Welcome to the Laika Archive!

Hello fellow Laikans! If you’re looking for a universal home for LAIKA behind the scenes content, this is your spot! Right here on Tumblr.com!

Our team has been working hard, putting together a series of Google Documents to digitally archive behind-the-scenes from all of LAIKA's stop-motion films, and more!

Here is a quick intro to get you started here on our blog!;  

Meet the Mods! Mod Rampage He/They || Adult   

Rampage is the founder and the brains behind this operation. He’s an impulsive collector of any and all background media that tickles their fancy.

Rampage’s favorite Laika film is The Boxtrolls

A fun fact about Rampage: He loves to draw and can complete the first four stages of the game Spore in 3 and a half hours 

Mod Riot 

She/her || Adult

Organizer of the Archive, constantly on the search for storyboards and scripts. Riot has been a stop motion fan for as long as she can remember and loves to yap about it. 

Riot’s favorite Laika film is ParaNorman

A fun fact about Riot: When she is not archiving, Riot loves to cook and makes kimchi from scratch.

What Is the LAIKA Digital Archive? The LAIKA Digital Archive comprehensive collection of Fan-made Public Documents, purposed for collecting, sorting, and sharing any and all online behind-the-scenes information on projects from Western animation studio LAIKA, theatrical releases and more! Our ISO list can be viewed here!

How 'least-known'? So obscure in fact, that there are ZERO news articles reporting on the project. Only ONE concept artist has ever come forward with their involvement, and only ONE test animation was ever made (see above).

The film would have been based on the novel of the same name, 'Toad Rage' by Australian Author Morris Gleitzman.

The concept art and storyboards by Dan Krall (see some below) reveal the struggles of cane toads near a highway. No other information is known about the film's production.

(Every mini-teaser released by LAIKA so far.)

A very early Coraline script was uploaded to the Internet Archive this past December. Written by Henry Selick and printed three years before LAIKA studio opened, it's likely this script was written with live action or CGI in mind, before the medium of Stop-motion was ever considered.

Right off the bat, this script features several differences from the final film; It takes place in the summer, Coraline meets the neighbors right away, and her parents are named 'Barry' and 'Karen'. Wybie Lovat is still in this draft and he shows up a bit more often, at one point the Cat goes missing, and the button-eyes are not even present at first.

Additionally, the script abruptly ends as Coraline sets the spirits free.

Lots of elements from the original novel are present as well, including the flashback where Mr. Jones gets stung by hornets, and trapping the Other Mother's hand using a decoy tea party.

The Crown Prince of the Avian Principality, this wise old bird couldn’t give two hoots for the messy machinations of Man. What Owl Rex wants is for peace to return to the woods.

The majority of Herbert's on-screen appearances in The Boxtrolls have him in an extremely unkempt state, with a massive amount of equally unkempt hair; a specialty puppet referred to as "Prisoner Herbert". Fairly early in production the realization was made that this vast quantity of hair would make rapid prototype animation virtually impossible, thus a mechanical face was created for the puppet. Some production notes are shown in The Art of The Boxtrolls, revealing that this internal facial mechanism has 7 paddles in total just to manipulate Herbert's eyebrows.

Starting June 21, 2026 and lasting through September 27, a unique exhibition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival will give attendees the opportunity to discover a sneak peak at LAIKA's upcoming Wildwood, featuring the Pittock Mansion, The General (pictured), and never-before seen puppets and sets!

"Wildwood: Follow the crows" Is an upcoming spiritual successor to Coraline's Curious Cat Trail. A whole murder of oversized crow statues will be installed around the Portland metro area from August 7 to November 1, in order to promote the film and invite tourists!

Read more about it HERE!

Set for release later this year, LAIKA's newest theatrical journey is going where no LAIKA film has gone before; into a secret world where humans and animals, both quadruped and anthropomorphic, live intertwined. For Wildwood, the craftspeople and artisans at LAIKA have created more animal puppets than ever before, and pushed stylized designs and realistic movement to the absolute limit.

LAIKA's practical departments are constantly determined to learn from themselves, and that is especially evident when viewing the external 'groom'; the hair, fur and feathers, of these puppets.

A new workflow had to be implemented in order to recreate physical and digital duplicates of coyotes on a mass scale; maquettes are scanned into a computer program where the fur can be adjusted and manipulated as needed for a more unique look between individual puppets. These strips of fur are then 3D printed and cast into silicone, to be cut out and hand-placed onto the practical puppets, individually, by hand, just like furred characters on previous films.

For puppets with shorter fur like horses, the digital 'CG Groom' consisted of each hair follicle being diamond-shaped four-sided polygonal tubes, in order to make the practical groom easier to print and more tactile. To preserve the fine detail, these grooms were printed in wax. Still, the initial model ended up being over-detailed and impractical for LAIKA's new pipeline; it was over 17 million polygons. The team remedied this by determining which strips of fur to keep based on follicle length, reducing resolution of other strands and 'baking' the remaining detail into the skin. Similarly, The General, a fantastically oversized Eagle (voiced by Angela Bassett!) is described by film director Travis Knight as “a miracle of craftsmanship and engineering". Across two identical puppets, over 9'000 [Nine thousand] feathers were laser-cut and placed on flexible fabric skin in order to help emulate what Knight calls 'the shapeshifting anatomy of birds'.

By implementing this new pipeline of digital to physical printing, the results were as follows; efficient scaling of puppet fabrication to meet demands of epic film, consistent material properties across practical and digital assets, and Seamless integration between practical puppets and digital doubles.

With Wildwood set to arrive in theaters on October 23, 2026, LAIKA has partnered with Fathom Entertainment for U.S. theatrical distribution and FilmNation Entertainment for international sales, marking a new phase in the studio’s global release strategy.    Read more about it here!

This time revealing a keystone location in the upcoming film, the Pittock Mansion! Based on the one in real life! I wonder who these colorful characters are?

"Goblins", based on the book of the same name by Philip Reeve.

LAIKA first announced the project in 2012. CEO Travis Knight described the book as “A fantasy with bite, it practically shimmers with verve, caustic humor, and piercing wit. Philip Reeve has pulled off a helluva feat, masterfully crafting a sly send-up of classic fantasy archetypes and adventures while lovingly honoring their underlying forms. Goblins is a thrilling, high energy swashbuckler teeming with wonderful surprises; at once hilarious and twisted, sincere and endearing. In the hands of LAIKA’s freakishly talented artists and guided by the ineffably gifted Mark Gustafson, it will make a strange, stirring, and altogether beautiful film.”

Absolutely nothing else was revealed about the film's production, and it's unknown why it was cancelled, although Mark Gustafson passed away in 2024.

Here's some concept art drawn for the film, by Rustam Hasanov;