Perfect Honeymoon 💒💍✨

Brendan leads the bandits not because he seeks power, but because the others trust that he’ll know to exercise it with wisdom. Although he’s formidable when the situation demands it, he comprehends that strength is measured less by domination than by containment.

Niamh is fierce in battle and fiercely loyal to her people, Niamh dedicated her whole life defending wildwood. Her bravery, her strength and her combat prowess inspires others, but it is her heart that makes her unforgettable.

No one knows Wildwood's hidden trails better than The Postmaster. Partly a boatman and partly reluctant narrator, he distributes much more than letters: he transports news, secrets and, sometimes, young heroes exactly where they must go.

If there's ever an accidental soldier, that's Dmitri. Always ignored, perpetually scruffy and master of a lousy luck, he spends much of his life trying to avoid becoming another’s lunch.

Each shimmering button. Every order settled. Every weakness despised. Maksim embodies the seductive certainty of authoritarian power

Strength answers to command. A presence within Pittock Mansion, Boris serves the system of power that governs South Wood.

He holds the line when things start to slip. Constable of the North Wood, Samuel is tasked with protecting a world shaped by forces beyond his control. He acts where others only observe.

Long before someone called her a villain, Alexandra was simply a mother. Her son’s death shook her world in such a way that she refuses to accept its irreversibility.

Unlike Alexandra, Lars does not long for love; he craves control. With impeccable carrying and tireless calculator, he believes that civilization is simply the effective management of other people’s ambitions.

I tried to find it in the digital version but it doesn't seem to be there :/

I hope someone finds it and shares the scans, I'm really curious what it says 👀

Hello! Thank you for reaching out to us! I share your frustration, like, I spent money on that thing! Why the hell wouldn't they specify it's exclusive to the physical copy of the magazine instead of getting our hopes up???!!! As far as I'm aware, there's no scan just yet, but one of our *cough cough* connections has obtained some photographs of it!

This is the best we can provide at the moment. If better quality ever surfaces, we will be sure to make a new post about it!

I've recently been rewatching Laika's films, and I've really enjoyed all of them. I think Coraline and Kubo have the strongest stories, while ParaNorman and Missing Link told well-developed stories. But The Boxtrolls is the one that left me with the biggest "what could have been" feeling.

It seems like the film had so much untapped potential. Looking at the concept art, I noticed a lot of interesting ideas that were cut, like Eggs being more of an inventor (like his father and the Boxtrolls), and even Snatcher having a pet rat, which made him feel more unique, and the list could go on.

Does anyone know why so many of these ideas were changed or removed during development?

Hello! Thank you for reaching out to us! We love messages from fellow fans! First of all, I do love hearing different perspectives and interpretations of these films, even though I personally disagree. Mod Riot and I both think Missing Link had the most wasted potential. As for the reasons behind the changes... it's complicated. This is gonna be a long one. The Boxtrolls (known by the working title Here Be Monsters! throughout much of its production) had the longest pre-production period of any LAIKA film, at least that we know of, and at least before Wildwood. However we do know the most about these earlier versions just from the sheer amount of concept art and storyboards that have surfaced. To understand how this happened, it is crucial to recognize the source material, the novel Here Be Monsters!, is an extremely messy story, and that's putting it lightly. 500 pages and a new character introduced almost every other page. The directors of the film have gone on extensively on how it's impossible to consolidate a story that needlessly complicated, at least not without significantly mangling it. Excluding various cancelled projects, Here Be Monsters! was the first adaptation LAIKA decided to make without Henry Selick's involvement (Drafts for a Coraline film existed before LAIKA was even "founded"). Really the only reason this film exists in the first place is because LAIKA beat out Dreamworks for the film rights by "promising the author, Alan Snow, that LAIKA directors would stay true to his vision and that she’d throw in a pair of Nikes for his son." I almost wish I were making this up. Yea, that didn't happen. The end result is, in essence, a fanfiction. Up to eighteen complete drafts were written during pre-production. About every three drafts, the writing team would start completely from scratch. At one particularly low point CEO Travis Knight had to step in and say “Guys, this is fundamentally broken. It’s not working". Reportedly, the one element that stayed the same across all drafts was the close relationship between the protagonist and the Boxtroll characters, even though the final film seems to focus more on the question of what it means to be a boxtroll. With that being said, there are definitive stories on why certain elements had to be cut, and for very valid reasons. Snatcher's pet rat 'Framley' being one of them. In the novel and in subsequent early drafts of the film, Framley gets "resized" into a giant elephant-sized armored steed, that Snatcher rides around town with much in the same way he rides his giant Mecha-Drill machine.

(Art by Mike Smith) The official Art Book for the film states; "the design teams from all of the major construction departments grappled with the practicalities of building and filming a seven-foot-long, three-foot-tall killer rat. It wasn’t just the construction of the puppet itself that posed the challenge; it was the logistics of placing him in any of the environments and capturing him on camera. It’s a classic example of the scale-related domino effect that can quickly beset a stop-motion film... “Each version of the script kept reducing Framley’s importance. It was getting harder and harder to justify him.” Stacchi agrees. “In the end, he was just taking up space and he wasn’t really that interesting.” To everyone’s relief, the directors finally eliminated Framley entirely." An additional character who stuck around for a while but was eventually cut for not having relevancy in the script, Mr. Gristle. (As in, a character that more closely resembles the Mr. Gristle from the novel. The short and short-spoken Red Hat from the final film was originally named Mr. Crabs. Maybe another reason why this guy was removed.)

(By Alan Cook)

The film directors cite the main reason for cutting this character as "He was stealing all the thunder from Snatcher, he was doing more yelling." (And before anyone asks, yes, Madame Frou Frou is still in the source material as Snatcher's alter ego. it is no more or less questionable to American audiences though it is important to note British entertainment has a long history of crossdressing in entertainment that goes back to the golden age of Shakespeare.) Ultimately it's a matter of how you look at it. To some, the making of The Boxtrolls could demonstrate how the medium of a story could limit its potential (A big reason why Wildwood took so long to officially launch production, Travis Knight was waiting for the studio's technology to be capable of the scale he envisioned for the adaptation.) Or it could be a prime example of fanfiction esque-adaptations. Either way, This film was revolutionary in the world of Stop-Motion for a time, albeit short-lived.

Well why of course.

Sorry its not amazing as all of my other works, I'm in a mood where whatever I will draw for the next month will be shitposts and random stuff, but I hope this can be enough until I make another fanart.

Anyway, I LOVE WYBIE AND CORALINE! I don't draw them much but I try whenever I can. It's not like Lili and Raz where they are in a weird style so trying to draw them in my style would look shit. I have had time drawing enough of Norman's that I have become pretty good at drawing Laika characters.