Laika Animated Movies Ranked
FADE IN: A stormy night in Hillsboro, Oregon. It’s 2005 and in the lashing, ever-present rains of America’s Yorkshire, a brand new animation house is born and named after the first, very unfortunate, dog in space.
In the years that have followed, Laika have fascinated and horrified little and big viewers alike with their 5-film-strong collection of striking stop-motion animated features, each of which dip into the fantastical but always stay true to honest emotions.
What follows is a ranking of those five films; some of the most creative and impactful American animated films of all time.
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5. Missing Link (2019)
Even Laika’s weakest film (“weakest link” if you will) is strong by the standards of many other animation studios.
A Victorian explorer goes looking for the legendary Sasquatch to make a name for himself… and he actually finds one. In fact, the one he finds is the last of his kind. But this is only the beginning of Sir Lionel’s (Hugh Jackman) journey, and before long he’s on his way to the Himalayas with his hairy new friend (Zach Galifianakis) looking for some hairy distant relatives.
Missing Link missed the really dark stuff of the other Laika films, and of the few jokes that did land nicely, too many of them felt overly familiar – despite being the first of Laika’s features that follows an all-adult cast of characters, it definitely skews lower tonally. Younger viewers might laugh at Mr Link/Susan being silly and causing chaos with his clumsiness, but there’s very little for adults to chuckle at.
Even so, Missing Link is still arguably Laika’s best-looking adventure; every environment and creature built from scratch, painstakingly manipulated frame-by-frame and teeming with so much detail you’d swear you could walk through the screen to take in the scenery up close.
If Missing Link performs well enough at the box office it could produce Laika’s first sequel. We already see Sir Lionel tussling with the very large Loch Ness Monster in a very small boat in the opening scene; imagine the potential of his further rollicking adventures with Susan the Sasquatch? Imagine if they bring better jokes next time?
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4. The Boxtrolls (2014)
This is Laika at its most grotesque (in a good way). Deep below a town grown slothful and decadent on cheese, creatures wearing society’s castoffs live. A human boy known as Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright) was lost as a baby, presumed abducted or eaten, but in reality adopted by the actually loving box trolls. Together with rich girl Winnie (Elle Fanning), Eggs and the box trolls must reveal the truth and stop the devious Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) from his campaign of troll genocide.
The character designs in The Boxtrolls are something else, like Regency-era caricatures of politicians, the corrupt and the depraved (same difference) – all bad teeth, cadaverous skin and blemishes of excess. The personalities matching these exaggerated visages are all pantomime, even down to one key character’s tendency to cross-dress, which slightly distastefully is used as a plot twist.
This Laika entry is not really about death (the studio’s go-to subject), rather it’s about how ignorance snowballs, and about being trapped between worlds. Eggs is a “Troll-boy” truly belonging neither among mankind or trollkind, too prone to committing faux pas on the surface and unable to really join in with the diminutive trolls below it (well at least since he put on a teenage growth spurt). It’s a pretty damning criticism of mankind’s baseness and our tendency to go along with anyone who shouts loudly enough as long as our comfort isn’t threatened, even if it’s not exactly (OK not at all) subtle.
