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I love Laika movies. I love that they exist, and I love the sheer craft and effort required to make them... but I think they look _too_ good.

I think most people laypeople that see a Laika movie doesn't realize it's stop-motion. Ironically, this makes them seem less magical than they are!

It's sort of like a magic trick where the slight of hand is too good.

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This is a great analogy, as it actually has a name in magic circles! It's called the Too-Perfect theory.

The idea being that some tricks are "too perfect", so the only way to do it is obvious, or the solution the audience arrives at is one which makes it look easy, and thus they don't give you (the magician) any credit for it.

It's part of why I like that for the last several Laika movies they've included a raw time elapse, including puppeteers and seams, of what was often the movie's most elaborate set piece or action sequence. But doing that at the end of the movie is its own sort of "Too Perfect" because it's after the audience already engaged with the work. If they were to find a way to open that way without derailing their stories it might set expectations better; instead of ending the film with the "flawed view", start the film with flaws showing as a form of exposition and then tighten up as things flow into the story.

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