Review by Andrea Comiskey from December 21, 2021

Mihailova places her analysis in an industrial-allegorical tradition (represented by, in addition to Connor, scholars like David E. James, John Caldwell, and Jerome Christensen), which provides a generally compelling framework for revealing Laika's zeal for reflexivity. Laika has long harmonized the themes and generic appeals of its films with the studio's 'alternative' status within the contemporary animation marketplace vis-a-vis CG hegemons like Pixar. (This edgy strategy is perhaps most obvious in ParaNorman, but we can trace its lineage years before the studio's founding—as far back, at least, as Henry Selick's involvement in The Nightmare Before Christmas.) Mihailova's analysis suggests just how tightly these connections are woven into the films' narratives and articulations of space. In so doing she ties Laika's strategies into a larger history of self-figuration in animation while highlighting how they might engage the particularities of stop motion. 

That Laika's films perform reflexivity is all but indisputable, even if the particular allegorical framework suggested here regarding "secret worlds" seems a bit too tidy. It requires some glossing-over of distinctions among spaces (or worlds) that are unseen, invisible, and simply offscreen, and it fits some of the films better than others. (Boxtrolls seems like the biggest strain.) Many elements that can be read reflexively needn't hinge on the secret-world distinction—or perhaps it's just that the different senses of "secret world" and "boundary-crossing" in the different films (living/dead, real/fantastical, above-ground/underground) require stretching the relevant narrative and aesthetic variables beyond what they can satisfactorily bear. The skeptic (cynic?) in me expects that analogous interpretive frames could readily be mapped upon other, non-stop-motion animated films with similar subject matter (ghosts, monsters, machines, etc.—Onward, Coco, or Soul, perhaps?). But this is a broader issue I have with this line of meaning-making—and, as noted above, the author is convincing on the whole regarding Laika's reflexivity. (This, I'd argue, is baked into stop-motion generally, due to the way that the craft relies on object substitutions and the processes of conceptual blending they prompt.) The essay visually connects texts and paratexts—diegetic space and profilmic space—to underscore Laika's thoroughgoing efforts to discursively bridge and blend these domains. 

I concur with Mihailova's later arguments about the contradictory nature of Laika's emphasis on the handmade and discuss these issues in a contribution to the 2015 volume Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts. Stop-motion discourse in general, and Laika's promotional rhetoric in particular, emphasizes the form's material and handmade status. This "handmade imperative," which serves as a form of market differentiation for stop motion, posits a computerized 'other' and a set of value-laden binaries derived from this distinction; it also effaces the ubiquity of CGI and other digital processes within contemporary stop-motion craft practices. Those hoping for a continued place for the medium among high-profile, high-budget animation must wait and see whether and how these contradictions (whereby stop-motion is increasingly indistinguishable from computer animation, and vice-versa) can be sustained, and what role Laika (recovering from calamitous box-office performance of Missing Link) will play.

Additional comments:

The author indicates that re-editing the video would be logistically challenging while acknowledging that it is something of a time capsule (of Laika's production output as well as the state of the field of research on stop-motion animation). If the video can't be edited, some additions to the written statement that take into account recent works in this area (e.g. a recent edited volume on the Aardman studio, which discusses reflexivity in many chapters) could be useful. (I briefly discuss my own work in this area in my review.)