FXGuide | Kubo and the Two Strings: Water Effects
From the opening minutes of Kubo and the Two Strings, directed by Travis Knight, it's clear that team at LAIKA broke new ground for the company with the vast amount of water effects in the film. That's not to say there hasn't been any water on screen in their previous films, but it was treated as a practical effect and not CGI.
A previous example would be in their 2009 film Coraline. In one scene, Coraline wanders into a bathroom, turns the shower on, and she's sprayed with this rusty, rancid water. That was all achieved using replacement animation, which was achieved via replacement animation where streams of water are swapped in one frame at a time. Rapid prototype (RP) 3D printers were used to create each physical frame of the water animation.
For their next film, Paranorman (2012), there is a scene where Norman is in the bathroom at school and his uncle makes his first appearance as a ghost. A quake occurs and water spills out of the toilet and under the floor. The team at LAIKA used a lot of 3D printing with replacement animation, but also used different types of gelatins that could actually be formed and moved one frame at a time.
The thing about Kubo is that it's epic and it's huge. The first thing that I was shown when we started talking about the fact that we were going to make this film was the opening sequence. We certainly weren't going be able to buy enough of whatever that gelatin was that the animators use -- KY Jelly or whatever the heck it was going to be. We knew it was going to end up being some type of a computer generated solution.
by LAIKA VFX Supervisor Steve Emerson