Kubo and the Two Strings Raiden the Moon King's Screen-Used Puppet Mouth

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) was LAIKA's fourth feature film — directed by studio president Travis Knight, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and widely considered one of the most technically ambitious stop-motion productions ever mounted — and this piece is a direct production artifact from the film. It is a screen-used puppet mouth element from Raiden the Moon King, the film's principal antagonist voiced by Ralph Fiennes and rendered on-screen as a dragon-like celestial being. The mouth is sculpted and painted in translucent grey resin with textured scales across the upper and lower jaws, jagged individual teeth aligned in the biting position, and a curled forked tongue mounted inside the roof of the mouth. Small production markings are visible on the reverse of the piece — "004 / 21 / PAIN3 / 1129" — the internal reference codes LAIKA used to track the individual armature and interchangeable puppet parts across the film's shooting schedule.

The Moon King sequences represented some of the most technically demanding stop-motion work LAIKA had ever attempted, requiring dozens of individual mouth and face elements swapped frame-by-frame to produce his dialogue and roaring transformations.