Kyle William Roberts is the director of The Posthuman Project, The Grave, and the mind behind Reckless Abandonment Pictures. With a knack for channeling imagination, Roberts career is synonymous with a myriad of different animation styles. His relationship with stop-motion, however, has grown into one of his most notable hallmarks. Roberts invited The Cinematropolis into his studio to comment on the work that has fueled his endeavor.
Ray Harryhausen
I actually never heard of Ray Harryhausen by name before seeing the Mythical Menagerie exhibit at Science Museum Oklahoma, but I quickly learned he produced a lot of the early stop-motion stuff. Though King Kong came sooner, he brought it to a new level by mixing it with live-action. It was super innovative. Stop-motion in his time was defined by people doing something innovative. It has this theme of people continually pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
One huge moment for me was in the late 2000s when I first saw Fantastic Mr. Fox. It was beautifully made and had a really touching story to it. I thought it was incredible how the movie combined those together. That’s really where this crazy thing, my career, got started. After my nephews and I saw the film, we thought maybe we could figure this out ourselves. We played with action figures and eventually produced a stop-motion recreation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles opening theme.
Though we work heavily with other kinds of animation, I love stop-motion because it has this handmade, organic feeling that you can’t really replicate elsewhere. The Lego Movie might do a really good job of feeling like a stop-motion film, but it’s nothing like something from Laika. I mean, it’s an entirely different ordeal to capture something like that. For instance, in my work we might get a 3D model of a toy from a manufacturer to work with, but we can’t really inspire a child to play with a toy with just a rendition. It’s way more fulfilling and worthwhile to implement the actual toy itself into a piece of animation like stop-motion.
Primal Rage
Primal Rage was an old-school fighting game that used exclusively stop-motion models. They made these crazy armature puppets and detailed sculpts of Velociraptors, giant gorillas, and other monsters to build their sprites for the game. When I was a kid, I saw a behind-the-scenes segment of how Atari brought it to life. Primal Rage is important because it was truly my first experience with stop-motion, even before I really knew what it was.
John Hughes
When I think of what makes up Reckless Abandonment, I typically describe it as a combination of John Hughes, a bit of stop-motion animation, with the influence of the superhero and fantasy realm. I’m really compelled by things that are teen-influenced or otherwise have a lot of heart to them. Take The Posthuman Project, for instance: It’s an analogy relating superpowers to adolescence. Anytime you can take a bigger theme, something very powerful but sometimes taboo, and present it in a sci-fi or fantasy light, it makes it a bit more palatable.
Trolls
Kind of like how Harryhausen forged a path for stop-motion animators of his time, we created the first 360-degree stop-motion film in a collaboration with DreamWorks’ Trolls. We made this glimpse inside a kid’s bedroom where the audience can look around and see the makings of his imagination: There’s a few trolls dancing, a few others in the middle of a soccer match, and a couple taking part in a half-pipe challenge. When DreamWorks was describing what they wanted to several huge studios, they were told it couldn’t happen and that it wasn’t really possible. What we made happen, ultimately, lead us to an exclusive relationship with DreamWorks for Trolls. The influence of stop-motion animation has a lot to do with that.
-Kyle William Roberts
