From doodles to director: The Boxtrolls' Sault connection

Graham Annable has always been a doodler.

Throughout high school, it was rare to find him not scribbling and sketching on almost everything in sight.

It should come as no surprise to those that grew up with the Sault-born White Pines graduate that those doodles eventually lead Annable to the feature film director's chair.

Premiering today, The Boxtrolls marks Annable's full-length feature directorial debut along with co-director Anthony Stacchi.

After graduating from high school, Annable attended Sheridan College in Toronto where he finished with a degree in classical animation.

From there, he worked as an animator for Phoenix Animation Studios before being offered a position with LucasArts in San Francisco.

He spent 11 years with LucasArts animating video game titles that included Full Throttle, The Dig, Outlaws, AfterLife, RTX Red Rock, and the Star Wars titles Obi-Wan and Episode 3.

He and a few LucasArts co-workers then created Telltale Games, the studio behind the Walking Dead and Game of Thrones video games.

This creative career path came naturally and Annable said he realized fairly early that animation would be his life.

"[After high school], I was weighing my options for university/college and trying to decide between pursuing something in the sciences or something in art," he told SooToday.com. "When I looked at how covered all my science textbooks were in doodles, I figured maybe I should stick with the art thing."

As impressive as his past library of work is, it was some of Annable's personal 'doodles' that lead him to Laika Films and the world of stop-motion animation.

Throughout his career working on video games, he created personal work that included comic books, animated shorts and graphic novels under his own Grickle title.

Some of these Grickle comics found themselves in the hands of Henry Selick, the director of A Nightmare Before Christmas.

This lead to a story artist position on Coraline, Laika's first animated feature, and its followup, Paranorman.

The Boxtrolls is Laika's third and most recent release.

"It honestly hadn't been my intention to be a director on The Boxtrolls," Annable said. "But my sensibilities were a real match with what Tony Stacchi and Travis Knight (president of Laika) wanted to create in the film, and I suddenly found myself in the co-director's chair. So it was a sort of natural yet surprising leap to the position."

That leap from artist to director presented him with some unique challenges.

"Up until now I'd always problem solved using my drawings," he explained. "And while that skill still came in handy, I quickly found that as a director, your speaking abilities needed to be sharp every day. A lot of the departments didn't have the time or patience to wait for me to doodle out solutions, so the need to articulate ideas audibly in a succinct fashion became very important."

"Putting together a stop-motion animated feature is fraught with failure," Annable continued. "It's a marathon of persistence. Every day brings you things that don't work or didn't come together as originally conceived, and what you have to learn from that is that if you stay with it and focus on the problem, you will find a way to a solution. It may not be the way you thought it was going to be, but you will find your path to a resolution that will evolve the film and add to the unique final result. It's terrifying and exhilarating in the best possible way. Our process is tweaked and changed daily to keep pace with each film we make at Laika."

He told us that as arduous and exhausting as creating stop-motion film can be, there's no denying the pride and sense of accomplishment one feels when the end result is a movie like The Boxtrolls.

As for directing again, Annable said he may consider it after taking a much-needed and well-deserved extended vacation.

And although directing a live-action feature has certain advantages over stop-motion, his first love will always be animation.

"I can't imagine working in any other medium to be honest. Although I will say that the stop-motion process combines the absolute worst aspects of live-action and animation and gives you none of the benefits. You can't shoot extra coverage or multiple takes, and you don't get to build performances in an iterative fashion. The 18-month shooting schedule is like 540 days of opening nights at the theatre! So, while I've never considered doing a live action film before, the idea of doing a film in a third of that time and being allowed to shoot coverage does sound like a wonderful option!"

Oddly enough, Annable isn't the only local connection to The Boxtrolls.

Sault Ste. Marie's Kevin Parry also worked on the film as an assistant animator.

Parry is the creative genius behind Kalle Mattson's Thick as Thieves, Hurt People Hurt People, and Water Falls music videos.

The Boxtrolls opens in North American theatres today.

Local show times are 5:05 p.m., 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.

For more information about Laika and its film projects, please click here.

To learn more about Graham Annable's Grickle series, click here.

For details about Kevin Parry and his his work, click here.

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