Technically Correct, Emotionally Wrong
I have watched the Wildwood trailer more times than I am willing to admit in mixed company, and it has made me cry every single time. Not a tasteful single tear, either. A full, embarrassing, forty-five-year-old-man-in-a-fedora openly weeping situation.
So understand that I come to this with zero objectivity. LAIKA might be my favorite studio on the planet. Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo, Missing Link. Five films, twenty years, and not one of them takes the easy road. They make movies one twenty-fourth of a second at a time, by hand, in a warehouse outside Portland, in an era where nearly everyone else has found a faster way.
Which is why the name of their brand new interview series made me sit straight up.
It's called MADE BY HUMANS.
One episode in particular is a conversation between two people I could listen to for a year. I want to walk through what's in it, because almost every single thing they say about moving objects around applies directly to what you and I do behind a microphone. And because one exchange in there is the cleanest explanation I have ever heard of the thing I say to my actors constantly and perhaps clumsily.
“Perfect is boring.”
Who's talking
Brad Schiff is LAIKA's Head of Animation. He was the animation supervisor on ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Missing Link, and Kubo and the Two Strings, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects. He runs a department of forty animators on Wildwood, and here is the detail that matters most for our purposes: he does not schedule them. He CASTS them.
James Ortiz is a puppet designer, performer, director and writer who has spent more than fifteen years building the impossible for New York theater. He designed Milky White for the Broadway revival of Into the Woods, worked on Disney's Hercules at the Public, and most recently built for El Niño at the Metropolitan Opera. He is now more widely know for playing Rocky in Project Hail Mary opposite Ryan Gosling. He was the lead puppeteer on set, running the “face” and the body while coordinating as many as six other puppeteers. He is also the voice. And he got third billing, which we will come back to, because it is one of the best things that happened to performers all year.
Two masters of the same art form, from opposite ends of it, geeking out on each other. Go watch it. Link at the bottom.
The coyotes were anatomically correct and it looked ridiculous
Wildwood has coyote characters. They are built to move on four legs and on two. So the animators did what good animators do... they built them ANATOMICALLY CORRECT. A canine walking upright would be up on its toes, because a dog's paws are essentially its toes. Correct. Verifiable. Scientific. Researched.
And Brad's word for how it played on screen was "goofy."
These are supposed to be intimidating animals. Fearsome. Instead they read like a cartoon. So they threw out correct, pulled whatever they could from the animal kingdom, and rebuilt the walk until it FELT the way the story needed it to feel.
His summary of it is the line I'd tattoo on the inside of every booth: you can get characters that feel authentic even when they aren't naturally correct.
Read that again with your last audition in mind.
Every mark hit. Every spec word landed. Diction clean, timing tight, noise floor pristine, zero mistakes. Technically correct.
And emotionally wrong.
I write about this constantly and people keep politely nodding and then going back to worrying about their microphone. Voiceover is not about SOUND. It is about FEELING. Correct is not the same thing as true. You can do everything right and still lose the room, and if you have ever listened back to a perfect take and thought "why is this dead," now you have the vocabulary for it.
James has the flip side of the same coin, and it's even better.
In Into the Woods, he built Milky White, the cow. And here is the thing about that cow... in the story, she doesn't think she's a cow. She thinks she's a dog. So the more the puppeteers played authentic, researched, accurate cow behavior, the FAKER the puppet looked. It made the audience aware that it wasn't a cow.
The truth of the character beat the facts about the animal. Every time.
The man who built the Star Destroyer said it first
I have a rule about podcasts. If I have to pull over to write something down, the episode gets a second listen.
Not long ago, I pulled over.
It was the Dana Gould Hour, and Dana was sitting down with Richard Edlund. If that name doesn't ring a bell, his work does. Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The man designed the opening shot of Star Wars... you know the one... the Star Destroyer that just keeps COMING, and coming, and coming until you slide down in your seat. He knew going in that if that shot didn't land, the movie was dead. Ten seconds. A whole new visual language.
But the line that made me pull over was the one Dana quoted and then immediately admitted he wished he'd come up with himself:
Practical effects look fake but feel real. Digital effects look real but feel fake.
I have been trying to say that about voice acting for twenty-five years.
That's the coyote. That's the cow. That's every technically flawless audition that died on the table. Edlund built a career on models and motion control and objects you could put your hands on, and the reason they work is that they are OBVIOUSLY artificial and somehow more true.
There is a potato in The Empire Strikes Back. In the asteroid field. An actual potato, because it tumbled the way a rock ought to tumble and nobody in a theater was going to run the numbers. Wrong object entirely. Right feeling exactly. Nobody has ever walked out of that movie complaining about the produce.
I come at this from foam and fleece and a rod. Twenty years of puppetry, and here's the thing about a puppet: it is obviously not alive. Everyone in the room can see the arm. Nobody is fooled for a single second.
And they cry anyway.
That's the whole trick, and it was never realism. It was never accuracy.
It was never CORRECT.
The puppet teaches you who the character is
This section should be required listening for anyone who has ever been told to fix their voice.
Rocky is made of hollow fiberglass with five arms, operated by James plus a rotating crew he nicknamed the Rocketeers. And the puppet had a problem. It physically could not hold still. Hold a pose too long and a leg would pop or give out. They fought it for weeks. Fighting it made things worse.
So James stopped fighting.
He decided Rocky is the most caffeinated, anxious little guy in the universe, and he tied it to the fact that the character has been through something traumatic before the movie even starts. The defect stopped being a defect. It became the characterization.
Brad has the LAIKA version. A puppet with an exoskeleton can't do certain things. So you stop asking what it can't do and ask what it CAN do... and what it can do becomes part of who he is.
James lands the plane: the puppeteer's job is to know the limitations cold, and then find all the variety hiding inside them.
I have been in a hundred sessions where an actor apologizes for their own instrument. Too raspy. Too young. Too old. Too regional. Not enough range. They spend years and real money trying to sand off the exact thing that makes them castable.
The professionals at the top of this conversation don't repair limitations. They CAST them.
The baby owl
I love this story so much.
Eight weeks. A team of trained theatrical and dance performers, all of them analytical, all of them excellent. Grinding on Rocky's walk. That leg goes on three, this one goes on two, no, it's this rhythm. Everything they tried came out sinister and slow, like a tarantula. Which is a disaster, because the entire movie collapses if the audience spends the second act waiting for the alien to turn on Gosling.
Nothing worked. James went home defeated and did what we all do, which is stare at his phone.
And there was a baby owl. Molting, enormous eyes, feathers everywhere so it looked like it had extra legs. It saw the camera, had no idea what a camera was, panicked, and just chaotically fell out of the frame. No plan. No thought about which leg goes where.
That was Rocky.
Now, I want to be careful here, because the lazy version of this lesson is "stop working so hard and go scroll TikTok." That is not what happened. The owl only meant something because eight weeks of failure had built the exact shaped hole it fit into. The grind is what makes you able to RECOGNIZE the answer when it wanders past.
Everything you love is research. Everything you scroll past is research. But only if you've done the work that lets you see it.
They took acting classes. As a group.
If you read nothing else, read this part.
Brad says that historically, stop-motion animators have been viewed as technicians. Skilled hands. Craftspeople. And over the last several films at LAIKA, as they leaned harder and harder on video reference, they came to a realization about their own jobs.
It's acting.
So the animation department at LAIKA went and TOOK ACTING CLASSES. Together. As a team.
An Oscar-nominated department, at the undisputed top of their medium, with more technical mastery than most industries can dream of, looked at their own work and decided that technical mastery was not the finish line. And then they went back to school.
Meanwhile, our industry buys microphones.
I'm not going to belabor this one. You know where I stand. Gear is technique. Technique is table stakes. Acting is the job, and the best people in the world at it, are still in class. Still coaching. Still GROWING.
Brad also mentions a conversation he had at Annecy this year with someone from Aardman (another studio I adore and talk about on an ep of “The Poster Says…”), comparing how their two studios work. His distinction is one every voice actor should carry around: there's acting for animation, which historically runs closer to theater, playing to the back row... and then there's acting for camera, which is smaller, quieter and infinitely more nuanced. Two legitimate traditions. Two completely different sets of muscles. If you have ever been given a note you didn't understand, there is a decent chance the director was asking you to switch between those two and nobody told you they were different things.
There's a second piece here worth grabbing. Brad casts his forty animators the way a director casts a company. Some are extraordinary at nuanced dramatic work. Some own comedic timing. Some are the action people.
Which means: at the highest level of this industry, being the specific right person for a specific thing is a STRENGTH, not a shortfall. You do not have to be everything.
Trust the stillness
Phil Lord and Chris Miller kept giving James the same note. Rocky is “blinking” too much. You can trust more stillness.
There's a deleted scene coming from his first day of shooting, and he describes it honestly: he isn't letting a single second go by without the puppet doing SOMETHING. Phil pulled him aside, showed him the footage, and reminded him it was going to be projected on IMAX. We can trust it.
Brad says Travis Knight was always asking for less. Lose that gesture. Lose that thing. And the film is richer for it.
James brings in a Japanese idea called ma, the space where nothing happens. Miyazaki letting you sit and watch rain fall on a rock. It reads as a breather for the audience, but it's still telling story and still delivering feeling.
Then he says the thing that I think is the single best audition note in the entire hour: acting is less about what you're saying and more about how you're RECEIVING.
We work alone. We read opposite a person who is not in the room, sometimes opposite a person who has not been cast yet. And the temptation, every time, is to fill. To push, to indicate, to punch every third word, because silence in a padded box feels like you're not working.
You're working. As James puts it, doing less makes you feel like you're doing nothing, but what you're actually doing is making space for the audience to come in and finish the thought.
The listening IS the performance.
The invisible increment
LAIKA builds BREATHERS into their puppets. Actual mechanisms so a chest can expand and contract. They have rigs they call jet packs so a character can drift slightly while sitting. Eyes that dart. Brad's term for all of it is the invisible increment... the ambient motion that makes something read as alive.
Susan in Missing Link was the first character to get a belly mover. Now nearly everybody in Wildwood breathes.
And Brad tells James, flatly, that he wouldn't WANT Rocky to be perfectly still, because perfectly still would feel fake.
Now hold that against our industry.
A studio is spending real money engineering diaphragms into 6 inch metal armatures so an inanimate object seems to breathe. And on our side of the fence, breath is something to be gated out, scrubbed, noise-reduced, and apologized for. Every mouth noise removed. Every catch cleaned. Every human increment sanded down until the read is technically immaculate.
And emotionally wrong.
I'm not telling you to leave a lip smack in an audiobook. I'm telling you that the thing making your performance sound alive and the thing your plugin is trying to kill are frequently the same thing.
The blend, and the credit
Rocky is not purely a puppet. He's a blend. The digital animators at Framestore, the same team behind Rocket Raccoon, did enormous work on that character, and James goes out of his way to say he'd be remiss not to mention it.
The workflow is what matters. They'd shoot practical on set, loose and improvised. Then second unit coverage. Then a third pass with a small dotted Rocky on a table, cameras all around, where James got to play the "dream version" of the scene with nothing in the way. Not motion capture. Reference. One last chance to pour everything he knew about Rocky into the record.
Then, in the edit, Lord and Miller realized something. The animators had to MIRROR the energy of the practical puppet.
Read that carefully, because it's backwards from the norm. Usually the physical thing is scaffolding and the digital version is the keeper. Here, the human performance set the standard and the technology was asked to match it.
James says he watches the movie and cannot tell which shots are which.
Brad says LAIKA works the exact same way. The foundation is practical. The computer handles scale, crowds, vastness. Their CG coyotes are built with joints in the same places as the physical puppets, animated off the physical run tests.
And James asks the question I want framed on a wall: shouldn't we use every tool available to us?
Obviously yes.
And this is where Edlund earns his second appearance in this post, because he has watched this exact panic before.
When digital effects arrived, the people who built things with their hands were told the work was over. Not changing. OVER. Edlund has lived through several of those turns, and his takeaway isn't dismissive and isn't doom. You adapt. The people who came out the other side were never the ones who won the argument about which method was better. They were the ones who learned the new thing and kept the old thing.
Dana Gould tells a bit in that episode, credited to Kevin Rooney, about Hollywood as a forest where lightning strikes one tree and the entire industry rushes over to camp under the scorched one. That's every trend cycle we've had. It was pay-to-play. It was "you need a booth or you're finished." It is now, loudly, AI.
I am not going to stand here and tell you there's nothing to be concerned about. There is, and it is almost entirely about consent, credit and compensation, which is precisely why the billing story I'm about to tell you matters as much as it does.
But the fear that the tool simply replaces the performer misreads what actually happened on Project Hail Mary, and what happens at LAIKA every day. The tool did not replace anybody. The tool was pointed at a human performance and told to MATCH it.
The question was never whether to use the tool. The question is WHO SETS THE STANDARD.
Human performance as the reference, technology matched to it, and the illusion holds beautifully. Flip that relationship and the illusion wavers, every time. Too much of either one and you lose it. I've been saying that for years, and it has never had better evidence attached to it than this.
Then there's the credit, and I got a little emotional about this one.
James gets on and off his soapbox, his words, about creature performers, motion capture performers and on-camera puppeteers. The long, long history of audiences remembering the character and never learning who was inside it. I know that road. Years ago I did the motion capture performance for a puppet character in a video game, and I promise you nobody has ever stopped me on the street about it.
And here's the detail from the Dana Gould episode that I couldn't place anywhere else, because it belongs right here.
Richard Edlund was also the hand.
THING. In The Addams Family main title. He never saw a nickel of that merchandise money.
Which is the most voice actor thing I have ever heard.
That is the default setting of this entire business, and it has been for fifty years. So here's what happened instead.
James got a text from his directors. They wanted his voice in the final film. And they asked if he'd mind being billed third.
He says he figured he'd just weep until he was dead.
In a year where our industry is fighting about consent and credit and compensation, and mostly telling each other horror stories, here is a studio and two directors who saw a performer inside a creature and put his name on the poster. That deserves to be said out loud.
Two kinds of puppetry, one job
The best structural thing about this conversation is that these two men work in almost perfect opposition.
LAIKA locks the script. Nothing changes. Everything is storyboarded within an inch of its life because you cannot afford a rewrite when a shot takes a week. Project Hail Mary was five puppeteers improvising live with Ryan Gosling while the directors whispered try this, say that.
Opposite methods. Opposite timelines. Opposite everything.
And they arrive at identical answers. Know your limitations. Trust stillness. Build the bible. Serve the story.
Which is my whole argument about our business, if you'll let me have it. Commercial people and animation people and audiobook people and games people, all standing in separate rooms defending their techniques from each other. Different tools. Different muscles. Same job.
Watch two masters of wildly different disciplines spend an hour delighted by each other instead of protecting their turf, and tell me the gatekeeping in our corner isn't a little silly. At one point Brad just hands James an X-Acto blade, sits him down at a live Wildwood set, and puts him on the character. James does it, admits out loud that he has no idea what he's doing, and they both have a blast.
Serious craft. Serious passion. Serious FUN. (notice this is my whole brand yet? haha)
Everything is in service to the story
That's the line. Brad says it plainly, and James finishes it. I clapped. Literally. And then did the Leo meme. (You know the one)
Everything is in service to the story. If the audience NOTICES anything, a technique, a flourish, an inconsistency, they've been pulled off the only thing they were ever supposed to be watching. You want the work to disappear.
Which brings me back around to my actors.
I say progress, not perfection, and some of you nod. I say perfect is boring, and some of you nod. I say it's not about sound, it's about feeling, and I can see people quietly deciding if I'm being poetic.
So here is the same idea in a stranger's voice, from a man who has spent decades making the most exacting films in the world:
“Technically correct, emotionally wrong.”
Every one of these phrases means the same thing. Some of you need to hear it in a different key before it sticks. Take whichever one lands.
Jim Henson said the only way the magic works is through hard work, but that hard work can be fun. LAIKA is currently the loudest proof of that on earth. Go watch the video. Then go follow them, because everything that studio makes and shares is worth your time.
Watch it: "Inside Puppetry: LAIKA Stop-Motion & Project Hail Mary's Rocky" is the first episode of MADE BY HUMANS: Creatives in Conversation, on LAIKA's YouTube channel. New episodes every other week. Go subscribe.
Listen to it: Richard Edlund's conversation with Dana Gould is on The Dana Gould Hour. Worth your whole commute, potato and all.
Companion reading on this site:The 12 Principles of Animation was the MECHANICS. The Ollie Johnston piece was the EMOTION. Looks Fake, Feels Real was the BLEND. This one is WHO it's all for.
Nate Begle is a voice actor, audio producer, writer, director, puppeteer and VO coach.
