scene’s sentimental tone. Specific puppets of Lisa and Michael were used, which were composed of a ball and socket armature as opposed to wire armatures. According to Johnson, the wire armatures are more cost effective, but not ideal for the sex scene.
Kaufman: I’m not going to speak for Duke, but I think we both agree, we both love that scene — the sex scene, because of how beautifully done it is, technically and emotionally beautifully done.
Kastelic: The sex scene was particularly challenging because you’re asking a puppet to do a lot. And a lot of times, you have many different puppets that you would put into scenes because they’re good at doing different things. We had to engineer puppets, because it’s such a long shot, it had to be the same puppet. We had to figure out ways to make it take extreme bends and still be full silicone and still look like a nude puppet. So, instead of doing solid silicone, we had to do a foam core and different steps in how to make it look right, and that was very hard.
Smith: For the sex scene, that was the most complicated. That one took six months to film, and those puppets had to have special armatures inside of them that allowed the kind of movement that they wanted to do. And I think each of those armatures was worth $2,000, just the skeleton.
Kastelic: I’ve worked on a lot of things that have puppet genitalia, but they’re always joking. It’s Robot Chicken, things like that. There’s a lot of nude puppets, but this was the first time we actually had to make it look realistic and make it function.
Smith: You kind of forget that every little thing that moves has to be touched by a person. Nothing happens automatically in stop-motion. It’s not like CG or animation, where you get a lot of free movement out of things. So, when he throws his shoes on the floor and the shoes bounce, somebody has to animate that bounce.
Driscoll: This movie is so complex, and it’s easy to say the sex scene was exceptionally difficult because of the subject matter; it’s not a funny moment, it’s a very tender moment. But at the end of the day, every shot in the movie would provide many challenges. Even a shot where the puppet looked very still. It’s very difficult. The puppets themselves are a foot tall, so the face is about an inch of surface area, so the eyeballs are very small. So, when you’re watching this thing on a big screen when that face has been blown up to 12 feet tall, it has to look right or it will be taken right out of that moment.
The Meaning Of It All
As with any Kaufman film, Anomalisa is rich in meaning. And, much like Kaufman’s comments on his previous films, he leaves the meaning up to the viewers. The same holds true for everyone working on the film — the meaning is never explicitly discussed among those involved, but rather the tone and feel of the piece. The creative team behind the film hopes that Anomalisa‘s realistic aesthetic and adult themes, will help stop-motion expand beyond the kid-movie realm.
Kaufman: We didn’t even talk about [what it means], really. We just talked about what’s happening now, what’s the character feeling now, what’s this character feeling in relation to this character now and just keep it, it’s not a conversation you have with actors, so it doesn’t seem like it’s a conversation that has to be had with animators.
Johnson: You talk about tone and mood a lot. Talk about how the hotel should feel tonally and how the lighting, is Michael feeling claustrophobic, isolated in this moment, things like that.
Kaufman: And then people come in with reference material and you go, “No, no, yes,” and everyone starts getting on the same page.
Tran: We never talked about meaning, and I never even asked [Kaufman] about it. We would have the endless meetings of Charlie, Duke, the animation director, and myself, we’d sit and go through the movie and they’d talk about the action and the blocking and this is what’s happening in the scene, but it was never asking, “What’s the meaning of this next part?” then explaining it to us. It was never like that.
Driscoll: Charlie is very keen on letting you discover what it’s about for yourself. He’s looking for your interpretation. He can be pretty closed. He doesn’t want to tell you. The movie’s for you to discover. So, the story is about a man who is lost and adrift and extremely aggravated. He’s not going to tell you what that means to him personally.
Smith: They were both very collaborative. Charlie, he’s great about saying, “This is what I’m thinking, but how do we get there?”
Driscoll: Stop-motion has this weird association for some reason with every Rankin-Bass special they’re playing every year, and they’re all really great films. I’ve worked on more than my share of Christmas episodes of Robot Chicken and SpongeBob, so it’s nice to tackle a mature theme for adults and in a high drama type of movie.
Tran: It really is a dream come true for our struggling movie. We duct-taped everything together, and for three years, you don’t know if it’s going to make it out to the screens and all of this. It’s an absolute dream come true.
Kastelic: All the things that Starburns does, they have a certain taste, and it goes towards the artistic and the dark. Dino [Stamatopoulos] and Dan [Harmon], their writing is a little bit darker and more intelligent than a lot of animation out there now. I really feel it’s a step towards adult animation and animation being taken seriously. Usually, it’s just kids movies and different things, and I really hope that this is opening up more films like this, more adult animation genres, where it’s an art form and there are so many artists working on it and it doesn’t have to be fart jokes [Laughs.] or kids shows.
Tran: Starburns gave us the support of the facility, and they were just the infrastructure, so you didn’t have to worry about the building and all the equipment, which is a huge load off for us. And I think visionaries, like Dino and Duke, had always wanted to do something in the adult space for animation, and they’re pushing animation in this new direction.
Driscoll: I know in my conversations with Charlie, he’s said that he’s learned a lot and has really appreciated what stop-motion has done for his movie. He doesn’t think it would be the same movie if it was live action, and he’s interested in doing more stop-motion. So, hopefully we can look forward to a lot of people taking a second look and hopefully we’ll see more.
Kaufman: I knew that it was time consuming, the specifics of it I guess were surprising to me, but it was educational. Everything that’s involved in making the puppets, maintaining the puppets, and animating, and lighting, and it’s an intense amount of work. I mean, it doesn’t really surprise me that it’s an intense amount of work, but learning a bit about what that amount of work entails is educational for me.
Duke: [My brother-in-law] was super excited about it.
Kaufman: He went to the Minneapolis premiere because he lives in Minneapolis. With an entourage.
Duke: This is a nightmare, he went with an entourage and I guess…
Kaufman: You know this is going into an article, right?
Duke: It’s okay, it’s funny. Apparently there’s the line in the movie where Lisa’s like, “He’s gorgeous.” And he was like, “Yeah, he is!” or something.
Kaufman: What about your sister’s line? I’m not going to say it unless you want me to say it.
Duke: Oh, when my sister saw the movie [Laughs.], there’s the point of view of Lisa looking down at Michael’s face when he’s going down on her and my sister was like, “I didn’t think I was ever going to see that again.”
Driscoll: It’s just so great when people see it. Like last night, I was at a screening and I don’t know if anyone in there had really thought of stop-motion in this way, so it’s opening so many people up to something so new.
Tran: In other countries, animation is for adults and they’re more risky with their animated films, and it’s not just for family and children. But in the United States, it’s not common, so when we’re making this movie and everybody’s telling us, “I don’t know how you’re going to do this, I don’t know who’s going to buy this,” you just have to put all these people out of your head and say, “We’re going to make this, we’re going to make it our way and we’re just going for it.”
