But what he discovers is a lonely, warm-hearted, intelligent creature who yearns to join his relatives in the Himalayas. That’s what we’ve got to change.”įive years in the making and inspired by the adventures of Indiana Jones and Sherlock Holmes, Missing Link follows 19th-century explorer Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman) as he goes in search of a sasquatch (Zach Galifianakis). “But, by far, the most common question I get asked after these awards screenings is, ‘When is the film coming out?’ People weren’t even aware that it came and went. “Awards season has been great for my mental health because it’s given us the chance to get the film out there again and people really love the film when they see it,” he says. It is a burden that clearly weighs heavily on the Liverpool-born filmmaker, who dreamed of becoming an animator from the age of three, enchanted by Disney films like 1977’s The Rescuers and the work of stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen. “But it obviously turned out not to be the case.” “Coming off Kubo, Travis wanted to do something tonally different so, arguably, Missing Link is the most commercial movie we’ve ever made - certainly the most playful and colourful,” says Butler. What made the poor performance more surprising was that expectations had been high for Missing Link, Laika’s follow-up to Bafta-winning Kubo And The Two Strings on which Butler was co-writer. ![]() What can you do? It’s so hard to get noticed in that scrum.” “We were sandwiched between the release of Shazam! and Avengers: Endgame. “This was crushing for me,” says Butler, whose debut feature was Laika’s comedy horror ParaNorman, which grossed $107m in 2012. The win (Laika’s first Golden Globe) went some way to vindicate the box-office performance of the film, which had an estimated budget of $100m but made just $26.2m worldwide. The stop-motion animation - the fifth feature from US studio Laika - was the true underdog on the night, up against the likes of The Lion King, Toy Story 4 and Frozen II - the second, third and fourth highest-grossing films of 2019 in the US. It was because we were up against the biggest movies of the year.” “But the surprise was nothing to do with how highly we regard the movie. “I was genuinely shellshocked and don’t even remember being on stage,” says the UK filmmaker. When Missing Link won the Golden Globe for best animated feature, no one was more surprised than the film’s writer/director Chris Butler.
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