Review by Patrick Sullivan from September 2020

Mihaela Mihailova’s Studio LAIKA and the Ghosts of Invisible Labor offers a delightful and compelling reading of how the studio’s feature films (Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings) acknowledge the labor of stop-motion animation. To win this reading, Mihailova traces out the narrative motifs, spatial environments, and character construction that point to the craftedness of the animated world and the labor of its making. Narratives of border crossing link together the films’ diegetic magical realms and the animator’s workspace, fantastical spaces that fragment and reform through supernatural means point to the very materials of making, and the protagonists of the films are given the power of animators, creating and controlling other beings in their animated worlds. Each of these points flows seamlessly into the next and accumulate in a persuasive reading of how the animator’s labor imprints onto LAIKA’s film worlds. Studio LAIKA and the Ghosts of Invisible Labor is an excellent example of close reading in an audiovisual format. 

The essay’s argumentative thread is carried along by a persistent voiceover, which Mihailova felicitously illustrates with clips from the films, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and promotional materials. While behind-the-scenes footage and other promotional materials reinforce the video essay’s argument that LAIKA’s films are about the very labor of stop motion animation, what Mihailova persuasively calls “industrial allegories,” this footage also raises a question about the invisibility of the invisible labor that Mihailova traces out. LAIKA seems insistent on making us see the labor of stop-motion. The video essay states, “stop-motion labor maintains a privileged role in Laika’s promotional materials and self-reflexive narrative threads,” and Mihailova’s statement sees the demonstration of stop-motion labor as part of the studio’s “branding strategy.” While I believe that the essay could flesh out the tension between visibility and invisibility with greater detail, this tension does lead the essay to a reflection on the role of CGI labor, for according to the statement, “the specter of CGI” haunts the studio’s stop-motion animation. Like the stop-motion animation, might CGI be another ghost of invisible labor? Might there be two ghosts—two modes of invisible labor? And one wonders, can the forms and features of LAIKA’s animated worlds provide the material for an allegorical reading of the films’ CGI labor? That the video essay raises such questions, while clearly being outside its purview, points to the generative nature of Mihailova’s video essay. 

Mihailova’s statement draws a point of connection between the video essay’s theme (labor) and its own construction. Indeed, as a collaborative effort with a director, producer, voice actor, and editor, the Studio LAIKA and the Ghosts of Invisible Labor highlights the issue of labor and creating video essays. Such a collaborative mode of production is unusual in the construction of video essays, academic or otherwise. The statement’s crediting of the various positions sparked a desire for a greater understanding of the production of the video essay. I wanted to know more. Yet withholding a clear delineation of labor might be the correct move, given the vexed relationship the video essay already has with institutional modes of evaluating scholarly labor. On acknowledging labor, the statement might do well by situating its argument within animation studies’ engagement with labor. I am thinking of such recent examples as Hannah Frank’s Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons and Joel Burges’s chapter “Cinema by Dated Means” from Out of Sync and Out of Work on the labor of the stop-motion animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox. 

Studio LAIKA and the Ghosts of Invisible Labor’s argument and, indeed, very production are intellectually generative and provide an opportunity to reflect on animation, labor, and the video essay format. Mihailova’s contribution is a welcomed addition to animation studies’ engagement with labor and the video essay’s engagement with animation.