Paranorman Norman Production Screen-Used Faceplate Crew Gift

ParaNorman (2012) marked LAIKA's second feature film after Coraline — the Portland-based studio's continued expansion of the medium-defying stop-motion craft that had already made its name — and this piece comes directly out of that production. Mounted onto a hand-carved wooden shield plaque and presented to LAIKA crew as a wrap gift at the film's completion, the faceplate is a screen-used replaceable-face element from the character of Norman Babcock himself — one of the individual 3D-printed color faces that LAIKA cycled through frame-by-frame to animate the character's expressions and dialogue across the film. The face is inventoried as number 89.254, one of the roughly 31,000 individual faces produced across the production to give Norman his full range of expression. The shield mount is finished with a "LAIKA 2012 STUDIOS" banner across the top and a brass-look plaque at the base reading "PARANORMAN — This faceplate was used in the film — 89.254" to certify the object's origin.

LAIKA pioneered 3D-printed replaceable faces as a stop-motion animation technique on Coraline in 2009 and pushed it to a new scale on ParaNorman, essentially reinventing what was possible in the medium. Screen-used LAIKA faceplates from any of the studio's features rarely surface outside of institutional collections, and crew-gift-mounted examples — presented directly to production staff rather than sold through commercial channels — sit at the top of the category.